4 thoughts on “Photo: Generations”

1. Where did that old computer card come from? It looks like something that could be cut up and used as a laser-alignment card.

   Kevin
   LANL

   1. They came from The Black Hole in Los Alamos– I got several big boxes of "new" unused cards there a few years ago. Boxes of them were piled up to the ceiling, against the back wall, towards the left when you walk in the building. Go get some. :)

      —
      Windell H. Oskay
      drwho(at)evilmadscientist.com
      http://www.evilmadscientist.com/

2. I dunno. Not directly comparable. The punch card (*I* have four different colors, none of which is beige!) is just data storage (80 bytes), while the AVR is a whole computer. How about a picture of a card with a 8GB micro-SDh flash card on top? A sweet 100,000,000:1 capacity ratio (not counting the difference in physical size.)

   1. (Sigh.) Some of us are old enough to have used Hollarith cards when nobody bothered to color them, which was when they ONLY came in beige. IBM 029 or 026 punch machines were used to put the square holes in them. Unless you were hard-core, and used the manual punch. And dropping a deck of cards was a Disaster, unless you had put sequence numbers in columns 73-80; then you could use the card sorter to put them back in order. (Yes, all this stuff was real.)

      BTW, the ATMEGA168-20PU chip shown on top of the Hollarith card is a single-chip processor that easily has hundreds of times as much built-in memory as the Hollarith card.

      These days, they should have put a 16 GB USB drive on top of the card.

Comments are closed.