So last night I ran into an acquaintance at the bar, we were having a lovely chat until it took a sad unforeseen turn for the worst. How it happened I’m not sure, but we soon found ourselves discussing the 1975 film Rollerball.
Our troubles began when I made a remark about how funny it was that in Norman Jewison’s vision of 2018, computers were still using punch cards. For some unknown reason my friend took offense to this and snottily shot back, “Well what else would they be expected to use!” His contention is that punch cards were the only medium available at the time, and who can fault them for not being able to envision something else. “Things didn’t change as fast as they do now”, he said. Yes, apparently people weren’t that creative back in ye olde days of 1975.
It seems to me that it wouldn’t have been hard to see, even way back in 1975, that punch cards were on the way out. Surely had they asked around they would have seen how silly it was to think that after 43 years the computer hadn’t evolved past the use of punch cards.
What annoyed me most about his attitude was that it stunk heavily of, “I was there, you weren’t so what would you know.” So, I’m especially curious to hear from the folks who “were there.” Was it really that hard at the time to envision computers that did not use punch cards?
Also, I don’t want to get lost in the theory that Jewison included it because that’s how the general public perceived computers at the time, we’ve already been through that.
But it’s the obvious reason for this. How can you have a discussion if you throw out the most reasonable and probable explanation. Jewison and his scenarists probably weren’t slow or stupid – they had to make things intelligible to their audience and still convey the right mood. Punch cards virtually yelled “computers” in 1975.
It’s like in Hedrik Smith’s book “The Russians”. He showed the David Lean film Doctor Zhivago to relatives of Pasternak, and they critizcized it because it opened with those scenes at the dam that looked so much like a Soviet propaganda film.
That was the point!! It immediatelt established the place and the mood.
There are plenty of examples in science fiction, and in science fiction film, where they got it incredibly right. People can often extrapolate well. There are also cases where they got it spectacularly wrong, but they were at least trying. And sometimes, as in this case, you go with current images so people know what you’re doing (like the salt shaker in the first broadcast episode of Star Trek
Computers then also hadn’t gone through the many media transitions we’ve seen since (punch cards->magnetic tape->floppy disks->CDs->DVDs, plus all the other formats now and I’m sure many I skipped in the past). It’s pretty natural now (for audience and filmmaker) to realize a computer even in the short-term future will use different media for input; not so much then, though I’m sure a figurative handful could.
And yet in 1967’s Star Trek, the computers were using tape-based storage devices, shaped a lot like a 3.25" floppy. If they never mentioned the word “tape” in the show, you’d never know what was in that mysterious little box. It was ahead of its time, but not obnoxiously so. Non-paper digital media were showing up all over written sci-fi.
Of course, the ship’s computer made teletype noises when it was running, so that kind of cancels the percieved advances in storage media.
Cal, I don’t disagree with you, but I think you’re missing the point. It’s possible I’m not articulating myself well enough, but we weren’t arguing about why they included punch cards in the film. Our argument was about whether or not anyone could have foreseen a future without punch cards.
Certainly people had envisioned computers without punch cards by 1975. Asimov’s Multivac didn’t have them, and I think you communicated with it by speech. Star Trek had speech recognition on their computers from the very start.
But to the general public, any sort of computer storage or imput medium was just going to be confusing.
Let me add that I was using computers in 1974, and nothing about them indicated that punch cards were on the way out. It was the standard way of entering data. The mainframe I worked with at the time had tape storage, as well as disk storage. The disks were about a yard in diameter; I don’t know how much they held, but I would guess that it would take quite a few of them to hold the data in a single CD-ROM.
Even in the 1960s time-sharing systems without punch cards were common enough anyone who knew anything about computers could have guessed the right way. Hell, the first honest-to-god VIDEO GAME was working in 1961 or thereabouts. Multiple players and video screens, too, not teletypes or anything like that.
In 1977 three important home computers were released, all of them recognizably like the ones on desks worldwide right now. In fact, the first successful home computer, the Altair 8800, was advertised in January 1975. It was a kit computer, but all of the basics were in place and nobody was selling cardreaders to hobbyists.
So, yes. By 1975 someone who knew the computer world could predict the death of punch cards.
homeskillet - you’re right & your friend is a fool.
In 1975 I was in large-scale corporate DP as we called it then, and punchcards were already widely regarded as obsolete anachronisms. Yes, they were still used in a great many of our systems, but everything new we did was based on disk (or tape if we needed physical portability) for internal storage. All new human-to-computer IO was being done with key-to-disk or timesharing terminals.
We thought punchcards would be around a long time, just because the cost of converting legacy systems (yes, we already had stuff we called “legacy” in 1975) would make it a low slow slog. We didn’t really anticipate the vast increase in size & scope of data that meant that by 1985 our legacy punchcard systems represented just a few percent of all they bytes we owned / maintained / processed.
In a metaphorical sense, large corporate punchcard data systems shrank to insignificance rather than being replcaed one-for-one.
For the large majority of companies that were not Fortune 500, minicomputers were coming onstream heavily at that time and they had few, if any, hardware components for punch card processing.
RealityChuck: Were you using IBM computers? I’m fairly sure DEC machines (the minicomputers mentioned by LSLGuy, or at least some of them) never had punch cards, going all the way back to the PDP-1 back in 1960.
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