@Full_marx
A nicer photo, showing a used card and details.

We can see the card's instruction, I highlighted in green :

Z(1) = Y + W(1)

In English, it takes a lot more wording to transmit the instruction, but I believe it would read as: "Let array Z, cell 1 be equal to variable Y plus contents of array W, cell 1"

...where Z and W were previously defined and initialized as single dimensional (think a straight line of mailboxes, each cell contains some value you chose to store there) arrays.

It's been a long time, Fortran. 😉

@shibaprasad
Thank you. Brings back some nice memories. 😄
@Full_marx

@shibaprasad @Full_marx I forgot to mention the other highlighted box, on the right side of the card -- it was the project number, so if you dropped or mixed the card you could still find where it belonged.

@hansw@mastodon.social
Wasn't it lovely? 😄

@shibaprasad @Full_marx @hansw@mastodon.social
After the mainframe and Fortran, punched cards time, my next experience was with an early home computer, a Sinclair Z80 clone, and it was not the best thing to type on.

Things change a lot, certainly. 😃

@EdS

Thank you, Ed! I will add the video you linked to my ever growing Tabs list, to be processed.

I found a nice image showing how each of the possible characters was encoded into a card, it's here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/026-card.jpg

Some characters are one single punch hole (each character occupies one vertical column, out of the 80 possible in the card), some use two punch holes, which combined represent the character.

I was looking at images and found a nice one of the IBM Model 29 card punch, which is the one I personally worked with to create my first programmes in first year Uni classes. It was a solid, well built, last forever machine.

@retrocomputing @Full_marx