I learned about punch cards, when I discovered my high school in Scotland, in the 1980's, had card readers that were lying on a shelf unused for years.
It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school.
We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs.
The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program.
Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles.
As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!
It was the Physics teacher who ran a computer club I'd joined in the school.
We got to use those old HP "calculators" which were big bulky machines which had a display consisting of a single line of I think, 80 character LEDs, ran a form of BASIC, had a built in cassette tape reader (and writer) to load or store programs.
The card reader attached to these clunky big things. I asked the physics teacher why they weren't used - I remember him saying it was because they weren't working. My 13 year old mind kind of fixated on them; the cards were in the same format as punched cards, except you marked them by drawing a single diagonal line across one of the rectangles which represented an ASCII character; each card had an array of such characters and you wrote a complete BASIC program by correctly marking each card. It took many such cards to write a program.
Long story short, I got the card readers working again. The physics teacher just nodded his head - he was one of the old-skool kinda guys with a beard, who showed they were impressed, by displaying such stoic reactions. It was at that point that I learned about punched cards; basically the same principle but using punched holes rather than marking the individual rectangles.
As I was born in 1969, I feel I had the priviledge of growing up during the various eras the article speaks of; by the time I attended high school I was growing up with Sinclair ZX81s (My first home computer), VIC-20s, C= 64s, Amiga 500s (My first Amiga). Amiga 1200s. My first PC was some 386 thingy I bought from a pal. This article reminds me of a lot of common knowledge I'd completely forgotten over the ensuing decades - such nostalgia!