x026(1)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, this is the x026(1) page from the General Commands Manual, and the name says it all: x026 is an IBM keypunch emulator. iconic little retro moment, no cap.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

x026

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

x026 is a simulation of an IBM 026 keypunch. yes, literally that.

You can put stuff in from the keyboard, or by pasting the X11 selection with the middle mouse button. Keyboard input is deliberately paced so typing happens at a realistically slow pace — very "authentic vintage struggle" of it — and this can be overridden with a command-line option. If the selected character set does not support lower-case characters, they will be mapped to upper-case characters. If the selected character set does not support a particular character at all, it will be ignored. 🫶

Multiple punches in a single column can be entered by holding down the Alt key. yes, multi-punch column realness.

The current card can be moved left and right with the left and right cursor keys, and back to column 1 with the Home key. There is one configured tab stop, which is set up to skip to the body of a FORTRAN statement. 🎀

The current card is stored, and the next card fed in, with the Return key.

There is a button to discard the current card; it will be replaced with a blank card with the same sequence number as the discarded card. lowkey thoughtful.

The virtual card deck can be saved in one of two ways. The Save Ascii option saves the deck as ASCII (actually ISO 8859-1) text, with multi-punch columns implemented as backspaces. The Save Images option saves the deck in Douglas Jones's standard card deck format (see http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/index.html for details). 💾✨

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

x026 is a toolkit-based program, so it understands standard Xt options and resources (e.g., -geom). It also understands the following options:

• -ifont font — Interpreter (card edge) font. Defaults to 7x13.
• -nonumber — Do not automatically number the cards in columns 73 through 80.
• -typeahead — Allow typeahead. This is very un-026-like.
• -charset name — Keypunch character set:
  • bcd-h — 026 FORTRAN (default)
  • bcd-a — 026 commercial
  • 029 — 029 standard
  • 1401 — IBM 1401
  • ebcdic — S/360 EBCDIC
• -card name — Card image:
  • collins — Collins Radio Corporation
  • cmu — Carnegie Mellon University
• -026ftn — Alias for -charset bcd-h.
• -026comm — Alias for -charset bcd-a.
• -029 — Alias for -charset 029.
• -EBCDIC — Alias for -charset ebcdic.
• -help — Display command-line syntax help.

💀 BUGS 💀

The author obviously has very little experience with real keypunches, and would appreciate any input on how to make x026 a more realistic experience. 😭

Sound effects would be an obvious addition, but are notoriously non-portable.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Paul Mattes

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and that’s the whole cute little manual moment, bestie: this is the x026(1) page, dated 13 July 2003. mwah 💋✨