Punched card facts for kids

An 80-column punched card of the type most widely used in the 20th century. Card size was 7+³⁄₈ in × 3+¹⁄₄ in (187.325 mm × 82.55 mm). This example displays the 1964 EBCDIC character set, which added more special characters to earlier encodings.

A punched card is a storage medium. It contains information in the form of holes, that are at precise locations on the card. In the 19th century, punched cards were widely used to control machines, such as looms. Fairground organs and related instruments still use punched cards, as do some voting machines.

Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine.

Images for kids

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  A 12-row/80-column IBM punched card from the mid-twentieth century

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  Close-up of a Jacquard loom's chain, constructed using 8 × 26 hole punched cards

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  Carpet loom with Jacquard apparatus by Carl Engel, around 1860. Chain feed is on the left.

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  Woman operating the card puncher, c.1940

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  A deck of punched cards comprising a computer program. The red diagonal line is a visual aid to keep the deck sorted.

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  Hollerith card as shown in the Railroad Gazette in 1895, with 12 rows and 24 columns.

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  Punched card from a Fortran program: Z(1) = Y + W(1), plus sorting information in the last 8 columns.

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  Binary punched card.

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  Invalid "lace cards" such as this pose mechanical problems for card readers.

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  A 5081 card from a non-IBM manufacturer.

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  IBM 96-column punched card

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  A blank Remington Rand UNIVAC format card. Card courtesy of MIT Museum.

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  A punched Remington Rand card with an IBM card for comparison

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  HP Educational Basic optical mark-reader card.

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  Aperture card

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  Institutions, such as universities, often had their general purpose cards printed with a logo. A wide variety of forms and documents were printed on punched cards, including checks. Such printing did not interfere with the operation of the machinery.

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  A punched card printing plate.

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  A $75 U.S. Savings Bond, Series EE issued as a punched card. Eight of the holes record the bond serial number.

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  Cartons of punched cards stored in a United States National Archives Records Service facility in 1959. Each carton could hold 2,000 cards.

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  A U.S. Census Bureau clerk (left) prepares punch cards using a pantograph similar to that developed by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 Census, while a second clerk (right) uses a 1930s key punch to perform the same task more quickly.

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  A wall-sized display sample of a punch card for the 1954 U.S. Census of Agriculture

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  IBM Port-A-Punch

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  FORTRAN Port-A-Punch card. Compiler directive "SQUEEZE" removed the alternating blank columns from the input.

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  Port-a-punch

See also

• In Spanish: Tarjeta perforada