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 stan-
dards, 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
10-15 characters per second. In parallel, it might be read
at 8-12 thousand characters per minute.
