Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server

- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
- 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts
- Data loader with in-memory JSON storage

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

hpr_transcripts/hpr3775.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@
+Episode: 3775
+Title: HPR3775: Emergency Show posted in 2014. How to make a punch-card computer
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3775/hpr3775.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:14:16
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,775 for Friday the 20th of January 2023.
+Today's show is entitled, Emergency Show Posted in 2014.
+How to Make a Punch Card Computer.
+It is hosted by Mike Reg and is about 14 minutes long.
+It carries a clean flag.
+The summary is, how to make a punch card computer from stuff from the kitchen.
+Hi everybody, we're really short of shows at the moment, so I've had to take this one
+out of the reserve queue.
+If you have shows, can you please send them in?
+Because HPR as a project will cease to exist if we don't continue to get shows from listeners
+like you.
+This is something I've had in my head for decades.
+I can vaguely remember when I was very small, making one of these punch card computers.
+It may have been me or me, it may have been my older brother, more likely to have been
+my older brother.
+I think we probably made it in response to seeing it on the TV or reading it in a book
+or something.
+I have this vague recollection of a serial box with some of my mum's knitting needles sticking
+through the box and putting out the needles and cards dropping out at the bottom.
+Now we're not going to use knitting needles, but we're going to update it a bit.
+I've not done it since I was probably over 40 years ago, but it's just something I've
+remembered for years.
+So what you will need, the main body of the computer, it consists of an empty breakfast
+serial box.
+Have any sort of average size or just a normal breakfast serial size box.
+The first thing to do is to cut off the flaps at the top of the box where the box has been
+opened and the serial has been removed.
+Through the flaps away, except for one of the long flaps from the long side of the box,
+we're going to use that on a made-coming handy as a template when we get a little bit
+further on down what we're going to do.
+The other thing we're going to need is some cards about the same width as the box and
+these can be made from another serial box sliced up.
+An empty box of the same sort of size will yield about four cards, possibly six if you
+make them not very deep from top to bottom.
+Another thing you need is some bamboo skewers.
+These are the things that are going to take the place of the knitting needles.
+When the example I was talking about from when I was very young, Richard Stallman was
+still in short trousers.
+You're going to need some scissors and or a sharp craft knife, possibly some glue, preferably
+or something washable and optionally some sticky tape.
+So what you do, the first thing we're going to do is to make a shoot, a sort of shoot
+at the bottom of the box.
+Now the box, when it's used as a computer, it's going to stand on the table, on the way
+it would stand normally.
+We're going to cut a flap out of the bottom and stick it back as a shoot and we'll
+do this by making a horizontal cut across the box, about four inches or so, ten centimeters
+or so above the bottom.
+So it's a horizontal cut all the way across and then we're going to cut down the front
+edges of the box.
+From that horizontal cut down to the bottom of the box, this will form a flap that you
+can fold out by sticking your hand in the top of the box and pushing it out.
+When you're done that, you need to make a fold in that flap about a centimeter or half
+an inch from the front edge of the flap, the bit which came away from the horizontal
+slot that you cut across the box.
+Then you coat the inside of that flap between the fold and the edge with glue and then you
+push it back into the box until the glued part of that flap is against the back wall of
+the box and then use some sticky tape to stick it down while the glue dries.
+If you can imagine what that forms is a kind of shoot at the bottom.
+If you drop something into the top of the box now, it will hit the shoot and slide out
+the hole in the front where the shoot was cut away from.
+Now take the long flap that you cut from the top of the box and draw a horizontal line across
+it, across the wide length of it, about half way down so that you're effectively dividing
+the flap into two halves along its length.
+Here's where we need to do some rest of the technique.
+You're going to mark out eight or perhaps even sixteen points along the line, equally
+distant so if you've got eight, if it's an eight bit computer you've got eight points
+so there are nine gaps between the points, measure the width of the flap, mark off the
+points with a ruler and then stick that to one side.
+Now we're going to punch some holes in the box at near the top, near the opening and
+we're going to do this by holding the template flap that we've just made at the top against
+the box and punching through with a bamboo barbeque skewer or something sharper, perhaps
+a knitting needle if such things still exist to make the holes in the box to take the bamboo
+skewers and we're going to do the same on the other side because the bamboo skewers are
+going to pass all the way through the box from front to back and they need to be quite
+accurately inserted so that each skewer is the same distance from the top of the box, the
+same distance between it and its neighbours and so that the skewers are nice and parallel.
+So once you've done that, if you imagine you've done eight holes and you've inserted
+eight skewers, you've got eight parallel skewers passing all the way through the box, a
+bit like a magic trick where a man sticks a sword through a wardrobe with a beautiful
+blonde inside it. So now we've made the body of the computer with the eight or sixteen
+or nine or ten, we can make a nine bit computer skewers through the box, we're going to make
+the cards. Now we need to make, if we've got an eight bit computer that's got eight skewers
+through it, we're going to need to make eight cards. These cards need to be almost as wide
+as the box but not quite so that they fit nice and snug but with no friction in the top
+of the box and the depths of them, it's perhaps about four or five inches, ten or twelve
+centimetres from top to bottom, big enough to write some stuff on but not deep enough
+to be visible through the hole at the bottom where you cut the flap for the shoot. Now
+along the long edge of each card you're going to measure and make some holes, we need
+our template again for this, to template that you used to make the holes for the skewers.
+We're going to hold against each card and punch some holes, again probably starting
+with by using a bamboo skewer but the holes need to be bigger than the diameter of the
+skewer, perhaps about five millimeters or a quarter of an inch or so in diameter. Nice
+and wide so that the skewer passes easily through the holes. A single hole handheld, a hole
+punch is good for this but it's not absolutely necessary. It doesn't matter if the holes
+are square, as long as the hole is bigger than the actual skewer and that the holes line
+up with where the skewers are. Now once you've made eight of those cards take each card
+in turn and convert seven out of the eight holes into slots by slicing from the side of
+the hole to the top of the card so you actually remove a little piece of card between the hole
+and the top edge so you've now got, with each card you've now got one hole in seven slots
+and for card zero the left hand hole if it's a little Indian is still a hole and the rest
+of them are slots and then for the next card the first one will be a slot, the next one
+will be a hole and the remaining six are slots. So you can probably see where I'm going
+with this you do it with each card and in each in turn holes zero to seven become, remain
+as holes and the rest become slots. Okay so now we've made our cards. We need some
+data to put on the cards. Now it would help if you've got eight children at this point
+because if you've got eight children you need never forget their birthdays ever again.
+The right piece of data on each card and write something on the box next to the hole
+which corresponds to the intact hole on the card. Now once you've written all the data
+then put the cards together in a stack and put them into the top of the box hold them
+with one hand and then insert the skewers through the holes and slots through the front
+of the computer and out the back. So when you stand it up on its bottom end what you've
+got is a serial box with a nice slippery shoe to the bottom where something can come
+out. Eight skewers through the top of the box in a line and eight punched cards suspended
+in the top of the box but of course each card has got seven slots and one hole each in a
+different position. So each card is only held in position and prevented from falling by one skewer.
+So if you now pull out one of the skewers the card which corresponds to that skewer should
+drop out the bottom. So if you have eight children and a third one was called Bobby pull out
+Bobby's skewer and Bobby's card will drop out the bottom with his birthday on it and that is a
+punched card computer. Now I know that some people will be saying well that's not a computer and
+it's not and it's eight bits and it's only got eight bits of random access memory and the main
+problem with it is that each time you remove a piece of data by putting out the skewer that data
+is not copied it's you know you've not got the data out but it's still in the computer it's
+the computer now only contains seven bits of data so it's not it's not really a computer but
+it's fun and like I say it's one of those things I have way back in a dim and distant past my brain
+one of these days I'm going to get around to making another one. Oh I should do a little bit of
+trouble shooting information here if for some reason when you pull out a skewer nothing drops
+through this could be because of a number of reasons there's too much friction between the cards
+now when you load the cards into the top of the computer try and sort of spread them out a little
+bit so they're not all packed closely in together it could be that the cards are too wide and
+that they have left some friction between the left and right edges of the cards and the side of
+the box or it could be because the slots are not wide enough and are actually producing some
+friction between the remaining skewers and the side of the slot so that the card is unable to drop
+down when you pull out its skewer those are the only things that we can go wrong it's as simple as
+that if you make this then you really need to get out more and stop wasting your time and
+everybody else's. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does
+work today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording
+or cast and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is hosting for HBR has been
+kindly provided by an honesthost.com the internet archive and our syncs.net on the Sadois status
+today's show is released on our creative commons attribution 4.0 international license