IBM 026 PRINTING CARD PUNCH (1949)

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Punched cards were pieces of stiff paper that held digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions on the paper that were widely used through much of the 20th century in the data processing industry where specialized record processing and computer systems used them for data input, output, and storage. Introduced in 1928, the IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry with early digital computers using them as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Creating the data stored on these cards initially required manually operated keyboard controlled machines known as Keypunches to precisely punch the holes in these cards. One of these early keypunch machines was the IBM 026 Printing Card punch, introduced in 1949 and used until it was superseded by the IBM 029 card punch in 1965. This model represents one of these IBM 026 machines.