Editing Punched card (section)

==Cultural impact==
[[File:US Savings Bond EE $75.png|thumb|A $75 U.S. Savings Bond, Series EE issued as a punched card. Eight of the holes record the bond serial number.]]
[[File:Photograph of Federal Records Center, Alexandria, Virginia (34877725360).jpg|thumb|Cartons of punched cards stored in a [[National Archives and Records Administration|United States National Archives Records Service]] facility in 1959. Each carton could hold 2,000 cards.]]

While punched cards have not been widely used for generations, the impact was so great for most of the 20th century that they still appear from time to time in popular culture. For example:
* Accommodation of people's names: ''The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit''<ref name="Tyler_1968"/><ref name="Betsy_1987"/><!--- think anti-war protest: the cultural impact lasted -->
* Artist and architect [[Maya Lin]] in 2004 designed a [[public art]] installation at Ohio University, titled "Input", that looks like a punched card from the air.<ref name="Mayalin_2009"/>
* Tucker Hall at the University of Missouri – Columbia features architecture that is rumored to be influenced by punched cards. Although there are only two rows of windows on the building, a rumor holds that their spacing and pattern will spell out "M-I-Z beat k-U!" on a punched card, making reference to the university and state's rivalry with neighboring state Kansas.<ref name="Mizzou"/>
* At the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the exterior windows of the Engineering Research Building<ref name="Fpm"/> were modeled after a punched card layout, during its construction in 1966.
* At the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, a portion of the exterior of Gamble Hall (College of Business and Public Administration), has a series of light-colored bricks that resembles a punched card spelling out "University of North Dakota."<ref name="Panoramio"/>
* In the 1964–1965 [[Free Speech Movement]], punched cards became a

: <blockquote>metaphor... symbol of the "system"—first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally ... a symbol of alienation ... Punched cards were the symbol of information machines, and so they became the symbolic point of attack. Punched cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity. .... A student might feel "he is one of out of 27,500 IBM cards" ... The president of the Undergraduate Association criticized the University as "a machine ... IBM pattern of education."... Robert Blaumer explicated the symbolism: he referred to the "sense of impersonality... symbolized by the IBM technology."...
::— Steven&nbsp;Lubar<ref name="Lubar_1992"/></blockquote>
* A legacy of the 80 column punched card format is that a display of 80 [[Characters per line|characters per row]] was a common choice in the design of [[Computer terminal#Historical|character-based terminals]].<ref>{{cite web |title=All About CRT Display Terminals |url=http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/datapro/datapro_70/70D-010-20_All_About_CRT_Display_Terminals_Apr1974.pdf |access-date=16 January 2023 |page=11}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine| last=Rader |first=Ron |date=1981-10-26 |title=Big Screen, 132-Column Units Setting Trend |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1REkdf3I86oC&pg=RA2-PA41 |magazine=Computerworld | at= Special Report p. 41 |access-date=2023-01-16}}</ref> As of September 2014, some character interface defaults, such as the command prompt window's width in Microsoft Windows, remain set at 80 columns and some file formats, such as [[FITS]], still use 80-character [[card image]]s. The [[two-line element set]] format for tracking objects in Earth orbit is based on punch cards.
* In [[Arthur C. Clarke]]'s early short story "[[Rescue Party]]", the alien explorers find a "... wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and the five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet".<ref name="Clarke_1946"/> Writing in 1946, Clarke, like almost all SF authors, had not then foreseen the development and eventual ubiquity of the computer.
* In "I.B.M.", the final track of her album [[This Is a Recording (Lily Tomlin album)|''This Is a Recording'']], comedian [[Lily Tomlin]] gives instructions that, if followed, would purportedly shrink the holes on a punch card (used by [[AT&T Corporation|AT&T]] at the time for customer billing), making it unreadable.

===Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate===
A common example of the requests often printed on punched cards which were to be individually handled, especially those intended for the public to [[turnaround document|use and return]] is "Do Not Fold, [[Spindle (stationery)|Spindle]] or Mutilate" (in the UK "Do not bend, spike, fold or mutilate").<ref name="Lubar_1992"/>{{rp|pages=43–55}} Coined by Charles A. Phillips,<ref name="Lee"/> it became a motto<ref name="Jane"/> for the post–[[World War II]] era (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant), and was widely mocked and satirized. Some 1960s students at Berkeley wore buttons saying: "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. I am a student".<ref name="Albertson_1975"/> The motto was also used for a 1970 book by [[Doris Miles Disney]]<ref name="Disney_1970"/> with a plot based around an early [[computer dating]] service and a 1971 [[Television film|made-for-TV]] [[Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate|movie]] based on that book, and a similarly titled 1967 Canadian short film, ''[[Do Not Fold, Staple, Spindle or Mutilate]]''.