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