X-Nico

unusual facts about punched card


Seweryn Chajtman

After returning from the USA he created a laboratory equipped with counting and perforating Hollerith machines, accounting and billing equipment, equipment for standardization work, psychological test instruments, equipment for production planning and a then state-of-the-art UMC-1 computer.


Bit

The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted by Semen Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM.

Data processing

The term automatic data processing was applied to operations performed by means of unit record equipment, such as Herman Hollerith's application of punched card equipment for the 1890 United States Census.

Fredrik Rosing Bull

His machine was substantially better than its competition, Hollerith and Powers, through the mechanism of punched card pre-selection.

Gustav Tauschek

Rheinische Metallwaren- und Maschinenfabrik (Rheinmetall) in Sömmerda, Germany, where he developed a complete punched card-based accounting system, which was never mass-produced.

Pseudorandom number generator

On the ENIAC computer he was using, the "middle square" method generated numbers at a rate some hundred times faster than reading numbers in from punched cards.

UNIVAC 1050

In these installations the big computer (e.g., a UNIVAC III) did all of its input-output on magnetic tapes and the 1050 was used to format input data from other peripherals (e.g., punched card readers) on the tapes and transfer output data from the tapes to other peripherals (e.g., punched card punches or the lineprinter).

VS/9

This included RCA's Spectra series of computers, various external hardware designs (such as video terminals, tape drives and punched card readers), and its operating system, Time Sharing Operating System (TSOS).


see also

14th Weather Squadron

At this time, IBM electronic accounting equipment installed at the Climatic Center allowed data processing directly from punched card to tape.

Wallace John Eckert

Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman organized a punched-card solution, proving its effectiveness for physics research and prompting the use of more powerful computers.