I was telling my son about how,in grade school, they always had us spray ibm cards with gold spray and make wreaths out of them.
He asked what IBM cards were for.
I cannot recall.
Help me out.
Do you mean punched cards? If so, they’re used to store program and data for computers of yore.
Thanks!
We used to have a punch tape machine when I was at college - it stored the data as binary holes in the right order across the tape (makes sense), so all we had to do to make christmas decorations was to feed it the correct sequence of bytes:
16, 84, 56, 238, 56, 84, 16, 0, repeated over and over creates a sort of snowflake pattern.
16, 56, 16, 56, 124, 56, 124, 254, 16, 56, 56, 0 makes a christmas tree.
60, 66, 90, 66, 60, 66, 145, 137, 145, 137, 66, 60, 0 makes a snowman
Some guy still services these machines.
Here you can see a bunch of cards and here you can see a 026 model IBM punch machine (click to enlarge).
Blank cards were used in offices to make notes, pretty much like we use the sticky yellow notes today. IBM gave plastic card holders which you placed on your desk and held a stack of cards ready to be used for notes. Airplane tickets are the same size as those cards.
The newer and smaller 96 column, System 3 cards never really caught on but they were also used for notes. They were soon replaced by the humongous 8.5" floppy disks. Then came smaller floppies, “winchester” disks, PCs, Bill Gates, cell phones with cameras, PDAs with GPS, the enema-umbrella, the orgasmatron, free health care coverage for everybody, world peace, etc.
Well, maybe we’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting closer.
I’m now retired from IBM, but I started by repairing keypunch machines. We were called Customer Engineers and we hauled around a tool bag that looked like a big briefcase.
A story I’ve never confirmed is that one model keypunch had a hole in the cover which was open when the chad box was removed. Supposidly the CE could pull out the box and see up the operator’s dress.
None of the machines I worked on were built that way and I suspect an urgan legend.
Minor nitpick: the first floppy format was 8", followed by 5.25", then 3.5", followed by all the pseudo-floppy MO formats that never caught on: Superdrive, Zip, Jazz, etc. IIRC, Sony also tried to introduce a 3" floppy format, but it never caught on either.
>> the first floppy format was 8"
You are right and I knew that. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I got mixed up with 3.5"
Regular audio cassettes were also used for data storage in specific applications. And also the TTY paper tape with the Baudot code. It seems amazing today.
And 1/2" mag tape in 200 BPI, then 556 BPI, 800, 1600 & finally 6250.