Curtis Industries Old IBM Punch Card

Some of the Curtis Industries employees who worked at the company in the late 1960s and in the 1970s may recall the days where all information had to be input into the main computer using IBM punch cards. The “keypunch” department was located in a separate room in the Eastlake Ohio facility, right next to the computer room. These employees worked all day in a windowless room (that was often kept cold because of all the computer equipment in the next room) and typed all the data (for orders) on keypunch machines which generated IBM punch cards. These punch cards were eventually fed into the main computer to generate invoices. I don’t think the punch cards went away until the early 1980s when the company converted to a modern (well, it was modern for its time) computer system which eliminated the need for punch cards. After all these years, one punch card survived, Here’s a photo; this was a rejected card which were sometimes reused as scrap note paper. This card stayed around all these years as someone had written a recipe on the back. (Sorry, I don’t have that recipe, which was likely more interesting than this IBM card!)

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