Fun fact I found in a game…
Chip Defense (A tower defense game with a microprocessor theme)
You can’t take notes on a memory card? Skill issue
One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.
My dad converted old assembly programs into Cobol for spending money in uni - his textbooks were full of cast offs.
Maybe he was born during the Depression or soon after
256GB? that’s hitting on the low side
TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.
You also can’t make star ships out of an sdcard
Let’s say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I’m not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O
For the Americans, this is more than one football field and less than Texas
How many peach trees could you plant on 51km2
At least 2
For the entomologists, this is approximately 2.6 trillion ants
This could easily be a quote by GlaDOS the way it reads.
“To contrast, the human brain apparently can’t remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard.”
You Monster
Punch cards are the Chads!
(Are you old enough to get this joke?)
Can you explain more? Don’t leave me hanging…
I can, but the history is a little gorey.
Come on, I’m counting on you!
Please be direct and stop beating around the Bush.
The quality of this thread is really reaching a nader.
Future archeologists be like we keep finding microSD cards from the early 21st century and have to wade through all that data to figure out anything about that period, from earlier periods we only have paper records.
unless you made a lace card
It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.
As you can tell, I’m fun at parties.
Is the 80-character width of early terminals related to the 80-byte capacity of punch cards?
It absolutely is. A punch card represents a line of text, mostly in a programming language.
without proof, we’re up voting you because we want it to be true
MicroSD cards also don’t look nearly as badass if woven into a skirt.
A full suit of SDcale mail armour, however…
Honestly, yea… badass.
That’s a lot of data!