Punched card
part · 1725 · Early modern era
A card in which information is encoded by the presence or absence of holes.
Inventors: Herman Hollerith, Charles Babbage.
Principles and materials it uses
- Paper — is made of. Punched cards are stiff card.
Where it is used
- Jacquard loom — is used in. Each punched card sets one pass of the pattern.
- Babbage’s Analytical Engine — is used in. Operations and numbers were entered on punched cards.
- Hollerith tabulator — is used in. The 1890 census data was encoded on punched cards.
- Harvard Mark I — is used in. The program was read from punched tape and the data from punched cards.
- ENIAC — is used in. ENIAC’s input and output went through IBM punched-card equipment.
- Mainframe — is used in. Programs were entered on punched cards.
Things built in a similar way
- Pinned cylinder — works like. Pins on a cylinder and holes in a card are two ways of recording a sequence for a machine.