Ottawa Canada A punched card was a piece of light cardboard about the size of a government cheque that had 12 rows and 80 columns Data was recorded on the card by punching holes in it. Numbers were a single punch in a given column while letters, punctuation and special characters required two or more punches in a given column..
They used to send one with various bills, like your telephone bill, some utility bills with your account number and amount owing already punched into the card and would punch the amount of your payment into it when you sent it in with your cheque. Then they fed the cards to either what were called unit record (another name for a punched card) tabulating machines or into a card reader connected to a computer and credit your payment to your account. Punched cards were the most common form of data processing medium for years, like from about 1890 until maybe 20 years ago. They were invented by Herman Hollerith, the Chief of the U.S. Bureau Of The Census to speed the processing of census data. Back then they didn't have computers in 1890, but they invented mechanical punched card processing machines to sort, list, add up and do other operations that are very tedious to do manually when you are dealing with millions of pieces of data. A punched card is also known as an IBM card because IBM was a major manufacturer of punched card equipment. Hope this explains what a punched card is. Brian -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.4.1/312 - Release Date: 14/04/2006 ___ To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote
