Punch cards ftw
Punch cards ftw
Fun fact I found in a game...
Chip Defense (A tower defense game with a microprocessor theme)
256GB? that's hitting on the low side
TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.
One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn't throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn't need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.
Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.
Maybe he was born during the Depression or soon after
My dad converted old assembly programs into Cobol for spending money in uni - his textbooks were full of cast offs.
Makes sense. I'm a librarian and we still use cards from the old card catalog for notes.
We used unused punchcards to make flashcards in elementary school in the late 80’s / early 90’s. I guess the county bought a bunch and had to find another use.
And now I realize the primary definition of flashcard has changed since then, from study aid to digital storage.
Let's say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I'm not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O
unless you made a lace card
It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.
As you can tell, I'm fun at parties.
Hacker Purity Test from 1989
MicroSD cards also don't look nearly as badass if woven into a skirt.
A full suit of SDcale mail armour, however...
Honestly, yea... badass.
This could easily be a quote by GlaDOS the way it reads.
"To contrast, the human brain apparently can't remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard."
You Monster
Future archeologists be like we keep finding microSD cards from the early 21st century and have to wade through all that data to figure out anything about that period, from earlier periods we only have paper records.
You can't take notes on a memory card? Skill issue
there are 1 TB microsdxc now, so that'd be 1.2 trillion to one
You can, if you write really small
A tower defense game with a microprocessor theme
Does anyone remember that club penguin tower defence game where you defend against computer viruses?
Wasn't it kill?
I can however, store my entire life history of notes and shopping lists inside the sd card
You also can't make star ships out of an sdcard
That's a lot of data!