2014-01-15



Two years ago, I've bought a packet of punch cards  on  ebay  be-
cause  I wanted to have some. I wanted to have them as cool give-
aways. The cards, unfortunately, didn't contain ordinary code. It
appeared  more like ASCII art and text printing programs. At that
point I became curious. Likely I would  have  become  curious  as
well  if  the code had been of some other type. However, I wanted
to know more and, as the code was printing ASCII art, I wanted to
have  it  in  a form that *my* machines can read. The guys at the
Computer Museum Stuttgart [0] converted the data  to  text  files
and gave them to me.  That was several months ago.

Today, eventually, I've managed to process the files. As the pro-
grams follow a common structure, cut(1) and bit of sed processing
achieved 95% of the necessary transformation:

     cut -c 7-72 | sed -n '
     /^-/! h;

     /^-/ {
             s,^-.....,,;
             H;
     };

     /\. *$/ {
             x;
             s,\n,,g;
             s,.\. *$,,;
             s,^.*VALUE..,,;
             s, *$,,;
             p;
     };

One part of the original code, the transformed  result,  and  the
manually post-processed result are online.  [1]

[0]  http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/index.en.html
[1]  http://marmaro.de/prog/various/cobol-ascii-art


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>