Rise and fall of the punched card

James: If you remember the scandal of the 2000 election with George W. Bush and Al Gore, you're probaby familiar with the punched card.

James: After all those dangling chads in Florida left the election in chaos, Congress banned punched cards from federal elections.

James: By the early 2000s, there were also numerous ways to store information digitally. So those little rectangular squares of paper, encoded with holes that represented the history of nearly everything, became pieces of history themselves.

James: To explore the evolution of this important precursor to the modern database, let's take a brief journey back to a time before data processing was a purely digital endeavor.

James: Humans have always had a need to organize information. That's why we're doing a deep dive into the history and future of database technology and how people have leveraged data and collaboration to innovate throughout time.

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James: Today, most of us associate the term PC with the phrase “personal computer”. But did you know that until the mid-20th century, PC actually referred to punched card?

James: Predominantly used from 1890 until the late 1970s, paper punched cards were the primary method of data storage and processing in manufacturing facilities and offices.

Marc: I'm Marc Weber, Curatorial Director of the Internet History Program at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. I've been chronicling the evolution of the online world and mobile since 1995, starting with the people who created the worldwide web in Geneva, Switzerland.

James: For those of you born in the latter half of the 20th Century who may not be familiar with the concept, our guest explained exactly what a punched card is and how it relates to the modern computer database.

Marc: Punched cards are stiff paper cards with holes punched in them. And the holes are punched in particular places defined within a grid of rows and columns, kind of like a spreadsheet or a chess board. A machine can read those holes either by putting a kind of mechanical finger through the holes, or in later versions, by shining a beam of light through them. Each position on the card where there could be a hole or not is a bit of information in the sense it's either empty or full. Just like ones and zeros in computing.

Marc: Punched cards are binary hundreds of years before the modern digital computer. And... the database connection is that they called punched cards unit records, and the columns were actually called fields. So there's a similarity even from early on.

James: As you can imagine, there were limitations to the amount of data punched cards could store.

Marc: There were lots of formats over the years, but none of them held a whole lot of information. The most common one, the IBM card, was 80 characters. And that had 80 columns across and 12 rows down. So that's literally about half of a text message or tweet.

James: Think about trying to run a company's massive payroll system using something size of a tweet! And on something that's as fragile as a piece of paper.

Marc: And this is why in a latter era, that when they would send out punched cards for a check or something like that, or an official form, it would say, “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” because if there is a person handling them, then there's a lot of ways you can mess them up.

James: Today using something as ephemeral as cardstock to store important data and input information into machines seems unbelievable. But back in the 18th Century, the idea was revolutionary, particularly to the textile industry.

James: In 1725, French textile worker Basile de Bouchon came up with the first kind of paper tape to control looms, using the tape as a long, continuous role. Then, in 1801, French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard developed a device that used interchangeable punched cards to control the weaving of cloth and create patterns.

Marc: And this became the common way to control machines throughout the 19th Century. You had player pianos. The early telegraph, automatic senders used paper tape to record messages and resend them automatically. Just all kinds of machines.

James: But the idea of using punched cards to sort data didn't come into play until later in the 19th Century, with a man named Semyon Korsakov.

Marc: The idea went back to a Russian inventor who had wild kind of designs for an ideascope that could sort through ideas, as well as a database of people using a very similar system, like separated cards you could sort.

James: Building on the work of innovators like Jacquard and Korsakov, a mechanical engineer named Herman Hollerith won a competition to create a machine for the 1890 census. This invention brought about what we know as the modern punched card.

Marc: The U.S. Constitution requires a census to be done every 10 years, and that's partly around the number of representatives in Congress. So, in 1890 they were hitting the point where it would take more than 10 years to actually do it the old way. They had a competition for a better way to do it. Hollerith won, and they did it in fact in six years. And this is what got commercialized in the early 20th Century for every manner of business application. Accounting, payroll, statistical uses, a census.

Marc: And in a way, this is parallel to index cards. The Dewey decimal system is literally just the same period. And this whole idea of taking information, putting it on little cards that you can sort and re-sort, it's like these two parallel tracks, one is read by machines, one is read by people.

James: Building on his success with the US government, in 1924, Hollerith's company became computing giant IBM.

James: And as IBM continued to develop the punched card technology, the demand for punched cards increased—from organizations that would use them for good and evil.

Marc: Some impacts were more visible than others. The 1890 and the later US censuses were a really clear example.

Marc: Another was Social Security at the end of the 1930s. Actually at the museum, in the punched card gallery, we have a recreation of the equipment they would have used in a Social Security office back then. And that's when suddenly you had to process millions of people's information to decide who would get benefits, how much, sent to where, et cetera. So, that was a really, really heavy use of punched-card equipment.

Marc: But in terms of probably the most tragic impact was literally for enslavement and genocide. In the 1930s, the German government used card-sorting technology for a census, which also went by race and religion. And that was used later for separating out Jews, gypsies, and others for camps and for enslavement.

James: Other, less nefarious uses included testing, voting, and big data applications for corporations and the government.

James: And for the next several decades, use of punched cards skyrocketed, with peak usage occurring in 1967, with the US alone consuming approximately 200 billion cards per year. But the writing was on the wall for punched card technology.

Marc: So they remained cheap, accessible, and heavily used through the 60s. That's also the period when bills could come on punched cards, checks. They were sort of in daily life to a fair extent.

Marc: But as I recall, the last sort of punched-card-oriented machine that IBM made, they did one last try where they did a format that had even smaller holes and more columns, but that was end of the 60s, and replaced by the very early 70s. So, that was the end of them ... As computer makers regarding them as a kind of current peripheral.

James: And as digital data storage emerged, punched cards simply couldn't compete. 64,000 cards are roughly equal to five megabytes of data—the size of one iTunes song. Imagine all the music you have on your computer translated into millions of punched cards, overflowing your office and even your entire building!

Marc: They kept on being used heavily through the 70s, and then sort of petering off in the 80s. And, yeah, the floppy disc really got popular in the late 70s, early 80s. And that was kind of the death knell ... Because suddenly you had something you could carry around easily, that's a good storage medium as well. So, that was pretty much it.

James: When you consider the speed and efficiency of data capture and storage today, the thought of punching, sorting, and storing punched cards seems almost laughable. But when you really think about it, are we just swapping one set of mundane tasks for another?

Marc: It makes you think of what people would do every day if there was still something like punched cards. There are lots of very dull clerical tasks around punched cards, from keypunching, to handling them, storing them, sorting them. But today we have all these completely different uses of information technology, but we also have, let's say, legions of content moderators, which is not necessarily the most pleasant job in the world.

Marc: We don't necessarily end up with more free time. There were predictions that we'd have the 15-hour work week by now. We seem to manage to find plenty of things to do, but the nature changes and hopefully gets more interesting and creative over time.