The Key Punch Type 011

1923 · Card Punch · Work 579 of 1,871

The Key Punch Type 011, 1923, Card Punch

An electric key punch with a flat card bed and a small keyboard of twelve numeric keys, a single card laid by hand in the bed and carried one column at a time as each key drives a hole by electromagnet, a plain buff card punched with round holes in a scattered pattern, the card and the keys close to the lens, the operator's hand on the keyboard, the punch in black enamel with steel fittings, a punch room lit by daylight from a window, the rest of the machine behind the bed in soft focus.

What it was used for
The Electric Key Punch Type 011 was the machine on which punched cards were punched by hand. It stood at the start of all punched-card work: someone read an original record and turned it, character by character, into holes. It appeared in 1923, when IBM cards still had 45 columns and round holes. The keyboard had twelve keys, one for each row of the card, plus a Release and a Space key. Each stroke punched a hole and advanced the card one column; the X key jumped to the next tab stop, much like the tabulator of a typewriter. The 011 could not punch letters, only digits.
What was new
What was new was electric punching. Columbia University's account calls the Type 011 IBM's first electrically powered punch: electromagnets drove the dies, which greatly reduced operator fatigue. What vanished was the muscle, not the person. IBM wrote in its own 1936 demonstration script that there is no machine that will read the various kinds of writing which appear on an original record. Punching therefore stayed the bottleneck of the whole installation: IBM put average operators at 250 to 800 cards an hour, depending on the number of holes and the legibility of the source, while the sorter in the same manual took 225 or 400 cards a minute.

What the sources leave open: Whether the Type 011 was re-engineered for 80-column cards after 1928 is open; Columbia University explicitly presents this as a supposition. No production figures or rental prices for the 011 were found. IBM's own chronology records for 1923 only the bare line that the electric key punch is introduced.

Further reading