Read it in the cards
There’s nothing to stop you looking at the cartoon at the end of this post now, but you may not understand it. You first have to know a little bit about Punch Cards. So first of all here is a picture of a punch card:
Interesting, isn’t it!
In my post titled Pretty Basic Stuff I showed you an equally boring image of some computer program code in BASIC. To create the program you would key in the instructions, and these are displayed on the screen as you type.
Punch cards pre-date this convenient method of entering code. When I first started programming in COBOL, I would start off by writing the instructions on coding sheets. These sheets then went off to the “Punch Room” where the girls (they were usually girls - I’m not being sexist here!) would key in my lines of code into a special machine which created a stack of cards - each card representing a line of code of my program. These were then fed into the computer using a special reading device.
In those days, the punch card was the very life-blood of the computer industry. But it served at least one another very useful purpose. Living in London in the late 1960s, early 70s, I was inevitably exposed, from time to time, to some activities involving the stuff that Bill Clinton smoked, but never inhaled; and punch cards had the perfect thickness and texture for making the tip or “roach” for joints.
I wonder if Herman Hollerith (1860 - 1929), who invented the punch card, could have predicted that his creation would be put to such a practical alternative use?
OK. Keep in mind the picture of the punch card when you look at this visual pun:
(Published in Computer Weekly some time in the 1980s)
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