Jun 18
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On Jun 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith patents his punch card calculator.
📸 Dev Community
A small archive of punch cards and ephemera from the 1930s through 1980s.
Punched cards were once a ubiquitous part of accounting, data collection and early computing. At their peak of use, in the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of companies around the world printed millions of punch cards every month. Yet within a few years of their obsolescence they all but disappeared from the public consciousness.
This archive captures a small selection of these cards and their ephemera, and aims to document and preserve these pieces of history for the future.
Punch cards from Tangible Media
Compatibility
The concept of compatibility was popularized with the advent of the personal computer where it means a suitability of a software to run on a particular computing hardware. On both ends, computing software and hardware still undergo cycles of upgrades but by preserving this respective compatibility.
In particular, software starts upgrade cycles by tagging programs with version 1.0, version 2.0 and so on. Usually, such versions do run their courses until they warrant upgrade within the overall framework of compatibility. It is seldom though that a software release is followed by a subsequent new one without gathering sufficient data that justifies such release. However, there is also the concept of the beta-version software release.
beta version - it is a pre-release, "feature-complete" version of software given to external users for testing, feedback, and debugging before official launch. Following internal alpha testing, this stage helps identify bugs, usability issues, and performance bottlenecks under real-world conditions, often acting as a "trial" or "preview" release to ensure stability.
In other contexts, texts and literary material can undergo similar upgrade cycles in a form of printed editions that do not usually expire so readers can go back and compare their contents. This way we could have them in forms v 1.0, v 2.0 and v 3.0 for example.
Image is due to ChatGPT AI search engine.
📸 source: Nick Janetakis
I made myself a punch card for my periods at the beginning of the year and ngl I love it lol. I used sparkly red gel pen to color in the blood drops. There's 13 full moon cycles this year (and most years tbh) so I put 13 drops on there and if I end up needing more than I will just draw them on.