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SciTech Daily Review

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Black Hole

Computing with Cards

By Alex Heatley

When I started playing with computers, you punched your programs on rectangular cards. The computer would read the cards, work out what the holes meant and then run your program.

Those card decks had some real problems.

Firstly, they were bulky. A 200-line program required 200 cards in a stack around two centimetres thick. Secondly, they were unwieldly. Drop them and you had the long, painstaking task of re-sorting them.

But barring silverfish, damp and other hazards of paper-based storage, the decks were very robust. What's more, with a bit of practice you could read them yourself.

Fortunately for me, cards were on the way out when I arrived on the computer scene. Card punches were being replaced with time-sharing terminals where you could type in your programs for filing deep in the bowels of the computer.

You couldn't drop this new form of storage. And it was immune to silverfish. But you couldn't take it away with you either, and now it was a lot easier to lose. One simple "delete" command and a 20,000-line program and six month's work could vanish in an instant.

Worse still, you were at the mercy of the computer centre, whose machine might crash, losing your files in an electronic limbo.

Then personal computers appeared with their floppy disks. You were master of your program storage once more.

But it still wasn't the same as punched card decks. Sure, you could fit a lot more lines of a program onto a floppy disk -- the equivalent of 4,500 cards. But you could still erase that program with a single ill-chosen command. Moreover, it's a lot easier to lose a floppy disk (I left one on a bus once). Losing a foot-high stack of cards is a bit more difficult.

Then the floppy disks started getting smaller. A standard 720 kB, 3.5-inch disk can store 200 pages of text, the same as 9,200 cards.

Now if a disk goes bad, you can lose half that best-selling novel or the results of a year's research.

But the problems don't end there. I have a 40 MB hard disk, 5.25 inches in size, which can hold the equivalent of 12,500 pages or 50,000 cards. I'm thinking about saving for an optical disk drive (200,000 pages or 750,000 cards).

So what has progress wrought? I can now store vast amounts of information on small disks that I can easily lose, put through the wash, have X-rayed by airport security or wiped by the demagnetiser at the local library.

And I can't read a damned thing on them without thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment.

Somehow I'm not sure if I've gained anything...

Alex Heatley works in computing and yearns for the smell of hot cards floating in the breeze.