Summary

Licensing

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 CC-BY-SA-3.0 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 truetrue Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License. www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.htmlGFDLGNU Free Documentation Licensetruetrue You may select the license of your choice.

Photo's description:

  As long as I can remember, my father had this tie clip.  I believed that it was his name in some punchcard format.  Not long after he passed away, in December of 2008, this tie clip came into my possession, and I noticed that there were a lot more bits on it than it would take to encode anyone's name.  It didn't take much research for me to realize that it didn't match any known punchcard format that I could find.  eventually, I found Wikipedia:File:IBM-026_wireplate.jpg on the wikipedia:Keypunch article— a picture of an almost-identical metal plate, with the same binary pattern. as it happens, this plate is apparently a part from a 1940s- or 1950s-vintage IBM-26 keypunch machine, a rather primitive Read Only Memory (ROM) containing data for printing characters in a 5Г—7 dot matrix.   I'm uploading this image, now, because I think that the Wikipedia:Keypunch article could use a better-detailed image of this plate.  The extant image is more “natural” showing the part more in its original form, without it having been made into a piece of jewelry, but my image gives a better view of the actual binary pattern stored on it.   I've rotated my image to match the orientation of Wikipedia:File:IBM-026_wireplate.jpg.