What Is a Punch Card?
The idea of a punch card today is best associated with frequent coffee or fast food restaurant coupon programs, where you get a free meal or drink after a certain number of similar purchases. However, 40 to 50 years ago, a punch card represented quite a bit more. It usually referenced a cardboard card that was used for information storage and data calculation.
Other People Are Reading
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What Is a Punch Card, Specifically?
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For information purposes and business, a punch card is a card made of cardboard stock with specific symbols and data represented on it. Depending on the data to be stored, the card has slots that can be punched out, literally. The filled or empty spaces on the card represent data. When the card is run through a punch card machine, depending on the function, the machine will either compile the data for summary reports, aggregate it for calculations or read it for data analysis.
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Early History
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The use of punch cards for the capture of knowledge and records is not a modern concept, even though most historians associate them with early computers. In fact, punch cards were first used as early as the 17th century in France. The cards then were used as production guides for clothing production looms.
The first time punch cards were actually used to store information was almost a century later in the beginning of the 1830s. The first function of data storage was provided in an invention created by Semen Korsakov. This new machine for the time allowed a rudimentary form of storage and data re-collection, which would be expanded upon as the years followed.
International Business Machines
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Herman Hollerith was the next inventor to evolve the punch card in the late 1800s, and his creations became the founding element for the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, one of four company partners that merged and became Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR). CTR was later retitled International Business Machines (also known today as IBM).
Hollerith's work pushed the punch card use a step further into the realm of artificial intelligence. This was a critical change, since previous punch card uses only automated user control, not providing data with which a machine could function its own.
Modern Computing Heralded
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The involvement of IBM in punch card computing eventually did become the genesis for today's computers, since it uses the same principles that programming is built on: one status for open, another status for closed. This is better known in computer circles as 0s and 1s. The punch card was essentially the caveman version of that programming, with punched slots open and closed depending on the data stored. The punch card machine read the variations on the cards and acted accordingly.
IBM punch card industry refined punch card technology through the 1950s and heralded data processing, which was the ancestor of databases conceptually.
By the middle of the decade, IBM's punch cards were used by just about every large company and government agency managing data. The cards provided a sequential method of data storage that could process in large quantity, which has always been the challenge of information management.
The Golden Age
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The mid 20th century was effectively the golden age of the punch card, with something close to 10 million punch cards in production daily. IBM itself pumped out the data-holding cards via 30-plus industrial printing presses. This 1950s level of production was never reached again, as technology started to create tools that would eventually replace punch cards.
The End of the Punch Card
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By the next decade, the introduction of magnetic tape meant the end for the punch card. The magnetic tape was more versatile, stored more data, was more compact and could be reproduced faster by the average user. Tape eventually opened the door for magnetic storage disks, which, when refined, became the basis for storage in another new tool by the 1980s--the personal computer.
Relics of the Past
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Today punch cards are almost completely obsolete as a storage device, except for a few legacy systems and specialized applications. In some remote applications, punch cards are still used as a fail-safe redundancy. However, for any real information application, they have become a museum exhibit.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit "Hollerith card puncher" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: saschapohflepp (Sascha Pohflepp) under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
