Punched Cards

Punched Card (replica)

The census cards were divided into sections to record the number of people in each household, how many were employed, their national origin, and so on.

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From Math to Data

People used calculators to manipulate numbers. But how do you make machines that also manipulate words or ideas?

Punched cards, a mainstay of early office automation and computing, helped launch the transition from doing math to processing data. Patterns of holes punched in cards can represent any kind of information. Punched cards can preserve data too: just file them away!