Computer Science History Question
How many bytes of information were stored on a computer card?
I mean the ones that were fed into computers in the 1960's and 1970's.
For comparison, a modern camera memory card holds 2,000,000,000 bytes (more or less).
posted by Pedicularis @ 2:38 PM
3 Comments:
Those cards look big enough to hold 32 bytes. Maybe 64.
2 gigabytes is 2,147,483,648 bytes.
A standard Hollerith (FORTRAN) card has 80 columns with 10 chads per column to punch or not. So, how many bytes?
I'm wrong about the number of chads per column. My computer expert friend (who is balding and gray-haired, old enough to know) reminds me that standard FORTRAN computer cards could be punched in any combination of 12 rows, not 10 (he also remembers other cards with different numbers of rows and columns). Total of 960 chads, or bits, makes 120 bytes in today's terms. But these were not random access memory. Each column was a single character, which is analogous to a byte, meaning they stored 80 bytes, maximum. Quite often a FORTRAN card only had a few characters on it (e.g., STOP or END) and the rest were blank.
And, yes, HAVE. A friend (also balding and gray-haired) very nicely sent me a handful of them.
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