What are punch cards?

Computer programs in the first mainframe were contained in piles of cardboard punch cards. Although it was many years since they were used for this purpose, Punch cards still have several uses and are most used in some voting machines.

Punch cards were actually invented in front of electronic computers. Originally patented by Herman Hollerith, the stock card was first used with tables of machines to record vital statistics of New York City Board of Health and later in the People census in 1890.

Hollerith invented electromechanical machines that contained a stocking device, a spreadsheet and a sorting machine that could be used to accumulate and store statistics. Thomas Watson later joined his company, a tabulating machine company, who later renamed international business machines (IBM).

The size and number of columns has varied over the years, while the original card was used in the 1890 census with 20 columns with 10 punch positions. There are several interesting parallels for modern operating systems. In 1928 IBM introduced and patented an 80 column card, which used rectangular openings instead of round openings, which was significant because it reduced IBM competitors to an older, incompatible format of round openings.

Remington Rand has designed a competing format that allowed 90 columns on 45 column cards, which was actually an excellent design, but was not used so often due to IBM dominance on the market. Card processing does not necessarily require the use of a computer. For example, some retail applications used card sorters and table on the board, such as the total price fields on cards in multiple categories.

programmingLanguages ​​required early repaired format cards to move to free format and with the development of standardized computer languages ​​such as Fortran and Cobol, generic perforated cards were predominated.

It was only in the 1970s that large data processing operations began to move from stock cards to the timesharing environment with data stored on magnetic tapes.

Punch cards are still widely used in voting machines, despite the problems that have occurred over the years. In the 1968 general elections in Detroit, the storm of the rainstorm soaked one dose of ballots, and in the presidential elections in 2000 there were questions about their accuracy and efficiency compared to more modern systems.