Ask HN: How to start programming with Punched Card

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
  • Awesome-Mainframes

    Awesome list of mainframe related resources & projects

  • If you just want the subjective experience, I recommend the Computer History Museum in California, when/if that's possible for you. About the only place where you can still load up a real deck of cards and hit RUN.

    Otherwise, yes you can simulate it. There are plenty of operating systems and software from the late 50s/60s/70s that has survived. Pretty much the whole stack for a cutting edge IBM mainframe from 1974 is available. But you'll have to pick which OS and era, and then set it up, install and configure it yourself to some degree. I don't think anyone keeps an MVS system running online for public access (but I could be wrong!)

    Expect many hours of reading old manuals. On the plus side, you do generally boot from a virtual punch card reader!

    https://github.com/FuzzyMainframes/Awesome-Mainframes

  • punchit

    A basic Go package to convert source to IBM 5081 (80 column) punch cards encoded by an IBM 029 keypunch (~1964).

  • I explored this a bit last year in a project for converting small snippets of RPG, COBOL, and FORTRAN to a punch card like format in https://github.com/barrettotte/punchit

    https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ is a good tool for getting the basics of the punch card encoding scheme.

    There's also a handful of people over at Hackaday that have made hardware for reading punch cards. Example: https://hackaday.com/2015/01/17/arduino-reads-punch-cards/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project