I used to use them in highschool to write notes on like a post it pad. Who knows about these!?
I used to use them in highschool to write notes on like a post it pad. Who knows about these!?
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It’s a sticky note designed for recording values, often for equipment settings or for measurements.
r/whatisit can also help
They are pages for hole punch coding. Basically a giant scantron for manual coding back in the day.
Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate
Punch cards… It’s ancient computing
Fortran punch cards. I coded on these back in ye olden days when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Those are punch cards for writing code or to enter values to a computer. After the early 80’s there piles of these things. People used them for years as note cards. The reason you didn’t fold them is because they would no longer be able to be fed into the reader; or mutilate again because if the reader; or spindle because the hole would change the data value.
Spindles were metal spikes you would have on your desk and after you were done with the note or receipt you would drive it onto the spike. Surprisingly few accidents
My dad would tell me how he used to code on these when he was younger, now he can’t navigate his way around a smart phone. 🤷
My Dad still has a stack of Fortran punch cards that he used for his Master’s thesis back in 1971. Apparently you wanted to turn on the card numbering option when printing them out. That way if you drop them you can put them back in order.
Everything old is new again
unpunched punch cards. those are a treasure. Oh the old times.
Each one of those cards represents a whopping EIGHTY BYTES of storage. So that whole stack is like 1-2 KB? You’d need about 200x that many cards to store this image.
Thank goodness he cleared his cache.
You wouldnt want to see his hanging chad.
Billion Dollar Brain has these in it, a great movie for the people here – literally pc master race
In high-school I took an intro to mainframes class at the local navy base. these are what we used.
Wow, punch hole cards, that is a piece of history
My first job was at a small manufacturing plant with a Univac system that used punch cards. We had a woman whose job it was to sit at the card punch all day. When we finally upgraded to a system with remote terminal entry, we had cases, and cases, and more cases of punch cards that we all used as scrap paper.
The original 80 byte unit record medium, often referred to as an IBM card. They could hold a line of code, or a record of data.
Used them on a job back in the late 90s
That’s where the term software patching comes from. You had to patch the holes to correct errors in the code.
*knees creaking* BACK IN MY DAY
[“In the future that’s how we input data into machines we call computers!”](https://youtu.be/ZAbx2fp_q4A?si=CPQ5ZV9DtSnRLlwN&t=1m16s)
– George Jetson
have not seen those in years.
My code would still be messy.
It’s still wild that computer science has gone from this to AI within one lifetime.
How tf is anyone supposed to keep up?
You can put Spock’s brain on one of those!