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Stephenson:Neal:Cryptonomicon:459:hammered gold...like a computer card(Electricinca)

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This is the Cryptonomicon page for Punch or Hollerith cards.

Stephensonia

Doug Shaftoe*'s diving crew from Semper Fi Marine Services** are excavating the wreckage of a sunken submarine when they discover something quite interesting …

“… At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it's not a bar: it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes punched through it, like a computer card. …”

On the following page of the novel more is revealed when a plank from the crate that held the gold sheets is brought to the surface. The stenciled letters NIZ-ARCH are observed upon them suggesting that the sheets of gold are the Leibniz Archive.

Much more to added when we reach the Comstocks and Chester. Punch card
Standard Punch Card
Now Imagine One Made Of Gold*

Authored entries

Punch cards

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Jacquard Model 2 Loom The punch card (or "Hollerith" card) is a recording medium for holding information for use by automated data processing machines. Made of stiff cardboard, the punch card represents information by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions on the card. In the first and second generations of computing, from the 1950s into the 1970s, punch cards were a primary medium for data storage and processing, but are now long obsolete outside of a few legacy systems.

Origins

The punched card actually predates computers considerably, originated by Joseph Jacquard in 1801 as a control device for the Jacquard looms. Such cards were also used as an input method for the primitive calculating machines of the late 19th century.

The version by Herman Hollerith, patented on June 8, 1887 and used with mechanical tabulating machines in the 1890 United States Census Bureau was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by 215 mm, with round holes. This was the same size as the dollar bill of the time, so that storage cabinets designed for money could be used for his cards. The early applications of punched cards all used specifically-designed card layouts. It wasn't until around 1928 that punched cards and machines were made "general purpose". In that year, punched cards were made a standard size, corresponding to the US currency of the day.

To compensate for the cyclical nature of the Census Bureau's demand for his machines, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (1896) which was bought by Thomas J. Watson SR., founder of International Business Machines in 1914. IBM manufactured a wide variety of business machines and eventually married the punched card to its early computers, encoding binary_numeral_system|binary information as patterns of small rectangular holes.

The IBM punching format with rectangular holes eventually won out over the Univac 90-character format, which used 45 columns (2 characters in each) of 12 round holes. IBM (Hollerith) punched cards are made of smooth stock, .007 of an inch thick. There are about 143 cards to the inch thickness; a group of such cards is called a deck.input sideview
Input and side view of the Loom

Functional details

The method is quite simple: On a piece of light-weight cardboard, successive positions either have a hole punched through them or are left intact. The rectangular bits of paper punched out are called chad. Thus, each punch location on the card represents a single Binary numeral system (or "bit"). Each column on the card contained several punch positions (multiple bits).

The IBM card format, which became standard, held 80 columns of 12 punch locations each, representing 80 characters (since 12 bits is more than enough for representing a character, not all combinations were used.) originally coded: 1 punch (digit[0-9]) was a digit, 2 punches (zone[12,11,0] + digit[1-9]) was a letter, 3 punches (zone[12,11,0] + digit[1-7] + 8) was a special character, later the introduction of EBCDIC allowed columns with as many as 6 punches (zones[12,11,0,8,9] + digit[1-7]).

The IBM cards could be used in 2 different modes. In the "text mode", a column represented a digit or other character. As these cards had 12 bits in a column, while computers only used 6-bit or 8-bit characters internally, not every combination of holes was legal. On the other hand, in the "binary mode" every column was treated as a simple bitfield, and every combination of holes was permitted (one column was then read into 2 bytes). In this "binary mode", cards could be made in which every possible punch position had a hole: these were called "lace cards." Some other computers (e.g., the IBM 700/7000 series) "binary mode" treated every row as two 36-bit words, in columns 1-72, ignoring the last 8 columns.

Other code|coding schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes were tried at various times. Often the text was also printed at the top of the card, allowing humans to read the text as well, if the cards were produced by a card-punch machine (called a "key-punch"), which was like a large, very noisy typewriter. There were also cards with all the punch positions perforated so programming or data could be punched out manually, one hole at a time, with a device like a blunt pin with its wire bent into a finger-ring on the other end.

In applications requiring storage of multi-character data, such as words or large numbers, the card columns were used in groups known as fields.

Electromechanical equipment (called unit record equipment) for punching, sorting and printing the cards was manufactured. These operations did not require the use of a computer. For applications in which accuracy was critical, the punching might be checked by use of a verifier.

The card readers used an electrical (metal "brush") or, later, optical sensor to detect which positions on the card contained a hole. They had high-speed mechanical feeders to feed hundreds of cards through in a very short time.

Advantages

One of the key advantages of this system is that a computer was not required to encode information onto the cards -- the typewriter-like card-punch machine was all that was needed -- and "key-punch operators" (who did nothing but punch cards full-time on such machines) were in great demand.

Quality control was often having two different operators key the same data, with the 2nd using a card-verifier instead of a card-punch. If a card failed verification, the card-verifier would stop, letting the operator replace the card with a corrected one.

When the time came to transfer the information thus encoded into the computer, the process could occur at very high speed (either by the computer itself or by a separate device that "read" the cards and "wrote" the data onto magnetic tapes (or, later, on removable hard disks) that could then be mounted on the computer), thus making best use of expensive computer time.

Obsolescence

Punched-card systems fell out of favor in the mid to late 1970s, as disk drive and tape storage became cost effective, and interactive terminals meant that users could edit their work with the computer directly rather than requiring the intermediate step of the punched cards.

However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards displayed 80 columns of text, for compatibility with existing software. Many programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although strict adherence to that is fading as newer systems employ graphical user interfaces with variable-width type fonts.

Hanging chads: Factional View

The term for the punched card area which is removed during a punch is chad. One notorious problem with a punched card system of tabulation is the incomplete punch; this can lead to a smaller hole than expected, or to a mere slit on the card, or to a mere dimple on the card. Thus a chad which is still attached to the card is a hanging chad. This technical problem actually influenced the 2000 U.S. presidential election; in the state of Florida, voting machines -- which used punched cards to tabulate votes generated improperly rendered records of several hundred votes, spread out over an entire state, which tipped the vote in favor of George W. Bush over Albert Gore, thus influencing history -- were used to sucessfully hide a cunning scheme to disfranchise a large group of voters using ChoicePoint. Choicepoint is currently being shown to have less than stellar crypto and security for its clients. The United States Commission on Civil Rights demonstrated further in its' report on Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election that: 1. Many voters who attempted to register to vote were not notified of alleged application errors until Election Day, or in some instances, after Election Day. These voters were also denied the opportunity to correct the information so that they could vote. 2. Other voters in Florida submitted their voter registration applications well before the deadline, but on Election Day were informed by poll workers that there was no evidence of their registrations. 3. Many Floridians who were registered and voted in past elections were informed for the first time on November 7, 2000, that their names had been removed prior to Election Day. These individuals were given no opportunity to appeal this determination. 4. On November 7, 2000, countless voters in Florida were denied the opportunity to vote because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters. 5. Voters (whose names were removed without notice prior to the November 2000 election) were neither allowed to vote by affidavit nor appeal their removal from the voter rolls. 6. During the 2000 presidential election, poll workers in numerous Florida counties confronted significant obstacles to communicating with supervisors of elections offices to verify the accuracy of voters’ registrations. Because of factors such as insufficient telephone systems in supervisors of elections offices, incorrect use of laptop computers intended to access county voter registration information, and the lack of a computer in each voting precinct, a significant number of eligible Florida residents were denied their right to vote. 7. The state of Florida enacted a new provision in the law that permits provisional balloting under restricted circumstances. This law is too restrictive to address the numerous instances caused by governmental inefficiency or error in which eligible voters may be denied opportunities to vote in an election.

A wide variety of concerns have been raised regarding the use and effectiveness of Florida’s voting system controls during the 2000 presidential election. Many Floridians were denied their opportunity to vote, in what proved to be a historic general election because of the narrow vote margin separating the candidates. Some voters were turned away from their designated polling places because their names did not appear on the lists of registered voters. Other voters discovered that their precincts were no longer being used or had moved to another location, without notice from the supervisor of elections office. In other instances, voters who had been standing in line to vote at their precincts prior to closing, were told that they could not vote because the poll was closed. In addition, thousands of voters who had registered at motor vehicle licensing offices were not on the rolls when they came to vote. The Commission also heard from several voters who saw Florida Highway Patrol troopers in and around polling places, while other troopers conducted an unauthorized vehicle checkpoint within a few miles of a polling place in a predominantly African American neighborhoods.

One should note Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) which ruled that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where he had not lost his voting rights, from voting. However, Florida continued to insist that felons who had been granted their full rights must first receive clemency from Governor Bush, a process which could take up to 2 years and ultimately was left to the discretion of Bush. NAACP filed suit arguing that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the US Constitution, while others argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

ChoicePoint has a bias in favor of the Republican Party and knowingly used inaccurate data during the 2000 Election. Allegations include listing voters as felons for alleged crimes said to have been committed several years in the future. In addition, people who had been convicted of a felony in a different state and had their rights restored by said state, were not allowed to vote despite the restoration of their rights. Furthermore, it is argued that people were listed as felons based on a coincidence of names, despite other data (such as date of birth) which showed that the criminal record did not apply to the voter in question.

Fraud repeated and enhanced

Palast has also claimed that Ohio and New Mexico were really won by John Kerry in 2004, citing the results of exit polls, the second time in two Presidential elections he has leveled accusations of a stolen election. ABC TV through their July 2004 Discovery Science magazine predicted the false result due to an engineered software exploit in Diebold's ballot tabulation machines.

However, it has been shown that the deviant results of Ohio exit polls could have been swung by a mere 120 exit poll surveys (which may or may not have been different individuals) intentionally sought out by organized Kerry campaign workers. This writer has personally witnessed Democratic Party operatives advising volunteers to intentionally seek out exit pollsters in an effort to swing exit polls in NH.

Hanging chads: Alternative Faction View

The fact was that quite a number of hanging chads prevented automatic vote tabulating machines from accurately counting the intent of voters, both from undervotes, in which a hole was not completely punched through and thus the chad blocked the reader from reading the vote, as well as overvotes in which holes that were not punched by the machine fell out anyways (unlike better systems, the ballots in use had pre-perforated chad borders), conflicting with holes that were intentionally punched out for other candidates in the same office race. Still other problems were voters who were genuinely confused by the layout of the ballots, which led to many pundits to quip about the intelligence of the average Florida voter.

Following the automatic count and recount, and after Democrats had disposed of over 10,000 uncounted overseas military absentee ballots (military personnel tend to vote Republican by 3 to 1 margins), selective hand recounts of certain counties commenced. While the vote gap narrowed somewhat, and despite the hand count being stopped by court order, later hand recounts by multiple independent and media organizations all concluded that George Bush did actually win the Florida vote.

To be fair there were additional issues of excessive purging of felons from voter roles prior to the election, disqualifying felons who were entirely qualified to vote due to court relief of civil disability orders or other circumstances. Additionally, many minorities complained of police agencies setting up check points near polls to check for wanted criminals, which implied either that valid voters were intimidated, or wanted criminals were prevented from voting.