Nino Ivanov's Arduino Punch Card Reader Executes Common Lisp in the Cloud

Vintage technology enthusiast Nino Ivanov has finished his work at bringing back classic storage technology with a modern twist, building a punch card reader which offers remote control of a Common Lisp program running on a cloud computing system.

"I am inviting you to something truly entertaining, the pinnacle mixture of modernity and antiquity," Ivanov says of his work, "for in today's experiment will shall be controlling a remote cloud environment through punch cards."

For the unfamiliar, punch cards are a storage technology which dates back to the work of Basile Bouchon in the 1700s and looms which could be controlled through loops of paper tape with strategically-punched holes. Punch cards and paper tapes were a staple storage medium for portable programs throughout the early days of computing, before magnetic media took over — itself later all-but supplanted by software distribution using optical discs and, today, electronic distribution over the internet.

In Ivanov's latest experiment, the punch cards are read by a custom reader — built from cardboard and wooden sticks and driven by an Arduino UNO development board — which shines a light at each row on the card. As the card is passed through the reader the light is either blocked by the card or allowed through punched holes, creating zeroes and ones which can be decoded into ASCII text and functional instructions for a cloud computing system.

"Each punch card contains Lisp code," Ivanov explains, "and in the end we'll be computing the factorial of 66. The punch card reader [sends] whatever it is receiving into Lisp on [a] cloud account, and then we can actually run our punch card program. As you can see, there is still life in the old punch cards."

Ivanov's full video is available above or on his YouTube channel, with more information available in our earlier article on his experiments.