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Punched Cards: The 200-Year Reign of Cardboard Computing
Long before magnetic disks and SSDs, the world ran on holes punched in cardboard. This episode traces the full arc: Joseph Marie Jacquard's 1801 loom cards, Herman Hollerith's census machines, the rise of IBM as a punched card company, and the 1928 business decision that created computing's first proprietary format. We dig into the actual encoding — the 80-column card, zone punches, the six-bit BCD codes that became EBCDIC — and the keypunch tradeoffs that made the fastest data entry machine also the one you couldn't verify. Then the surprising afterlives: paper tape running CNC machines into…
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