ABSTRACT
When the author was a beardless boy, he worked as a punched-card machine operator. These were
primitive information processing machines in which the information was stored in the form of holes
punched in paper cards. Although paper was relatively cheap by historical standards, by modern
standards it was very expensive storage. For example, a gigabyte of storage in punched paper would fill
the average room from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and corner to corner. It was dear in another sense;
that is, there was a limit to the size of a record. A “unit record” was limited to 80 characters when
recorded in Hollerith code. This code in this media could be read serially at about 10 to 15 characters per
second. In parallel, it might be read at 8 to 12 thousand characters per minute.
