Punch Card Chaos
The punch cards that served as the primary mode of interface with early mainframe computers, delivering instructions to the computer and providing a means for data input and output, were widely associated with institutional mechanisms for tracking and controlling the actions of individuals in a technologized society. A Hollerith machine, a predecessor of IBM, is prominently featured near the entrance of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, a monument to the efficiency with which punch cards allowed the Nazis to implement the final solution. Punch cards and early computational systems are likewise associated with America's prosecution of the Vietnam War through "draft cards" the public destruction of which became a staple of antiwar protests throughout the 1960s. According to Lisa Gitelman (2008, 93), "Many people–on the left at least–simply stopped drawing distinctions between one card-enabled system and another. Whether the cards registered draftees or pupils, they helped 'the system.'"
The depiction of punch cards in cinematic and televisual portrayals of mainframe computers is strikingly diverse throughout the 1960s. While voice interfaces dominate the portrayal of human computer interactions in science fiction genres, punch cards are widely depicted as offering the key to operating computers in the workplace in such plausible contexts as the accounting and insurance industries as well as military and law enforcement applications. Punch cards also occasionally serve as a plausibly deployed input mechanism–in unnecessarily detailed sequences of The Billion Dollar Brain, The Doll Squad and The Fat Spy, for example–but they are more frequently used as a means of output by the computer, resulting in a common trope of cards being read by humans using natural language like telegrams received from a mechanical brain. At times, punch cards simply serve as a fetish technology, instructing audiences as to the operation of complex computer systems. However, when they appear in comedy genres such as those seen above, an explosion of punch cards serves as the sine qua non of computer failure.
The depiction of punch cards in cinematic and televisual portrayals of mainframe computers is strikingly diverse throughout the 1960s. While voice interfaces dominate the portrayal of human computer interactions in science fiction genres, punch cards are widely depicted as offering the key to operating computers in the workplace in such plausible contexts as the accounting and insurance industries as well as military and law enforcement applications. Punch cards also occasionally serve as a plausibly deployed input mechanism–in unnecessarily detailed sequences of The Billion Dollar Brain, The Doll Squad and The Fat Spy, for example–but they are more frequently used as a means of output by the computer, resulting in a common trope of cards being read by humans using natural language like telegrams received from a mechanical brain. At times, punch cards simply serve as a fetish technology, instructing audiences as to the operation of complex computer systems. However, when they appear in comedy genres such as those seen above, an explosion of punch cards serves as the sine qua non of computer failure.
| Previous page on path | Introduction, page 4 of 5 | Next page on path |
Discussion of "Punch Card Chaos"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...