Punch cards had an amazingly long life... I've read about their use in the 60's, doing Apollo lunar trajectories on hundreds/thousands of punch cards and all that... but when I was still row-crop farming cotton, we (USDA cotton grading service) still used punch cards up into the early/mid 90's... When you picked a trailer of cotton (it's all pressed into "modules" now like a giant loaf of bread about 8 feet wide at the base, 6 feet wide on top, and about 25-30 feet long, with about 8-10, maybe up to 12 bales of seed cotton (about 1500 lbs each, of which about 900 pounds is seed, 500 pounds is lint, and 100 pounds is leaf debris "trash"). The cotton went to the gin, and they ginned it and pressed it into bales, and pulled samples from the edge of the bales... an "official" USDA warehouse card was then attached to the bale, with a tear-off tag at the bottom that the sample was rolled around, which was then sent to the USDA grading lab at college station, where they employed a bunch of A&M know-nothings cheap to run samples through the automated grading machines... (and yeah I've seen grades come back that sucked when I KNEW it was good cotton-- college idiots probably had the machine out of whack or mismatched the samples and bale numbers in the data entry or whatever...) USDA then issued an "official" grade card (punch card) for that bale... white card with green writing on it, dot-matrix printed grades in boxes across the top so that you could read it, and punch-card across the rest of the thing for the buyer's computer to read when you sold it. This card then went back to the gin, who had various ways of getting them back to you-- usually either 'pigeonholing' it in a specific "box" for each farmer, a file cabinet, or the secretary rubber banding them together into bundles to give to you... The cotton bale would have, in the meantime, gone on to the gov't approved warehouse in Galveston (Moody Compress) where it is "officially" weighed (the gin had weighed it and used that figure to calculate ginning charges and the seed credit (they pay you for the cotton seed, which used to cover ginning charges, sometimes even get a seed check at the end of the year, but that was a LONG time ago... ginning charges went up within a few years from breakeven to pretty substantial charges over a few years time, even with the seed credit gnawing the bill down... I'd hate to think what ginning charges are NOW! at today's energy prices... the whole gin here in town is powered by 400 volt three phase motors...) Anyway, the warehouse would issue the "official weight ticket" warehouse card, and once you had those and the class card from USDA, then you'd match them up and take them to the buyer (when you were ready to sell.) They'd manually enter the weights into the computer and stick the class cards into the punch card reader, and the computer would combine the two... then thanks to the internet, they'd look at the NY Mercantile cotton exchange prices at that moment, subtract their percentage, calculate the grading deductions (from off-color, high or low micronaire (coarse or fine fiber), short staple length, grass, bark, or other trash, etc...) and then make you an offer... You could call around and get current prices, but the buyers didn't want to honor their 'bid' if it was more than a half-day old... depending on what the futures market was doing (usually going down, so they want to buy it cheaper).
In the early 90's, the warehouses FINALLY started issuing electronic warehouse receipts (EWR's) for cotton on floppys... it was "encrypted" so farmers couldn't hack it (like hardly any of 'em could anyway) in a way that the buyers would accept as a universal standard... BUT USDA continued to issue punch cards for the grading class cards for another 4-5 years... the buyers were getting PO'd about it, because computers were REALLY evolving quickly in the early 90's and new systems, both hardware and software, were coming out constantly, and it was hard to integrate card readers into the works... very few of the buyer's systems supported the card readers and the hardware itself was expensive and difficult to get, is what some buyers told me... FINALLY USDA switched over to an encrypted disk as well after a few years... So for a couple years you had to tote around two floppies with all your warehouse and class data on it to sell your crop... then finally right about the time I quit row cropping and went to strictly cattle (early 2000's) they simply uploaded it all to the gin's computer and they'd burn you a floppy to run to the buyer when you were ready to sell...
It's all a mess... I remember back when the cotton samples torn off the bales were actually individually wrapped in a brown-paper sleeve about 4 inches in diameter and about a foot long, with cotton sticking out both ends... the "tear off" bit of the official bale tag was stapled to the sleeve... you'd go into the gin office, and the secretary would hand you a big stack of these things, tied together with twine... and a stack of warehouse receipts... heck back in those days, you'd step into the back office of the gin office and there was usually a buyer there, who'd pull the cotton out of the sample sleeve, unroll it, count the "pepper trash" leaf debris in it, look for stray stalk bark, pull some of the fibers out and measure them against a card to determine the staple length, and then make you an offer on the spot... no checking with any stock market crap... You either took the offer, in which case he'd add up the bale weights on the warehouse receipts and multiply by the cents per pound offer and write you a check on the spot, or you begged off and took your samples and warehouse receipts on down the road to another buyer in town or the next town if you thought you were being "lowballed"...
The more technology we get, the worse things get, IMHO... Heck in the old days, with "hand run" samples you carried directly to the buyer, with the warehouse receipts for "official weights", you could LITERALLY get a check within ten minutes of walking into the gin office... usually just an overnight or day or two wait for the warehouse receipts to come back... you could put the check in the bank before you left town to go back to the field... Then when the stupid computers came into play, and USDA stuck their noses into the grading process (so they could screw you on micronaire, "mike" as it's called, which is a measure of the fineness or coarseness of the cotton fibers... a specific size sample of fibers is rolled up and stuck into the machine, which then presses it between two plates, with a small orifice in the plate, which then shoots a specific air charge at a specific pressure through the sample, and measures how much air goes through, either as backpressure or flow rate or something... the coarser the fibers, the more air gets through... they dock you HEAVY for high and low mike... in the old days, the buyers had no way to check for mike other than just the 'feel" of the cotton and didn't worry about it... but "modern" spinning machines (air spinners) are more sensitive to high or low mike cotton and can't spin it as well as the older machines, so they dock you if the mike is too high or too low... in fact if the mike is REALLY high sometimes it's a battle finding anybody to even buy the crop!) With computers, not only did the buyers screw you worse because of the grade cards, but when DTN came about and every dealer had instant access to the NY Merc trading floor current prices, they REALLY screwed you over... I remember when DTN first came in at the gins where you could actually see it... handiest thing on it was live weather radar, so you could see the bad thunderstorms barrelling down on you that would ruin your picking for the day in an hour or two... well, I guess the live quotes from the selling floor let you know what the price was and what it was trending, and figuring the basis let you "get your own quote" more or less and decide if you even wanted to bother calling the buyer or going to see him... Thing is, when computers came into the picture, the days of selling your cotton in the gin office was GONE... now you waited, not overnight or a day or two for warehouse tickets, but 3-4 days, sometimes up to a week... whenever the warehouse people got around to doing the data entry and sending the paper tickets, and later the data packets, out to the gins... USDA class cards invariably took between 5-7 days at the earliest, sometimes 10-14 days... before you could sell the cotton. When it all went to internet transfer to the gin, it sped up SLIGHTLY, but then you were trading mailing time for a pack of cards from the USDA classing lab to the gin for whenever the beleagered gin secretary could actually compile all the data for the individual farmers and burn you a floppy... so it was about a wash...
So much for technology making things easier...
Later! OL JR
