Computer History

Mary asked me about the old computer punch cards she remembers we had at home. These type of cards were the standard input for mainframe computers from about the 1950s to early 1980s. (Old cards made good note cards or bookmarks.)




The cards were made on a card punch machine like the one shown below. I used one of these many times at university and at work up to about 1980. In the first university computer class I took the computer centre had clerical staff that did all the card punching. We wrote our computer program (FORTRAN) on paper and then handed it in at a window to be punched and run through the computer (filling a wing of the building.) Of course the program ended in errors and we had to rewrite, line up again at the window and repeat until it worked.

The punch cards came in boxes of 2000 cards. I remember seeing Grad students who had developed large programs that took more than one box of cards. There was more than one student who dropped his box of cards and had a scrambled disaster to sort out.

In that era most big companies including the one I work for had a whole department of people at card punch machines entering all the information needed for data processing. Sometimes the card readers chewed up the cards or two cards stuck together. I had an instance where two cards stuck together on reading and a data base was out of alignment causing a billing error for a major customer for a whole month before the problem could be found.

In looking at some information on computer history I found an amusing example of mobile computing. The picture below is a computer card reader machine pulled by an ox. This was in Taiwan and used in processing an early 1960s census.

I have always been fascinated by the history of technology and I was a witness to much of it. (No I never used a computer pulled by an ox cart though.) This may become part of an ongoing blog series.