In the 90s my dad showed me his stack of IBM compatible 12 bit per column, 80 column card from his time working at the university physics department’s computer in the 70s. He had no access anymore to card readers and just kept the cards for sentimental value.
Most cards contain FORTRAN programs for the TR440 computer made by Telefunken.
Let’s say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I’m not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O
“To contrast, the human brain apparently can’t remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard.”
Future archeologists be like we keep finding microSD cards from the early 21st century and have to wade through all that data to figure out anything about that period, from earlier periods we only have paper records.
One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.
We used unused punchcards to make flashcards in elementary school in the late 80’s / early 90’s. I guess the county bought a bunch and had to find another use.
And now I realize the primary definition of flashcard has changed since then, from study aid to digital storage.
It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.
One of my proudest university moments was getting a 50% on an exam. I built this absolutely fucking glorious solitare implementation in Java as a first year student that dove deep into how image buffers work and stayed up all night doing it. I got 100% on the project and 0% on the presentation that I slept through (my prof did offer me some extra credit which I took advantage of).
Never have I ever felt more validated in preferring to be a code monkey with zero interactions with clients than in that moment - I produced unimpeachably perfect results and completely fucked the communication side (thankfully, I’ve worked through a lot of my social anxiety but I’m still strongly in the introvert camp).
TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.
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Is the 80-character width of early terminals related to the 80-byte capacity of punch cards?
It absolutely is. A punch card represents a line of text, mostly in a programming language.
without proof, we’re up voting you because we want it to be true
In the 90s my dad showed me his stack of IBM compatible 12 bit per column, 80 column card from his time working at the university physics department’s computer in the 70s. He had no access anymore to card readers and just kept the cards for sentimental value.
Most cards contain FORTRAN programs for the TR440 computer made by Telefunken.
Sorry, I have no further proof. :)
thanks for following up!
Good question, I assume not though
MicroSD cards also don’t look nearly as badass if woven into a skirt.
A full suit of SDcale mail armour, however…
Honestly, yea… badass.
That’s a lot of data!
You can’t take notes on a memory card? Skill issue
Punch cards are the Chads!
(Are you old enough to get this joke?)
Can you explain more? Don’t leave me hanging…
I can, but the history is a little gorey.
Come on, I’m counting on you!
Please be direct and stop beating around the Bush.
The quality of this thread is really reaching a nader.
I got it, but mostly thanks to watching HIMYM.
I get it but only because of balatro
Let’s say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I’m not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O
For the Americans, this is more than one football field and less than Texas
How many peach trees could you plant on 51km2
At least 2
For the entomologists, this is approximately 2.6 trillion ants
This could easily be a quote by GlaDOS the way it reads.
“To contrast, the human brain apparently can’t remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard.”
You also can’t make star ships out of an sdcard
Future archeologists be like we keep finding microSD cards from the early 21st century and have to wade through all that data to figure out anything about that period, from earlier periods we only have paper records.
there are 1 TB microsdxc now, so that’d be 1.2 trillion to one
One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.
We used unused punchcards to make flashcards in elementary school in the late 80’s / early 90’s. I guess the county bought a bunch and had to find another use.
And now I realize the primary definition of flashcard has changed since then, from study aid to digital storage.
Maybe he was born during the Depression or soon after
My dad converted old assembly programs into Cobol for spending money in uni - his textbooks were full of cast offs.
Makes sense. I’m a librarian and we still use cards from the old card catalog for notes.
Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.
Does anyone remember that club penguin tower defence game where you defend against computer viruses?
Wasn’t it kill?
unless you made a lace card
It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.
As you can tell, I’m fun at parties.
Hacker Purity Test from 1989
One of my proudest university moments was getting a 50% on an exam. I built this absolutely fucking glorious solitare implementation in Java as a first year student that dove deep into how image buffers work and stayed up all night doing it. I got 100% on the project and 0% on the presentation that I slept through (my prof did offer me some extra credit which I took advantage of).
Never have I ever felt more validated in preferring to be a code monkey with zero interactions with clients than in that moment - I produced unimpeachably perfect results and completely fucked the communication side (thankfully, I’ve worked through a lot of my social anxiety but I’m still strongly in the introvert camp).
256GB? that’s hitting on the low side
TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.
I can however, store my entire life history of notes and shopping lists inside the sd card