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Punch cards are a very old way of programming a computer. The punch card would have long rows of numbers, representing certain instructions. You would punch a hole through the number corresponding to the instruction you wanted to execute. You would then feed the card into the computer, and it would run the program.

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What is the main feature of each computer generation?

vacuum tubes, punch cards, magnetic tape, large sizetransistors, punch cards, magnetic tape, harddisc, medium sizeintegrated circuits, punch cards, magnetic tape, harddisk, medium or small sizemicroprocessors, interactive user interface, harddisk, floppy disc, very small size


What bureau of government first used punch cards to colect data?

The United States Census Bureau was the first government bureau to use punch cards for data collection. They began using punch cards in the late 19th century to process and tabulate census data. This technology greatly improved the speed and accuracy of data processing and became widely adopted by various government agencies and industries.


What happened to the fingerhut punch board cards where people paid no more than 99 cents for a punch to win that picture prize?

i would like to know the same and one large punch with name under it you get one for doing the card and then one person gets prize also for the name under the large circle


What are the advantages and disadvantages of punchcards?

Assuming you are talking about computer punch cards... PRO: They last longer than other media. They don't lose data when exposed to a magnetic field. CON: They are slow to load. The data density is low (you'd need a truck to carry Microsoft Office on punch cards), they are susceptible to being damaged by water and anything else that destroys paper, they can get accidentally shuffled, they take lots of storage space, nobody has card readers anymore.


What were the challenges faced by the use of punched cards?

Cards were a fixed size. They were limited to 80 characters per card, so abbreviations were commonly used. This was one of the issues with the Y2K transition, years had been abbreviated with two characters instead of 4. A program had to be written into the computer through the cards. Each card represented a line of code. If a program had 1000 lines of code, that was 1000 cards that had to be punched out on the machine, and kept in order. If you dropped them, it took forever to resort them. Cards might not feed into the reader correctly, particularly if the weather was humid or damp. A bent card might jam up the machine, destroying some of the other cards, resulting in having to re-punch the cards.