All Punched Card Data Processing

Stiff paper cards with holes in set positions that stored data, and the electromechanical machines that read and summed them, which carried business and government records for roughly a century before electronic computers took over. The group includes the punched card itself and the tabulating machine built to summarize information stored on it. An invention belongs here when the cited article describes it as a punched card, or a machine for reading or tabulating punched cards.