We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous ...

From the early 20th century into the 1970s, Americans used punched cards to enter data into tabulating equipment and then electronic computers. This is an early key-operated punch, based on patents of ...

About thirty years ago [H. P. Friedrichs] pulled off a hack that greatly improved the process of programming with punch cards. At the time, his school had just two IBM 029 keypunch machines. One of ...

When Berkeley's William Rouverol invented the original Votomatic punch-card voting machine in the early 1960s, he never dreamed his gizmo would become both famous and infamous. His son now calls him ...

The punch card, the first way to program a machine, turned 300 this year. The first semi-automatic loom was created in Lyon as early as 1725. To commemorate this, we have taken the liberty of updating ...

On June 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith applied for US patent #395,781 for his punch card counting machine, a device considered to be among the foundations of the modern information processing industry and ...