S&#x2F;360 and descendant mainframes have gone through 3 generations of IO technologies: bus &amp; tag channel (parallel copper cabling), ESCON (proprietary 1990s era fibre optic system), FICON (Fibre Channel based). Contemporary System z mainframes only support FICON, whereas card punches&#x2F;readers were only ever bus &amp; tag. However, I&#x27;m aware that some third party vendors offer protocol converters between bus&amp;tag and ESCON, and between ESCON and FICON, (e.g. Optica Prizm) so in theory it is possible you could use a bus&amp;tag-ESCON and ESCON-FICON converter in series to connect your legacy card punch&#x2F;reader to a new System z mainframe. I don&#x27;t know if anyone has tried it, so I don&#x27;t know if it actually works. (I also don&#x27;t know to what degree the IO code to handle physical card punches&#x2F;readers still works in contemporary mainframe OSes, although given that virtual card punches&#x2F;readers are still used under z&#x2F;VM, it is possible that some of that code might still handle real ones.)