Editing Punched card (section)

===20th century===
At the end of the 1800s [[Herman Hollerith]] created a method for recording data on a medium that could then be read by a machine,<ref name="CH_ETS"/><ref name="Randell_1982"/><ref name="Hollerith_1884"/><ref name="Patent_2"/> developing punched card data processing technology for the [[1890 United States census|1890 U.S. census]].<ref name="daCruz_2019"/>  This was inspired in part by [[Jacquard loom]] weaving technology and by railway punch photographs.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Sobel |first=Robert |title=I.B.M., colossus in transition |date=1981 |publisher=Times Books |isbn=978-0-8129-1000-1 |location=New York |pages=15}}</ref>  '''Punch photographs''' were quick ways for conductors to mark a ticket with a description of the ticket buyer (e.g., short or tall, dark or light hair).<ref name=":0" />  They were used to reduce ticket fraud, as conductors could "read" the punched holes to get a basic description of the person to whom the ticket was sold.<ref name=":0" />  

Hollerith's [[tabulating machine]]s read and summarized data stored on punched cards and they began use for government and commercial data processing. Initially, these [[Electromechanics|electromechanical]] machines only counted holes, but by the 1920s they had units for carrying out basic arithmetic operations.<ref name="Austrian_1982"/>{{rp|page=124}}

Hollerith founded the ''Tabulating Machine Company'' (1896) which was one of four companies that were [[Consolidation (business)|amalgamated via stock acquisition]] to form a fifth company, [[Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company]] (CTR) in 1911, later renamed [[International Business Machines|International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)]] in 1924. Other companies entering the punched card business included [[British Tabulating Machine Company|The Tabulator Limited]] (Britain, 1902), [[Dehomag|Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (Dehomag)]] (Germany, 1911), [[Powers Accounting Machine|Powers Accounting Machine Company]] (US, 1911), [[Remington Rand]] (US, 1927), and [[Groupe Bull|H.W. Egli Bull]] (France, 1931).<ref name="SperryRand_1967" /> These companies, and others, manufactured and marketed a variety of punched cards and [[Unit record equipment|unit record machines]] for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after the development of electronic computers in the 1950s.

[[File:This is a card puncher, an integral part of the tabulation system used by the United States Census Bureau to compile... - NARA - 513295.jpg|thumb|Woman operating the card puncher, c.1940]]

Both IBM and Remington Rand tied punched card purchases to machine leases, a violation of the US 1914 [[Clayton Antitrust Act]]. In 1932, the US government took both to court on this issue. Remington Rand settled quickly. IBM viewed its business as providing a service and that the cards were part of the machine. IBM fought all the way to the Supreme Court and lost in 1936; the court ruled that IBM could only set card specifications.<ref name="Justia_1936"/><ref name="Belden_1962"/>{{rp|pages=300–301}}

"By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in Endicott, N.Y., printing, cutting and stacking five to 10 million punched cards every day."<ref name="Endicott_2003"/> Punched cards were even used as legal documents, such as [[U.S. Government]] checks<ref name="Lubar_1993"/> and savings bonds.<ref name="IBM_2003"/>

During [[World War II]] punched card equipment was used by the Allies in some of their efforts to decrypt Axis communications. See, for example, [[Central Bureau]] in Australia. At [[Bletchley Park]] in England, "some 2 million punched cards a week were being produced, indicating the sheer scale of this part of the operation".<ref name="CnC"/> In Nazi Germany, punched cards were used for the censuses of various regions and other purposes<ref name="Luebke-Milton_1994"/><ref name="Black_2009"/> (see [[IBM and the Holocaust]]).
[[File:Keypunch operator 1950 census IBM 016.jpg|thumb|Clerk creating punch cards containing data from the [[1950 United States census]].]]
Punched card technology developed into a powerful tool for business data-processing. By 1950 punched cards had become ubiquitous in industry and government. "Do not fold, [[Spindle (stationery)|spindle]] or mutilate," a warning that appeared on some punched cards distributed as documents such as checks and utility bills to be returned for processing, became a motto for the post-[[World War II]] era.<ref name="Lubar_1992"/><!--- parts of this paragraph copied from [[History of computing hardware#801: punched card technology]] ---><ref name="WhatIs"/>

In 1956<ref name="JustDep_1996"/> IBM signed a [[consent decree]] requiring, amongst other things, that IBM would by 1962 have no more than one-half of the punched card manufacturing capacity in the United States. [[Thomas Watson Jr.|Tom Watson Jr.'s]] decision to sign this decree, where IBM saw the punched card provisions as the most significant point, completed the transfer of power to him from [[Thomas J. Watson|Thomas Watson Sr]].<ref name="Belden_1962"/>

The Univac [[UNITYPER]] introduced magnetic tape for data entry in the 1950s. During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for [[computer storage|data storage]] by [[magnetic tape data storage|magnetic tape]], as better, more capable computers became available. [[Mohawk Data Sciences]] introduced a magnetic tape encoder in 1965, a system marketed as a keypunch replacement which was somewhat successful. Punched cards were still commonly used for entering both data and computer programs <!-- "programming" is the act, "program" is the physical object punched in the cards-->until the mid-1980s when the combination of lower cost [[disk drive|magnetic disk storage]], and affordable [[computer terminal|interactive terminals]] on less expensive [[minicomputer]]s made punched cards obsolete for these roles as well.<ref name="Aspray_1990"/>{{rp|page=151}} However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards, the [[IBM 3270]] for example, displayed 80 [[Characters per line|columns of text]] in [[text mode]], for compatibility with existing software. Some programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although fewer and fewer do as newer systems employ [[graphical user interface]]s with variable-width type fonts.