A lace card is a punched card with all holes punched (also called a whoopee card, ventilator card, flyswatter card, or IBM doily). They were mainly used as practical jokes to cause unwanted disruption in card readers. Card readers tended to jam when a lace card was inserted, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce cards with all holes punched, owing to power-supply problems. When a lace card was fed through the reader, a card knife or card saw (a flat tool used with punched card readers and card punches) was needed to clear the jam.
Another, possibly more significant use of lace cards was to test (or sabotage) computer programs with little or no data validation.
More modern equivalents include the black fax and computer-based denial of service attacks.
Famous quotes containing the words lace and/or card:
“Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of coloured hair, écru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I must save this government if possible. What I cannot do, of course I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)