Punched card
The idea of control and data storage via punched holes was developed independently on several occasions in the modern period.
Each card held the instructions for shedding (raising and lowering the warp) and selecting the shuttle for a single pass.
[7] Semyon Korsakov was reputedly the first to propose punched cards in informatics for information store and search.
[8] Charles Babbage proposed the use of "Number Cards", "pierced with certain holes and stand[ing] opposite levers connected with a set of figure wheels ... advanced they push in those levers opposite to which there are no holes on the cards and thus transfer that number together with its sign" in his description of the Calculating Engine's Store.
In 1881, Jules Carpentier developed a method of recording and playing back performances on a harmonium using punched cards.
The system was called the Mélographe Répétiteur and "writes down ordinary music played on the keyboard dans le langage de Jacquard",[10] that is as holes punched in a series of cards.
By 1887 Carpentier had separated the mechanism into the Melograph which recorded the player's key presses and the Melotrope which played the music.
Initially, these electromechanical machines only counted holes, but by the 1920s they had units for carrying out basic arithmetic operations.
Both IBM and Remington Rand tied punched card purchases to machine leases, a violation of the US 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act.
[20][21]: 300–301 "By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in Endicott, N.Y., printing, cutting and stacking five to 10 million punched cards every day.
[24] During World War II punched card equipment was used by the Allies in some of their efforts to decrypt Axis communications.
At Bletchley Park in England, "some 2 million punched cards a week were being produced, indicating the sheer scale of this part of the operation".
"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," a warning that appeared on some punched cards distributed as documents such as checks and utility bills to be returned for processing, became a motto for the post-World War II era.
During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available.
Mohawk Data Sciences introduced a magnetic tape encoder in 1965, a system marketed as a keypunch replacement which was somewhat successful.
Sequential card columns allocated for a specific use, such as names, addresses, multi-digit numbers, etc., are known as a field.
The card shown in U.S. patent 395,781 of January 8 was printed with a template and had hole positions arranged close to the edges so they could be reached by a railroad conductor's ticket punch, with the center reserved for written descriptions.
Hollerith was originally inspired by railroad tickets that let the conductor encode a rough description of the passenger: I was traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a punch photograph...the conductor...punched out a description of the individual, as light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc.
In an article he wrote describing his proposed system for tabulating the 1890 U.S. census, Hollerith suggested a card 3 by 5+1⁄2 inches (7.6 by 14.0 cm) of Manila stock "would be sufficient to answer all ordinary purposes.
[51] Initially designed to record responses to yes–no questions, support for numeric, alphabetic and special characters was added through the use of columns and zones.
For Pound sterling pre-decimalization currency a penny column represents the values zero through eleven; 10 (top), 11, then 0 through 9 as above.
In 1931, IBM began introducing upper-case letters and special characters (Powers-Samas had developed the first commercial alphabetic punched card representation in 1921).
The languages of Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Portugal and Finland require up to three additional letters; their punching is not shown here.
The IBM card readers 3504, 3505 and the multifunction unit 3525 used a different encoding scheme for column binary data, also known as card image, where each column, split into two rows of 6 (12–3 and 4–9) was encoded into two 8-bit bytes, holes in each group represented by bits 2 to 7 (MSb numbering, bit 0 and 1 unused ) in successive bytes.
Such "lace cards" lacked structural strength, and would frequently buckle and jam inside the machine.
The product was intended for "on-the-spot" recording operations—such as physical inventories, job tickets and statistical surveys—because it eliminated the need for preliminary writing or typing of source documents.
This format was never widely used; it was IBM-only, but they did not support it on any equipment beyond the System/3, where it was quickly superseded by the 1973 IBM 3740 Data Entry System using 8-inch floppy disks.
[22][73] Carroll's high-speed press, containing a printing cylinder, revolutionized the company's manufacturing of punched cards.
[28]: 43–55 Coined by Charles A. Phillips,[86] it became a motto[87] for the post–World War II era (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant), and was widely mocked and satirized.
[88] The motto was also used for a 1970 book by Doris Miles Disney[89] with a plot based around an early computer dating service and a 1971 made-for-TV movie based on that book, and a similarly titled 1967 Canadian short film, Do Not Fold, Staple, Spindle or Mutilate.
