Punchcards

GWC Community Geek Hobbies
#1

In a fit of boredom, I looked up punchcards on WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card).

80 bytes per card and 143 card per inch. That is 11,440 bytes per inch, or 11.2 kilobytes. So, a megabyte is 91.6 inches, or 7 feet 7 inches. A gigabyte is 7,821 feet, or 1.48 miles.

This means that an average song, in MP3 format, at two and a half minutes long, is 1.2 megabytes or about nine feet, while an episode of Galactic Watercooler is at least 360 feet.

An episode of Doctor Who is 1.5 gigs, or two and a quarter miles. :eek:

Talk about oceans through a straw…

#2

Okay, everyone on GWC knows I’m old.
Is 47 old? Well, not really. But it’s all relative to you youngins.

I took computer class every year of High School. So that was '79, 80, 81, 82.

In my freshman year we the computer we used did indeed use punch cards – just like those mentioned above. You had to type your program into a punch card generator then take your stack of punch cards and run 'em through the system.
The output would be a print out on paper of course.

By my Senior year the computer lab had some sort of DEC VAX system with terminals and that had screens and keyboards. (Monochrome (single color) screens) of course.

I majored in Electrical Engineering in college but later changed my major to Computer Science. So I saw even further computer technology advances hands on through that time.

I can’t say I’m nostalgic for the days of “primitive” computing— I love this era of dummy proof smartphones and iPads and the Internet.
But I do feel privileged to have lived through this evolution of computing and electronics technology.

#3

We used punch cards in college at my work/study job in the computer services center. For notepaper. :slight_smile:

#4

Punch card make me things of the Nostromo Mother :slight_smile:
Alien style!

#5

You can also wing those suckers across a room.