Most laser/punch combination machines maintain die heights at the same level as the top of the brushes. This helps with ...

A punch-card data entry machine. A deck of blank cards was placed into a hopper, and, upon operator command, the machine fed one card to a punch station. As characters were typed, a series of dies ...

Since you had to sit at the machine and type in your source code these machines ... but [HPF] hatched a plan to put them to task for punch card generation. He built his own interface hardware ...