Living like the pioneers! Code FORTRAN in a punch card!

vitno_punch_card

If you are around 40 years old or younger you’ve probably never used a punch card to code. I, when started college in 1988 also didn’t have a chance to do it, by one semester (I know, 1988 and still using punch cards is kind of weird, but my College didn’t have a big budget!).

Now you can experience it (and suffer) in a virtual environment. Norbert Landsteiner has created two free websites so you can revive programming with punch cards from the safety of you modern PC! The Virtual Keypunch is a virtual puncher that you can create standard or FORTRAN punch cards with your code – All cards can be saved as an image file for later use. A companion website called The Virtual Card Reader allows you to upload and read those cards later.

The two websites offers a great time and a lot of fun and you can even use it to send to friends encrypted emails. We even decided to send you a message using the card above. Download (Save Image As…) it and use the card reader to see the message!

Link: The Virtual Keypunch
Link: The Virtual Card Reader
Source: Norbert Landsteiner via Google+

Author: Paulo Garcia

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