my first PC game on a punch card

[tom]

well, it's a Quiz game but nevertheless, I finally found a game on punch card.

front and back shown here:

[Jorpho]

That's not technically for a PC, is it? It looks more like it's for some rather cheap kiddie toy.

[tom]

Well, yes, not for PC but for older IBM computers. Punch cards were like floppies of old, hell, we still used punch card in the US Army during the 80s.

[Superman]

That's pretty cool, tom! I didn't know they made anything like that for consumer use. Of course, looking at the language it isn't from the Americas, so maybe they never had anything like that over here.

You're right about the military, also. When my dad was in the military in the late 60s, he said that the computers used punch cards.

Either way, it is still a cool find!

[Jorpho]

Well, yes, not for PC but for older IBM computers. Punch cards were like floppies of old, hell, we still used punch card in the US Army during the 80s.

Um, dude? Maybe I'm getting a bad idea from the photograph, but it looks like there's a grand total of 21 holes punched in that card, and there's a whole lot of human-readable information there.

Combined with the "Computer Quiz" header, I really, really doubt this was a card for some ancient IBM mainframe. Do a Google image search for punch cards; there's really nothing that looks like this.

I'm pretty sure I had a toy very much like this when I was a boy. You would put different cards on it and answer multiple-choice questions by probing the holes in the card with electrical leads. (Yes, that means the correct answers were in the same position every time and eventually you could get the right answers just by knowing where to put the leads. It was amusing at the time.)

[jb143]

I'm sorry to say, but I have to agree with Jorpho. A punch card would have different patterns of punched holes to represent different bytecodes. The multiple choice quiz device does sound like the most likely candidate.

[tom]

Doesn't matter, it still says IBM Deutschland on the left side...

actually I think this punch card was for the port-a-punch from IBM.

[Jorpho]

The first two Google hits for <"port-a-punch"> look nothing like that. If it says "IBM Deutschland" on the left side, then that suggests IBM made these multiple-choice quiz device doohickeys.

...On second thought, I'll grant you that it's not impossible this was used with the Port-A-Punch, but if it was, it was used to record the results to these seven questions and certainly not for any kind of "game".

[jb143]

The first two Google hits for <"port-a-punch"> look nothing like that. If it says "IBM Deutschland" on the left side, then that suggests IBM made these multiple-choice quiz device doohickeys.

...On second thought, I'll grant you that it's not impossible this was used with the Port-A-Punch, but if it was, it was used to record the results to these seven questions and certainly not for any kind of "game".

That could be. From the picture though, it looks like all the holes were punched...which could just mean someone puchned them all for the heck of it. Like the bored kids who fill in all the circles on those standardized tests.

Also, Jorpho, is this one of the things you remember?
http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/...r-know-it-all/

[Edit]
And here's an interesting tidbit about IBM's history. The founder of the company that later became IBM created a machine for the 1890 census to speed up data tabulation. It was an electro-mechanical machine and was the first machine to use punched cards to process data.