Punched Card - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

While punched cards have not been widely used for a generation, the impact was so great for most of the 20th century that they still appear from time to time in popular culture. For example:

• Artist and architect Maya Lin in 2004 designed a controversial public art installation at Ohio University, titled "Input", that looks like a punched card from the air.
• Do Not Fold, Bend, Spindle or Mutilate: Computer Punch Card Art – a mail art exhibit by the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
• The Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has artistic representations of punched cards decorating its exterior walls.
• At the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the exterior windows of the Engineering Research Building were modeled after a punched card layout, during its construction in 1966.
• At the University of North Dakota, the exterior of Gamble Hall, College of Business and Public Administration has a punch card spelling out "The University of North Dakota."
• In the Simpsons episode Much Apu About Nothing, Apu showed Bart his Ph.D. thesis, the world's first computer tic-tac-toe game, stored in a box full of punched cards.
• In the Futurama episode Mother's Day, as several robots are seen shouting 'Hey hey! Hey ho! 100110!' in protest, one of them burns a punch-card in a manner reminiscent of draft-card burning. In another episode, Put Your Head on My Shoulders, Bender offers a dating service. He hands characters punch-cards so they can put in what they want, before throwing them in his chest cabinet and 'calculating' the 'match' for the person. Bender is shown both 'folding', 'bending', and 'mutilating' the card, accentuating the fact that he is making up the 'calculations'.
• In the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement punched cards became a

metaphor... symbol of the 'system' — first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally ... a symbol of alienation ... Punched cards were the symbol of information machines, and so they became the symbolic point of attack. Punched cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity. .... A student might feel 'he is one of out of 27,500 IBM cards' ... The president of the Undergraduate Association criticized the University as 'a machine ... IBM pattern of education.'... Robert Blaumer explicated the symbolism: he referred to the 'sense of impersonality... symbolized by the IBM technology.'... ––Steven Lubar

• A legacy of the 80 column punched card format is that a display of 80 characters per row was a common choice in the design of character-based terminals. As of November 2011 some character interface defaults, such as the command prompt window's width in Microsoft Windows, remain set at 80 columns and some file formats, such as FITS, still use 80-character card images.