Irreal

It’s likely that very few Irreal readers have ever used punch cards or maybe even know what they are. Nevertheless, they were once the mainstay of the computer industry. Indeed, IBM started out as a company that made punch-card-tabulating machines for the U.S. Census. If you’re really an oldtimer, you may even have called them Hollerith cards, named for the man who invented them and got the whole thing rolling.

In those days, there were no terminals or other interactive access to computers. Everything was batch and the way you input things—programs or data—was through punch cards. The last few columns of the card were theoretically reserved for sequence numbers but nobody ever used them for that. That led to many exciting experiences when a card deck containing your program or data was dropped and scattered on the floor.

Caleb Scharf over at Slate has an interesting article on punch cards and their role in our industry’s history. It’s based on his book The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life’s Unending Algorithm. The article doesn’t quite capture what it was like dealing with the cards and their periphery, such as key punches and card readers, but it does have lots of interesting details about the cards and their influence.

Scharf presses a connection between punch cards and biological processes that I find a little strained but the article is still interesting and worth a read if you’re interested in retrocomputing. It’s also worth a read if only to discover how easy we have it today. Believe me, a crashed disk or corrupted file system are way less common than a dropped card deck. And did I mention card readers regularly shredding cards? That gave rise to the universal sobriquet “card eater.”

Everything you read about tech these days is more or less a screed on the evils of the technology community. The smugly ignorant journalists of the tech press, most of whom wouldn’t know code from a cod, float every conceivable bit of nonsense and conspiracy theory all with the message that tech is evil and something should be done about it. The pandering ignoramuses in Congress are only too happy to comply.

It was a pleasure and relief, therefore, to read Marc Andreessen’s post Technology Saves the World. The TL;DR is the technology saved us from what—only a few years ago—would have been a five year wait for a COVID-19 vaccine and a probable reprise of the great depression.

While the astounding and speedy success of the vaccine program is probably technology’s greatest triumph, there were plenty of others. Among knowledge workers there was virtually no down time. That, of course, was made possible by the work-from-home technology that while nascent was already underway. Andreessen says that he talked to hundreds of CEOs and they were uniformly surprised at how well remote work worked from the very beginning.

Even nominally customer-facing workers were able to pivot to online ordering and delivery. Hence we could order groceries, meals, or whatever else we needed and have it delivered to our door. This worked remarkably well even though many small businesses bore the brunt of the lockdown.

The press, of course, responded to this by complaining that tech companies such as Amazon and Apple were making huge amounts of money. I remember in the middle of the crisis the Wall Street Journal was complaining about Amazon and some one asked who you’d rather have in the midst of COVID-19: the Wall Street Journal or Amazon. The question answers itself.

If, like me, you’re weary of the negative drumbeat from the tech press, take a look at Andreessen’s post. It will be a welcome respite.