@john haha, in one of the peak Hipster hype-cycles when i was at ScraperWiki we, mostly in jest, speculated about doing a job-running service from punched card: Instagram posts of punched cards with the appropriate tag would get optically scanned and run.

The EBCDIC encoding is pretty simple: it's one punch for a number, two for a letter. You could probably guess it, but i'm sure there are webpages documenting it.