UCW Aberystwyth

Cream 80-column punch card with rounded corners and a pink stripe. Card has several printed fields over the standard card to allow for manual correction of the card. In the top right hand corner text reads “For correction of this card place x in box” followed by a box which could be marked with pen. At the bottom of the card, upside down text in a box reads “For replacement or correction this edge up” with arrows pointing to the bottom of the card. This card has a red stripe on its bottom edge, likely to make identifying cards requiring replacement easier.

At the top of the card in the keypunch character printing zone, tick marks a printed for each 5 characters of text printed by the keypunch. Each ten characters is marked by a label incrementing by 10 for each 10 characters. This allowed authors to quickly identify the position of any errorneous characters punched in the card. In the cards body parts of rows 1 to 2, and 4 to 5 are covered by a printed region with boxes for the input of 40 characters each. This allows a user to write the full, corrected text of the card by pen or pencil. An operator could then punch this corrected text in a new card, when upside down cards were located in a deck.

Printer’s mark “Dataset” is located in the bottom left margin of the card, with “Printed in the U.K.” in the bottom right margin. In the centre the card the form number “07-21218-002” is printed with the institution’s name “U.C.W. Aberystwyth”. The card has column numbers for every column, above the 0 and below the 9 rows with a cut top left hand corner.

The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth was founded in 1872 as the first university institution in Wales. It purchased an IBM 1620 in 1961, though these cards are likely to have been used with a later system, an Elliot 4130 purchased in 1967. By 1969 the 700 jobs per week were being run by 50 users on the Elliot 4130.¹ This card is punched with a user ID and was likely used to identify the user responsible for a job at the start of a job’s cards. The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth became an independent university in 2007 and is now known as Aberystwyth University.²

2. Aberystwyth University - History of Aberystwyth University