"Body Check List" card

[Boxbot]

One of the things I like about my car is all the original paperwork and extras that came with it. I was looking through some things tonight and discovered a Fiat punch card that was being recycled as a quality control ticket. My VIN is written on top. I would assume this was used at the dealership rather than on the assembly line. I cannot find any information on whether the dealership sold Fiats (Automaster or S. Burlington, VT) Anyway, has anyone ever see something like this?

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[Boxbot]

But, hey, good news everyone! DMC has set up a 24/7 Toll free customer service number! :hihi2:

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[Rich]

One of the things I like about my car is all the original paperwork and extras that came with it. I was looking through some things tonight and discovered a Fiat punch card that was being recycled as a quality control ticket. My VIN is written on top. I would assume this was used at the dealership rather than on the assembly line. I cannot find any information on whether the dealership sold Fiats (Automaster or S. Burlington, VT) Anyway, has anyone ever see something like this?


Never seen anything like that.
Other than the handwritten VIN nothing about it matches the car. There is what looks like a 1976-vintage delivery date on it.

The punch card does show a handwritten sub-VIN for your car plus the "M" for the tranny but the rest of the card looks like it's for some other car. As you say, somebody downstream of the factory may have repurposed it to show whatever they inspected to a buyer. Or it was done to give the impression of some inspection.

[Dangermouse]

. I would assume this was used at the dealership rather than on the assembly line. I cannot find any information on whether the dealership sold Fiats (Automaster or S. Burlington, VT) Anyway, has anyone ever see something like this?


That's an unusual find :)

I would also assume it was dealership rather than factory by the spelling of "TIRES".

Looking at the history of the dealership on their website, they make no mention of ever having been a DeLorean dealer so it's perhaps not surprising that they don't mention FIAT either. Keeping things positive, and all that.

[Jonathan]

Aren't those little rectangular holes in the card part of some sort of computer coding? Like they all line-up and correspond to some specific information? That was a pretty old-school way of doing things, programming that is. Circa 60s NASA and the Apollo missions putting a man on the moon?

[David T]

It is an 80 column punch card and it was very common in the 60's and 70's. The holes are punched in specific places to code information. Does anyone remember the "hanging chads" from Florida during a presidential election where they had to recount the votes which involved manually reading the punch cards? It was common to use them for inventory control, production control, and machine programming. My guess is a dealership used them for inventory control. It was common for multiple cards to travel with the inventory and at certain places in the system one of the cards was returned to the computer at which time a report was generated showing where every car was in the process.

[vwdmc16]

It does look like early IBM punch card style marks.

[DMC-Ron]

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aren't those little rectangular holes in the card part of some sort of computer coding? Like they all line-up and correspond to some specific information? That was a pretty old-school way of doing things, programming that is. Circa 60s nasa and the apollo missions putting a man on the moon?

If you look closely you can see that the punch code on the card spells out the written text along the top of the card "0700114547WY14093076INT507". I hate to admit that I'm old enough to have used these in college to run my program coding for computer class. My recollection was each card represented one line of program code. For a complex program, the card stack was formidable.

Ron

[SS Spoiler]

And don't drop the stack!

[David T]

That card represented the latest and greatest in computing technology. Punch tape too. You would load the computer with the program and do a "run" with the data (all punch cards). It would produce printed reports, work orders and punch tape to run CNC machines. It was all a batch process, ie, none of the information was real time. We had cabinets full of those cards and the machines to make, read, and sort them. I remember recompiling all of the programs in Fortran, loading them into an IBM PC and trying to run them in DOS One IBM PC replaced a whole room full of equipment and cards!

[cis6409]

Fascinating stuff, amazing to see how far technology has come!.. I can remember our school getting a computer with the big rectangular floppy discs and Microsoft dos.. but that punch card code system is whole different ball game!

Shane

[David T]

In earlier computers the punch cards were the data, the program was a hard-wired board that you plugged into the computer. I remember seeing that at a large oil company and they used their computer to calculate "degree days" so they can predict which customers would need oil deliveries based on how much oil they had, they used, the size of their tank and the trend in the price of oil. In it's time it was ground breaking technology. Much of what we take for granted today did not exist or existed in primitive forms. There were no computer screens and computers did not talk to each other. The computer my company had had a whopping RAM memory of 64KB in core memory and that was a LOT! It taught you to be very compact and efficient in your coding. Getting back to the original theme of the OP, back when DMC was in existence commercial use of computers was just beginning to take hold. It often started in accounting and inventory control and punch cards were the medium. Here in New Jersey the New Jersey Turnpike was way ahead. When you went onto the Turnpike (a toll road) they handed you a punch card. When you got off they took that card, fed it into the reader and charged you the toll. On the card was the cost to go to each exit based on where you got on. If you lost the ticket you paid for the most expensive toll they had (so you learned not to lose the ticket!) That is where the terms "Do not fold.,bend, or spindle the ticket (punch card) came from.