"The Fortran character set has apostrophe where the commercial character set has @ (3-8 punch). So, it's possible either Stan has a "Scientific" 026 somewhere or he swapped in a character plate from one.
"
and
" Further reading at

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/codes.html

shows an expanded set of codes, where the "Report" character set (an expanded version of the BCD-A set) has an apostrophe at 4-8. That might be on the print-plate even if it's not on the keyboard, so you could use a multi-punch to get the character into the card, and then DUP it with print on...

Just some thoughts... "

Back in the "good old days", IBM made the "Verifier" punch. It was part of the 029 punch series, but did NOT punch data onto cards. Instead, it compared what was being keyed in to what was on the card currently going through. If it came up with a discrepancy, it punched a notch on the 12-edge. If the whole card matched, then it put a notch in the column 80 END of the card.

A deck of cards consistently notched on the end was a reassurance that the original punching and the verification matched, and therefore was probably pretty accurate.

Of course, that doubled the price and the amount of work for having a service bureau punch your data.

If done right, the punching and verifying would be done by two different keypunch operators, to reduce the possibility of the same mistake repeated being verified, particularly with 0 and O, etc.

Eventually, some of the service bureaus realized that instead of punching, and then verifying, that it was a lot less work to verify and then punch! So, they would verify entire boxes of blank cards, and then use those for the raw supplies for punching.

...

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin@xenosoft.com

and yet more ;-))

On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> Another skill to be learned was the ability to block-print neatly and
> legibly, differentiating "1" from "I", "0" from "O", etc. It was all
> uppercase, so that simplified things somewhat. To this day, I still
> put a line through my "7", although I've dropped the stroke through
> my zero as most people find it to be confusing.

A long time ago, there used to be some people who put slashes through the
letter 'o', to differentiate it from the numeral '0'. Are they ALL dead
now?

One of MICROS~1's early attempts at OCR on their order forms gave examples
of how they wanted the letters formed, and included slashing the letter
'o'!


How many people still use the Palm "Grafitti" system?