Dual Purpose Engineering Document Card, NATSF COPY, 1966

Dual Purpose Engineering Document Card (Aperture Punch Card), (Naval Air Technical Services Facility) NATSF COPY, 1966

I love business problems.  Imagine you are working for the Department of Defense in 1966 and you have to keep detailed records of paperwork, equipment schematics and a host of other paper based material.  How are you going to house all this material?  How are you going to duplicate it and get it to maintenance facilities?  How can people at the facilities quickly find and pull these materials?

Today we would scan the documents and ship it out electronically via a document management system.  But in 1966 this technology didn’t exist.

Solution:

First problem, how do you rapidly make an image of the material that can be shipped out?  No problem there.  Microfilm was around for decades even in the 1960s.

Next problem, how can you rapidly find the image you need out of the thousands of images on file. Solution, take industry standard punch cards, cut a hole and insert the microfilm!  Punch card technology has a long history, but the key to its success is being able to rapidly read through hundreds of cards quickly and accurately.  All you need is an index code and you are in business!

The result is what is called an aperture card.  The example shown here was specifically designed for the Department of Defense.  Branded as a “Dual Purpose Engineering Document Card,” these particular examples were created for the Naval Air Technical Services Facility and contain both schematics, maintenance logs and other important paper work.

As usual, Wikipedia has a great article on punch cards including Aperture Cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card