Cards

A punch card or punched card (or punchcard or Hollerith card or IBM card), is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. more...

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Almost an obsolescent recording medium, punched cards were widely used throughout the nineteenth century for controlling textile looms and through the twentieth century in unit record machines for input, processing, and data storage. Digital computers used punched cards, later scanned by card readers, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data, with offline data entry on keypunch machines. Some voting machines have used punch cards.

History

Punched cards were first used around 1725 by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon as a more robust form of the perforated paper rolls then in use for controlling textile looms in France. This technique was greatly improved by Joseph Marie Jacquard in his Jacquard loom in 1801. Herman Hollerith developed punched card data processing technology for the 1890 US census and founded the Tabulating Machine Company (1896) which was one of three companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), later renamed IBM. IBM manufactured and marketed a variety of unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after expanding into computers in the late 1950s. IBM developed punch card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines. By 1950, the IBM card and IBM unit record machines had become ubiquitous in industry and government. The warning often printed on cards that were to be individually handled, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," became a motto for the post-World War II era (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant).

From the 1900s, into the 1950s, punch cards were the primary medium for data entry, data storage, and processing in institutional computing. According to the IBM Archives: "By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in Endicott, N.Y., printing, cutting and stacking five to 10 million punched cards every day." Punch cards were even used as legal documents, such as U.S. Government checks and savings bonds. During the 1960s, the punch card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by better, more capable computers that stored information more efficiently on magnetic tape. Punch cards were still commonly used for data entry and programing until the mid-1970s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punch cards obsolete for this role as well. However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards displayed 80 columns of text, for compatibility with existing software. Some programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although fewer and fewer do as newer systems employ graphical user interfaces with variable-width type fonts.

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