Punched Card

A punched card is a stiff paper-based medium that stores digital information as the presence or absence of holes in a grid of predefined positions, used historically to control automated machines, to record data such as census results, and, through most of the twentieth century, as the primary input and output medium for early data processing systems and digital computers. The American inventor Herman Hollerith developed practical punched-card tabulating technology in the late 1880s, inspired by the punched cards that controlled Jacquard looms and by railway conductors' ticket punches, and built tabulating machines that processed the 1890 United States census; Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, which later became part of IBM. IBMs dominant format, a rectangular card with 80 columns and 12 rows measuring about 7 and three eighths by 3 and one quarter inches, remained the standard business and computing data medium until magnetic disk storage and interactive terminals made it largely obsolete by the mid 1980s.