Until the mid-70s most computer data and programs were stored on punched paper cards. These fed into machines which read the data mechanically into the computer. A common card format was the IBM 029 Punched Card, which held 80 columns of text. Other kinds of punched cards have been used as ballots in elections (famously in Florida with "hanging chads").
This video explains the process of preparing punchcards for computer work in the 60s and 70s.
To learn more about punchcards, please see the Columbia Computing History Project website
The goal of this CASES project is to demonstrate some simple image processing techniques that can be used to extract data from a known legacy format. In the data preparation notebook we will explore how to detect the edges of a document and crop, how to normalize for white or black backgrounds, and how to flip and/or rotate an image to achieve a known orientation. Then we will apply some pre-existing Python code to these normalized images in order to read the data on them.
This notebook project contains a small sample of punchcard images obtained from the United States' National Archives and Records Administration. You can find these in the cards
subfolder.