Punch Card

Punchcards got their start in the 1800s with industrial control applications and quickly spread to the time clock and other data gathering operations. They lasted through the 1970s, a potent sign of the formalization of data that computers required. My parents learned programming on punchcards not too long ago. As the cost of keyboards and TV screens for monitors came down, the punch card faded away, remaining only as the number 2 pencil-dot on the SAT test. Computers left paper behind and became instruments of free-floating data that needed no physical reminder of its presence. A terminal glow.