Reading old punchcards
Maybe they should go back to eBay and see if anyone has a card duplicator and a supply of cards.
I see they have an 029 in the pile, which you can duplicate cards with. But you'd rather not read those old cards mechanically. Optical is the way to go, plus you can more easily share the trove with TNMOC, the Internet Archive and similar organisations. Some image processing to turn those pics into binary code or data should be pretty straightforward, and the electronics to emulate a card reader those files can be fed into aren't that complex either, though you need to get the signal levels and polarity right.
That said, we've got a lot of paper tape media for various machines, and nearly all of it has held up well. Probably stored under better conditions than these cards, though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
