Antique Computer Punch Card

This old card will bring back memories for the 50+ crowd. Punch cards were used as library cards (such as this one) or often came in the mail as part of your utility bill. Electric bills, for example, would come with a card like this with some clock-like dials drawn on it. You would go to the meter at your house and transpose the information from the dials onto the card, then mail it in. This indicated your usage of kilowatt hours and, thus, your bill. For computer programmers, they would create software programs using hundreds - even thousands - of these cards to create the code for the machine to read. God help you if you dropped your cards on the ground.

In the photo above, cards were used in the 1970s by many libraries as a identification card for individual books. It was the new technology then and performed the same task as the common bar code does today. I found this artifact in the back of a book at York University. Most of these have been removed from the books in their stacks. I suspect this one will be removed when I return it. I don't think it has been checked out in a while. The title is Ghost of the Hardy Boys. It is a clever play on the author's job as ghostwriter of the first 18 or so Hardy Boys books (detective stories for kids and teens) first written in the mid-1920s, most of them near author Leslie McFarlane's home near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. It's a fascinating autobiography of Mr. McFarlane's ghosting as Frankin W. Dixon but also an interesting insight into the publishing mills of the day and their shoddy treatment (and payment) of their stable of writers.