ABSTRACT
Punched cards are small pieces of heavy paper stock that were used in a variety of industries for the control of machinery. This was achieved by punching a series of holes in the cards along a series of rows and columns. Punched cards were used for many years in both the textile industry and for election voting before they were used for the control of computers starting in the 1940s. The 1960s and 1970s, then, were the heyday of using punched cards as the primary means of entering data into computers. A less common but still important use was for computer output; the cards used for output were then used for input into another computer program. The current use of punched cards was recently detailed in an article on a small manufacturing company in Texas. Punched-card use had a long life during the history of computing and could have new uses in the future.
