Sure, the iPhone is a great thing. You can store all your software apps in the palm of your hand, and you can use them with the touch of a finger. But we still miss the good ol' days – when software apps were holes punched in paper cards.
Thankfully, we can relive those days by way of the IBM film archive. In its tech film classic Once Upon a Punched Card, Big Blue tells the fair tale of how holes helped create modern binary information systems (see below), and if you've ever held a punched card in your hand, it may bring a tear to your eye.
As the film explains, the origins of the computer punched card can be traced all the way back to the 18th century. That's when a French engineer named Basile Bouchon built a loom that could weave patterns into fabrics with help from reams of paper littered with holes. When the holes aligned with one of the loom's needles, the machine would make a stitch. If the needle hit paper, it wouldn't.
That may seem like a far cry from the computer age. But, as the film points out, the same basic idea can help juggle "patterns in words and numbers." A hundred years later, computer pioneer Charles Babbage proposed using punched cards to store information for machines, and a half century after that, German-American engineer Herman Hollerinth put the idea to work with a tabulating machine that compiled parts of the 1890 census. This machine then helped spawn IBM, which used punched cards with a wide variety of pre-computer business machines.
The setup was simple. IBM offered a card puncher that let typists translate words and numbers into holes, a sorter that helped you keep you cards in order, and an accounting machine that crunched the numbers by reading the cards. The machine used a series of tiny needles–not unlike those in Bouchon's loom–to get the job done.
In 1928, Big Blue introduced a new version of the punched card that could store more information than previous iterations, and eventually, punched cards became synonymous with the company. When the first computers arrived in the middle of the century, cards remained the primary way of moving data, and they would continue to play a big role with computers well into the 1970s. "Punched cards were often called 'IBM cards' because IBM had 80 percent marketshare for most of the 20th century," says Dag Spicer, the curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Punched cards were the "first automated storage device," and they let us quantify the world, according to IBM. But they had one substantial drawback. "With punched cards, you have to go and look through the whole deck to find the card you want," says Spicer. That way of retrieving information, known as sequential access, took too long and would eventually give way to the random access memory of modern hard drives.
Today, punched cards are a relic of the past, but their influence lives on. Long after IBM stopped selling them, corporate types used these these 7 3/8- by 3 1/4-inch cards for note-taking. IBM modeled a building after the punched card. Ohio created a punched card park. The movie Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate takes its title from a warning often printed on IBM punched cards. And in The Simpsons, Apu codes his entire PhD thesis "on 200,000 precisely ordered punched cards."
Naturally, Bart managed to screw up the order of the cards, and the program was lost for ever. D'Oh! Sequential access memory!