Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/08/1960s-innovation-punch-cards.html
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At one time I did call verification for a government agency. We used these as we could call the test numbers without making a mistake. The phones were ‘loaned’ to the agency as they were expensive.
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Wasn’t this a plot device in an early Columbo episode?
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“Columbo” episodes are wonderfully rife with old technology; murder by videotape, murder by the robot from “Lost in Space”, murder by fax, murder by room-sized computer, murder by typewriter, murder by pre-recorded phone answering machine. Columbo’s 1959 Peugeot model 403 Grande Luxe Cabriolet certainly murdered plenty of California environment. I’m sure murder by punch-card phone must be in there somewhere. All obsolete, all murderous!
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This evokes the last shot in The Formula
In the movie the “Formula” is a method developed by the Nazis to convert coal into gasoline. Big Oil represented by Marlon Brando is doing everything including murder to prevent to formula from cutting into their profits from crude oil. The hero, Goerge C. Scott IIRC at the end tells Brando that he has given the formula to the Swiss and now that it it sout Fuck You. He leaves in triumph and brandos sits there, digs through a deck of cards pulls one out and plugsit into his hone. Rings a few times and Hi Hans, yest that formula you have? I will give you 30% of our coal reserves if you hoild onto it for 30 years. Ya Ya great then.
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I remember these from when I was little! But the ones I remember were touch-tone phones, and the punches in the cards indicated which DTMF tones to play. The cards in the video look like they’re organized the way I remember, but the phones still have dials. Did the ones in the video use tones for card dialing, but pulses for manual dialing?
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Quite. Well, no shame in making the most of stuff in the props department.
Although that’s a modified Robbie from Forbidden Planet.
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Damn it, I had the chance to use the “oh, just one more thing” routine and I missed it.
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The card dialer was even available in a special version for the military AUTOVON network, with a 16-button Touch-Tone keypad and cards with an extra column to make use of all 16 possible tones.
I’d have loved to score any 16-button sets, but they’re scarce as hell, expensive as a result, and require rewiring to work on 2-wire circuits. Still, a phone with an “FO” button would be cool - and I could make Asterisk actually do something with it (like dump an incoming call and add the caller’s number to the blacklist).
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They were made in both rotary and Touch-Tone versions, with the rotary version using pulse dialing for the cards.
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I never saw a phone with a Flash Override button, but I remember that the phone books in the Pentagon had a description of all the phone precedence levels.
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My first thought at seeing this. “Ransom for a Dead Man”:
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It sounds like someone at Bell had both a familiarity with the ‘rolodex’ and had read Bush on how ‘Memex’ was supposed to work; and this was their implementation of the coded microfilm symbols for a phone-centric environment.
Utterly obsolete now, of course; but has the virtue of being obsolete in implementation rather than in concept (if anything, with the advent of cell phone contact storage, ‘remembering’ ‘phone numbers’ like some kind of brutal has largely been replaced by machines that can store and play back on command the necessary command sequence to reach the desired party; just not exactly handled by punched cards anymore).
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More just scient, really; Pynchon’s concern (like William Blake in the 18th century) is with the separation of human activity from human actors, so that the program becomes the thing and the people executing it are reduced to cogs. In that respect, the internet is only the latest revision of the Jacquard loom (the superficial “weaving” connection is a bit tenuous here).
That said, that book is a good example of the fascination/paranoia people had in the sixties through nineties about what we now think of as The Internet. Back then it was all about teletypes and punch cards and that filing robot in the opening credits of The Prisoner, but people sensed there was something there. Now we just think, “yeah, cyberspace, of course”, but we’re probably overestimating how much we understand the idea. It’s good to be reminded how weird and portentous its manifestations looked a few decades ago.
/rambling
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Yeah, I had one of these. I worked for TPC. While y’all were out clubbing on the weekends, I went up to work in the middle of the night to a nearly empty building, perusing the halls and offices, and going SHOPPING. If it wasn’t tied down it was fair game. Got some wide ass phone with, like, 50 speed-dial buttons across the top section. I didn’t know 50 people so must of them stayed blank. Parents would be “Where’d this come from?” “Work. They were throwing it out.” Silly wabbits.
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at one time there was a calculator type phone book that transferred numbers by tone to dial
I worked on the Canadian implementation of AUTOVON, installing updates to the site in Sudbury in '68. Man, what a kludge. They had to even get RCA to make a special run of germanium transistors, as they were already out of date.
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An episode of Hawaii-5 O (one of the old ones, so it was pretty good) had the wife of a pimp running his business via the punch-card telephone.
Network censors made them refer to the pimps as ‘pimples’, and the actors really sold you on the word ‘pimple’ as a worse insult than ‘pimp’.
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