IBM 026 Printing Card Punch

The IBM 024 Card Punch and IBM 026 Printing Card Punch were announced in 1949. They were almost identical, with the exception of the printing mechanism. The heart of the 024 and 026 keypunches was a set of twelve precision punches, one per card row, each with an actuator of relatively high power. Punch cards were stepped across the punch one column at a time, and the appropriate punches were activated to create the holes, resulting in a distinctive "chunk, chunk" sound as columns were punched.The 026 could print the punched character above each column. There were two popular versions with slightly different character sets. The scientific version printed parentheses, equal sign and plus sign in place of four less frequently used characters in the commercial character set: percent, lozenge, pound, and ampersand.