From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jul 05 2002 - 21:20:03 MDT
At 07:47 AM 7/5/02 -0500, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
>>It's not an ancient joke, it's a famous sf short-short story by Fredric
>>Brown (`Answer', 1954), so it might well have preceded routine use of
>>Hollerith cards.
>Hollerith cards were first used by the 1890
>US Census, http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/hollerith/
Yes, but obviously not in computers (which the earlier `ancient joke' post
was talking about).
http://www.maxmon.com/punch1.htm, say, sez
>the 80 column card shown above overwhelmingly
>dominated the punched card market from around
>the 1950s onward.
I used the damned things when I was doing a programming diploma in 1975,
but I don't know exactly when in the fifties they first went into use in
computers.
Damien Broderick
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