In those olden days before IBM invented the hard drive, data was stored on punch cards. I did a term paper in college using punch cards to sort my database.

Vanderleun remembers those days.

Speak, memory! The brilliant and always fascinating Kevin Kelly @ The Technium today brings up a long-lost method of making a data base:

Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once. In computer science terms, you could do a “logical OR” operation. This ability of the system to sort and link prompted Douglas Engelbart in 1962 to suggest these cards could impliement part of the Memex vision of hypertext.

The subject ignited a long-lost memory in me from my days as a student at the University of California at Berkeley.

While it may be faintly amusing, I think it also holds a lesson for our increasing dependance on statistics — especially in this election year of a poll a minute. It’s about a job I had and about being in on the ground floor of the acronym GIGO (Garbage In. Garbage Out).

Edge-notched cards. Oh, my sweet lord, that brings back the remaining specks of a mostly obliterated memory.Sometime in the summer of 1966 in Berkeley I was part of a group of “students” hired to punch the codes into a mountain of cards that recorded the data from some obscure study. The study in question was was the life’s work of a couple of academics at the University.

Read it all.