Punch Card

A punch card is a stiff paper card on which data is recorded as a pattern of punched holes, read either mechanically or, in later equipment, optically or electrically. French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard used punched cards to control the pattern woven by a loom starting in 1804, and American engineer Herman Hollerith adapted the punched card for statistical data processing, using it to tabulate the 1890 United States census far faster than earlier hand methods. Punched cards became the standard medium for storing data and instructions for early data-processing and computing equipment through much of the twentieth century, before magnetic and later electronic storage replaced them.