The 1890 US Census and the history of punchcard computing [feat. Grant of 3blue1brown fame]

[@feronanthus9756]

"Ben Eater has a computing channel" is the understatement of the year.

[@405Chancellor]

Oh sure, like there’s *any* chance this channel has crossover with train ticket enthusiasts...

[@alsorew]

They will never do that!… in the past…

[@hamkahasnim670]

@@alsorew yeah and thanks for the reminder kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZK0aWpqZdl6nZY

[@jinjunliu2401]

@@hamkahasnim670 Ew stop this stuff

[@MatthewSchoepf]

I’m a train ticket enthusiast

[@alsorew]

@@hamkahasnim670 What? I was talking about this colaboration with “train ticket enthusiasts” kzbin.info/www/bejne/iYG0g4GjjbuDbtU

[@cristumang3575]

So happy that Matt Parker remembered James Grime when he saw the Little Professor

[@eumesmoeu295]

I'll give my friends a bunch of abacus stones... it's the little things that count

[@Sityu1991]

This hurt. Good one!

[@angelicajones6612]

Hahaha I'm changing my Christmas' gifts shopping list XD

[@CaptainSpock1701]

This comment deserves more likes! Love it!

[@javajini]

Actually, the giant slide rule was used to teach students how to use it. The teacher would stand at the front of the class and do operations on the big slide rule while the students tried the same operation on their regular sized slide rule. They were still teaching how to use the slide rule that way when I was in high school (1969-1973). Thanks for the video!

[@jon8304]

11:50 As an undergraduate I had the opportunity to operate my university's mechanical differential analyzers. They are the only publically accessible, fully functional differential analyzers in the US (or at least they were when I was there). Very cool machine and beautifully elegant designs from a mathematical and engineering perspective.

[@RegebroRepairs]

My favourite example of standards persistence involves punch cards. See, in 1920 the not yet IBM company standardized all their punch cards (since the mergers presumably they had many different sizes). And the size they chose? Well, it was the size of standard US currency at the time, which in turn probably was dictated by the the paper making tools. In 1929, the currency got smaller, but punchcards remained the same. And then, much later, airlines wanted systems to print airline tickets and boarding passes automatically? Who did they ask? IBM naturally. Were IBM going to design new printers and mechanics? Of course not, they used the stuff they already had for punched cards. So airline tickets and boarding passes were the size of punched cards. So today, when you go to an automated check-in box at the airport and it prints out your boarding pass, that's the same size that US currency was standardized to in 1869. That standard has lasted for 150 years, and over three different usages.

[@nooneinparticular3370]

That's insane!

[@shruggzdastr8-facedclown]

The path of least resistance, in other words

[@hlraeth613]

When you're so into these sciences and maths that you become so happy when your favorite youtubers collab or crossovers.

[@hamiltonianpathondodecahed5236]

That abacus was there to check if the calculations of the calculator were correct

[@1996Pinocchio]

_mind blown_

[@kaitlyn__L]

Some Japanese businessmen taught the old fashioned way are still faster with an Abacus than typing in numbers and hitting enter, presumably Sharp wanted to cover both bases - perhaps it belonged to the desk than the person.

[@peterdegelaen]

Oh, oh, oh. When I started my professional career in IT in 1981, we still had that very same card sorter in the data center. It was one of the oldest machines we had but it still did its job. We also had an IBM 2560 MFCM (Multi Function Card Machine): two card input hoppers and 5 card output bins; the two input hoppers made it possible to merge two card decks. We also had a decollator (if anyone still knows what that is?). That one was used to separate the printed listings and the carbon between the different copies. I mention it because it was also old. In the early nineties, I visited a similar museum in Boston, but I think that does not exist anymore. The funny thing is that in that museum, I found an old disk drive (IBM 3340) that came from our data center (in Belgium). The removable disk pack still had the label of our company on it. I read and wrote data from and to that very same disk pack!!!

[@meraxion]

Last semester, I worked on a project using population data from the US censuses 1850-2010, and seeing this "behind the scenes" video is definitely making me appreciate more the effort that went into creating the pdfs I was reading from.

[@flymypg]

Yes! I did my first programming while in high school in 1972 using FORTRAN IV on an old school district IBM 1401 that had been "retired in place", as it would have cost IBM more to remove it than it was worth. We used punched cards, and I still have one of my program decks. We also had the upgraded control console that had a Selectric typewriter built into it, and a panel of blinkenlights where one could actually watch a program operating, and with experience could do simple debugging just by observing the panel. The 1401 was an unusual beast formed from a combination of technologies, the main goal being to get away from using vacuum tubes ("valves" to those in the UK). Transistor circuits were used for logic, but were too expensive to use for memory. Even magnetic core was too expensive, as the 1401 was intended to be an "entry level" machine for its day. So a rotating magnetic drum was used as semi-permanent storage. Programs wrote temporary or intermediate values on the drum, and the were crafted to be perfectly timed to read that particular value back just when the drum had rotated around for it to be under the read heads. Well, the compiler did that: We didn't have to cope with it unless we had too many variables in our program. At the time, I thought it was a marvel that it worked at all, much less with so much reliability that it was still running flawlessly after years without any maintenance. That experience guided the path of my life, leading me to get one of the first undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering, and a sequence of wonderful jobs I've thoroughly enjoyed. I doubt I'll ever retire, at least not willingly: I'm having way too much fun! Edit: Typos.

[@descuddlebat]

When you close your eyes, you can see Matt talk to a pi creature

[@1vader]

There is a channel called CuriousMarc that is all about these old computers and calculators and he has a few videos about the exact IBM computer from the video where they do some real calculations and explain them in a lot more detail together with the people that restored them.

[@cojawfee]

I think he works at the computing history museum. I guess he wasn't there that day.

[@damientonkin]

I think he volunteers there, he works at an electronics company called samtec. I found his videos on the Apollo Guidance Computer fascinating.

[@JeremyNasmith]

I was hoping Marc would pop up! ( Nice to see Ben Eater though: he works with Grant on his livestream currently, and his breadboard computer series is awesome.) I recognize one of the old chaps in the red shirt from some of Curious Marc's 1401 vids. Love to see good channels cross-over.

[@damientonkin]

I just stumbled across a video that mentions where he works and the computer history museum. kzbin.info/www/bejne/n6SUk2mjpt-rfKM

[@keios]

The abacus with a built in calculator is almost certainly from Japan, where for Reasons you'll often find purchases are added up by calculator, then your tax will be calculated by abacus. Or maybe the other way round, it's been a long time since I was last in Japan. I genuinely have no idea why, I just assume it's The Way Things Are Done and companies produce things to facilitate that.

[@josuelservin]

They are indeed from Japan, and apparently people didn't trust this new fangled gadgets so they include the abacus so they could double check the calculation.

[@PopeLando]

I own one, one of my favourite pieces of vintage technology. A Sharp lcd calculator in a special plastic casing which incorporates a "soroban", or Japanese abacus. Beautiful.

[@dglthrawn1]

It is from Japan. The abacus part is a soroban. The side with the single bead represents 5's and the other side represents 1's and you just add up all the beads that are pushed to the middle. www.tofugu.com/japan/japanese-math/ Experienced users of soroban can play word games or have conversations while doing mental arithmetic.

[@tombackhouse9121]

I would guess if you were familiar with abacus, and got an electronic calculator, you might under certain circumstances find it more convenient to do multiplication and division on the calculator while keeping running totals on an abacus. With quick fingers long strings of additions should be very fast, while long division is probably still more of a chore even if you're familiar with doing the computation. I'm a rank amateur on abacus though.

[@jinjunliu2401]

@@hamkahasnim670 stfu

[@nymalous3428]

When I was a young boy, my dad worked for IBM. They still used punch-cards then, in fact, I think he still has some. ... I'm old. 18:50 That machine was used for twenty years and is still working today?! Man, they built them to last back then...

[@kaitlyn__L]

they built them to last because IBM didn't sell machines, they leased them and also had exclusive service contracts. making them to last saves you money in that situation. when it's an outright sale and you don't get maintenance duties, building them as cheaply as possible saves money instead. this also allowed IBM to basically forcibly upgrade you as part of your service contract, though their machines were all backwards compatible for the software, so you kept all your existing tapes and stuff. in fact IBM mainframes can still decode EBCDIC as well as ASCII and emulate the 1401 today. after IBM was done with them, which wasn't literally as soon as the next machine was out, but about 10-20 years, IBM would sell them to competing "little guys" in computing, who also did all of the maintenance and sometimes operated on a lease model, sometimes outright sold them, but at a much lower rate than IBM, for smaller businesses who didn't need quite as much oomph and would accept slower additions (payroll small enough etc), which the country club fits perfectly. presumably the club outright owned it and ran it into the ground, only replacing it with a PC when it finally died and they couldn't source the spare parts - which are almost all socketed and easy for the IBM repair man to replace quickly.

[@NoahTopper]

I'm surprised Eater didn't go around fixing all those cables.

[@GibusWearingMann]

Maybe that's what he was doing before he visited the IBM 1401

[@Roxor128]

Bad idea. Those messes of cables could likely have been the program for that computer. If that was an analogue computer, it would have been "programmed" by plugging in wires to a whole bunch of sockets.

[@arfyness]

@@Roxor128 Oh, but Ben would ensure all the connections were correct AND route all the wires in a most surpassingly satisfying arrangement.

[@hlraeth613]

I just saw Ben Eater from the latest vid of Destin in SmarterEveryDay. I don't know but I feel so happy when I see them collaborating with each other.

[@storminmormin14]

The 1890 census is a sore spot for me. I’m an amateur genealogist. Tons of people’s families got their start in the US around that time. Also the majority of that census got burned up in a fire so we don’t actually have it.

[@marsgal42]

I did first year computer science in 1978 on punched cards. A few years ago I went to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and saw an exhibition of techie stuff, including an Apple 1, an Alto and an Enigma. As part of a different display I got talking to one of the staff who showed me jacquard loom punched cards.

[@nemoyatpeace]

I've actually been in a shop here in Singapore where the owner had an abacus with a calculator on the side. Said the calculator was for the patrons who were suspicious of his abacus workings. (He was much faster with the abacus.)

[@12knights55]

Infinity war is the most ambitious crossover. Matt parker: hold my abacus

[@Karthik-lq4gn]

I first learnt about punch-card computing when I was 11 or 12. I was watching the movie The Polar Express and the conductor punched some train tickets and for NO apparent reason I searched punch-cards on Google because I liked the way the punches sounded.

[@janebaldino7681]

I was looking as your KZbin, and I realized how old I was, 74 yrs. I remember learning Engineering and I programed my engineering programs on a similar model of IBM computer. When you say things like I am not sure what this does, I feel older. Remember, your time will come!

[@FunkyHonkyCDXX]

I remember learning about this from the show Connections. Exact same machines and everything (and he was able to actually put his hands on it and show how it was used)

[@watkins1robert]

Dropping cards is one thing, but I had a large fanfold printout like you have there in the back seat. With the windows down in the summer. When the cross breeze finally grabbed it, all I could see in the rear view mirror was this cloud of green bar.

[@gliderfan6196]

My Mum used to work on computers for Polish Railway; Back in 1970's they still used punchcards and perforated paper tapes. I had some used cards and used tapes and also clean punchcards. And blank tickets as well. It was great to play with, and of the tapes we used to make paper stars for Christmas Trees. So punchcards + railway + computers = my personal memories

[@j1952d]

Like others who've already posted, I'm from the punched-card era. Was at uni in late 60's/early 70's. Had to submit batch jobs of cards (that we'd keyed ourselves) and pick up the printout next day (or day after, depending on time of term). When it came back with the error message, you'd have to find the missing comma (or whatever) in the FORTRAN (I did physics). put a new (corrected) card in the deck, and re-submit. Only another couple of days to wait for the print-out.

[@Ma-pz2fy]

All of the best CS/Mathematics KZbinrs combined in one place. I love it.

[@darkhawk155]

Aslo, BTW, here's Ben Eater for a few seconds... How do members of the YT math community just randomly find each other in the wild?

[@SonOfSofaman]

Ben and Grant have a common history at Khan Academy and co-hosted the Ben Ben and Blue podcast. Ben's presence was probably not accidental.

[@arantes6]

I think it's like the Avengers or something

[@tncorgi92]

We used punch cards in 1979 for my high school computer classes. Had sets for all my FORTRAN and assembly language programs. I can't remember the model numbers of our keypunch or collating machines but they were huge beasts.

[@RaymondHng]

IBM 029 or 129.

[@guymarentette2317]

The collator I operated in the mid 60's was an 088. It was "programmed" using a plug board which I used to know how to wire. There was also a cheaper, older and slower model called an 087.

[@TheOwlman]

At grammar school we had a giant slide rule that was used to demonstrate to the class (it was mounted on the wall with a swivelling bracket and was brought into action as required)... I never thought of them as being for extra precision, I am going to treat that remark as humour. For extra precision there were the super expensive cylindrical rules that used some sort of spiral scales... I only ever saw one at my dad's place on an open day, and that was sitting on a desk in the engineering design office, definitely a look but don't touch guided tour, especially for 7 year olds.

[@schroedingershat7912]

I believe 20" was a fairly common size. Not so much to get extra precision that was impossible on a 10" (given they're only 5x as long as a compact pocket one so you're not even getting a full digit), but to improve speed, comfort and reliability when you needed precision around the one part in a thousand mark.

[@yhnbgt365]

The large classroom sized ones were so the kid in the back row could see it too. No extra precision.

[@johnchestnut5340]

They had extra long ones that gave one more digit. Usually when more precision was needed tables were used. Not that kind of table. Marking up Mom's kitchen table was a no-no.

[@SimplyDudeFace]

My favorite part of punch card computing is the fact that the sort invented to work with punch cards -- the radix sort -- is still in use today.

[@VinTheFox]

I visited the Computer History Museum in 2018 and it was one of the biggest highlights of my trip to the bay area!! I wish I had had more time to see the whole museum. Gotta get back there some day.

[@jdennerlein]

Wow, I didn't think I'd ever see one of those ever again. My very first computing class back in 1982 made us write a program on punch cards as our very last project of the class. That was at Cornell back in 1982! I didn't even know what the machine was called but I recognized it when I saw it. Thanks Matt!

[@awabqureshi814]

I love how grant is doing more stuff recently

[@iainmackley]

Amazingly, I already knew about the tabulator! Thank you James Burke's Connections!

[@edgeeffect]

It's funny seeing you go into a room I've already seen in multiple Curious Marc videos.

[@__-cx6lg]

Awesome video!! One thing: at 7:42 when you're talking about whether it qualifies as a computer, Grant says "If they just had NAND..." He was referring to the fact that you can make any boolean circuit by chaining together NAND gates (something you _can't_ do with AND gates, which is what the machines actually had). But contrary to a mildly popular misconception, the ability to run any Boolean circuit is strictly _weaker_ than Turing completeness. Boolean circuits don't get you the ability to store and act on memory, or change states, or have unbounded inputs or anything like that. Here's a useful Venn diagram from Wikipedia: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Automata_theory.svg. The innermost circle, "Combinational logic", is everything you can do with Boolean logic gates. As you can see, it's a proper subset of computable functions (the outermost circle).

[@Nukearc]

While I agree with most of what you said, is it not possible to also create "sequential logic" using only NAND gates? This would allow the ability to store and alter state.

[@renedekker9806]

_"Boolean circuits don't get you the ability to store and act on memory, or change states"_ - Although I agree with you in general, this one is not strictly true. You can store on bit of information in a flip-flop built with two nand gates, for example. You can build a finite state machine with just NAND gates without (theoretical) problems.

[@qwertyTRiG]

Your joy is infectious!

[@stevefrandsen]

We processed Library check out cards in 1980. We placed a sub in the card reader hopper as they were shorter than 80 columns. These cards were put in a pocket in the back of a book you had checked out. We read them in each week to see who had returned books each week for the local library system. Fun job loading the reader and we did it twice to make sure we got all cards at least once. We drew 2 lines on the deck with a "Sharpie" when they were taken out of the discard harper and placed back in the trays from the library. Done on an IBM 3031 then a 3033 mainframe.

[@mrembeh1848]

After Grant entered his name incorrectly the card was called a Parker Punchcard :D

[@bbgun061]

Embeh A Sandersoln Punchcard?

[@briantaylor9266]

You guys make me feel OLD. I learned programming (Fortran) using punch cards. At the time it was state-of-the-art.

[@gordonrichardson2972]

Brian Taylor I had a flashback to 1980, last time I used punched cards exactly like that!?

[@johnbennett1465]

I did the same. It was in the summer of '78 before I went to college. At college I got to use the newfangled😉 text terminals attached to a VAX 780 (1MIPS, 4Meg RAM). As long as there were less than 30 other users, it was faster than modern apps for many things. There were no graphics, but a cheap PC is over 10,000 times as fast and has over 10,000 times more memory, all devoted to a single user. 😥

[@gordonrichardson2972]

John Bennett In 1982 I got to use Basic on a terminal. Sheer luxury...

[@dwmac2010]

Brian- I also learned Fortran on punch cards. 1971 sophomore in college. It was on an IBM 1130. I remember having big stacks of cards that I punched myself. Run the program / find the bugs / fix bugs /run program again. And don't ever drop the stack of cards! I still have a punchcard in my office that I kept for the memories. Best regards.

[@screw0dog]

I learnt Fortran on a VAX (something?) at Uni ... in 2000.

[@sundhaug92]

"Whatever that is". That is the Bandai Pippin, which is basically a 90s Macintosh made into a home console

[@johnchessant3012]

pre-gaming with this video before Grant's livestream on Euler's formula

[@PopeLando]

14:15 I love how the museum has an Apple 1, a pretty good museum piece. Oh no, actually it's signed by Woz, making it a priceless collectable!

[@benjaminlynch9958]

This reminds me of how Major League Baseball tabulated results of All-Star game starter as voted on by fans in all the stadiums in the league. They used preprinted punch cards handed out to fans who then voted for one player per position by punching out the hole for their chosen player. This system was used until 2015!!!

[@PaulPaulPaulson]

Wait, how is Ben Eater in EVERY video on EVERY channel? Did he invent a cloning machine? I bet he did. He definitely has the required skill to do so!

[@K-o-R]

New video: "Building a 6502-based cloning machine on breadboard"

[@risfutile]

where else did he drop by?

[@TheDeadlyTemplar]

@@risfutile Newest SmarterEveryDay vid.

[@Komagb]

This episode was HIGHLY pleasurable, thank you for the experience, I feel like I was there!

[@macronencer]

Excited to see this! I was born in 1965 and although I've never used punchcards in my software career (which started in 1989), I have used a keypunch in about 1977. It's an odd story involving bus journeys to a local institution of higher education, and me just strolling past the guards on the gate (they never stopped me) and straight into the machine room to play :) I remember the language I was using was called JEAN, and it had hierarchical line numbers (1, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.2.1 etc.). I also got to play with paper tape and teletypes. Such a fantastic, heady time in computing, and I sometimes long for it. I still have a teletype printout of my first BASIC programme: I've kept it all these years.

[@jonnyphenomenon]

Two of my favorite people in the whole world exploring my favorite museum in the world! I love it!

[@Zeuskabob1]

Jeez, two of my favorite mathematicians visiting the museum I volunteered at? Wish I was there! Glad you visited the IBM 1401! The docents working there are awesome, and it's a concern whether the museum will be able to continue maintaining the machine in the future. Lots of work goes into keeping it working, but young people don't learn how to maintain these old machines so it's a labor of love and potentially a ticking timer for this amazing machine.

[@JasonTHutchinson]

That diagonal stripe at the edge of the punchcard deck is a low tech way to keep them in order. A computer operator would sit in a room and manually load the programs in on a daily basis. It's pretty amazing how far things have come in the past few decades.

[@NiteLynr]

Well, that's just great. I've never had a desire to visit the states...until now. I /have/ to visit this museum. Thanks for another great video and yet more eye-opening journeys into our computing history.

[@bentoth9555]

It's not just House of Representatives related, the census is also used to help determine appropriations and how much federal money needs to go to each state.

[@frankyboy4409]

Ben Eater ... "a computer channel". Understatement of the year.

[@JB-nz6ew]

Oh wow, Ben Eater and you're visiting Curious Mark's place. It's like all my youtube subscriptions mashed together.

[@StopChangingUsernamesYouTube]

15:00 They even got the right tiles for that room. I'm floored by their attention to detail...much like those tiles.

[@allanrichardson9081]

If you don’t have a raised floor, you will be tripping on cables all the time.

[@tdchayes]

I'm loving this in more ways than one! First two of my favorite KZbinrs are here. Second, the Computer History Museum is one of my favorite places, and in fact my wife is a trustee of the museum! It's a great place!

[@johnmacdonald1094]

This is the kind of stuff that I started my professional career on. I worked for Burroughs, and everything was punch-card based. Many hours loading programs that way.

[@bluerizlagirl]

Anybody who has worked with electronics is likely to have heard of a circuit simulation program called SPICE. When this was originally written, input was in the form of punched cards, one per circuit component. Even nowadays, the text file describing a circuit is often referred to as a "deck".

[@discflame]

i think every math teacher I had in school from grade 1 to grade 12 had one of those massive slide rules in their classroom. A few used them to demonstrate a more visual representation of the numbers and how they were affected by different functions but clearly my very rural school district didn't have the funding for computer graphics on the level of 3b1b

[@guymarentette2317]

My first job was a machine operator in a unit record (card) installation at an insurance company. Every month we'd run thousands of cards through the 083 sorter, the 088 collator, the 514 reproducing punch, and then tabulate on either a 407 accounting machine or a 1401 computer, which only had a 1402 card reader/punch and a 1403 printer. A year later I got a job with a different company programming a 1440 computer. It had two disk drives, so, other than initial data entry on cards, all the sorting and merging was done on disk.

[@benjaminlevi4528]

There is another genuine Hollerith machine in the Conservatoire des Arts-et-Métiers in Paris. Hollerith came to the Paris World Fair in 1889 to show how it worked and the museum acquired it. It's not on display all the time but I saw it twice already: once in the museum storage facility, which you can visit on appointment, and once in a temporary exhibition last year.

[@sam08g16]

3:40 Grant: I'm looking at the sector Matt: the SECTAH

[@otakuribo]

Peeps from the UK and Australia hearing Grant's American accent: the SECKTUR

[@timotejbernat462]

Elliot Grey When commonwealth folks finally discover how to pronounce the letter R

[@indigo-lily]

@@timotejbernat462 Canadians pronounce all our R's, thank you very much

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@timotejbernat462 Scots and northern English folk actually have rhotic accents....

[@TheGreatPurpleFerret]

Yall should check out The History Guy's video on the 1890 census from last year.

[@TheBlueArcher]

Thank you for finally enabling closed captioning on your videos. Keep doing this. even if you don't have your script prepared in text. The computer learning auto subtitles is better than nothing.

[@sinom]

Even ben eater. That's 3 KZbinrs in 1 video!

[@outside8312]

Why is Grant such a God damn Disney prince

[@hamiltonianpathondodecahed5236]

I agree that's illegal (btw Matt also looks like a king)

[@awabqureshi814]

he is so cute i cant even

[@synonymous1079]

Mans got dimples grandmas the world over be tryna pinch.

[@Rialagma]

@Adam Filinovich that's attractive people in a nutshell

[@der.Schtefan]

I am shocked nobody talks about Ben Eater. Can we all acknowledge Ben Eater, please?

[@OhadLutzky]

This is a fantastic museum with incredible staff. They have Steve Russell demoing "Spacewar!"!

[@adrienehrsam7098]

I don't know much about train tickets, but I do know the Jacquard machine (which is a loom) is famous to be one of the first device using punched cards in an industrial manner.

[@KennethSorling]

Wow! Ben Eater! That guy can basically build computers from scratch. His stuff is wicked impressive.

[@HonkIfYouLoveBeer]

My wife brought me here for my birthday a few years back, it was honestly one of the coolest birthdays I've had

[@Barabyk]

4:33 - 1930's Felix - my grandfather had one, I spend my early childhood cranking the crap out of it...

[@ViliamF.]

12:28 There is the supercomputer Cray 1 Matt is talking about in 12:31. Note to Matt: Don't make fun of its design, it discovered two new Mersenne primes in 1979 and 1982.

[@mikeroberts6799]

I joined Taylor Woodrow in 1978 and part of my job was to report the test results of samples of concrete used on all their building sites (including Heysham and Hartlepools nuclear power stations) to the board. At first I and an assistant copied results from test certificates onto forms which we sent too the key punch room where 2 ladies (to catch the typos) operated the machines that punched the cards. I then sandwiched this months results cards between the cards that had the instructions for the input and output and sent them to the computer room. Next day I would get the cards back with a print out listing the number of tests on each site and the number of failed test results from which I prepared a properly typed report to sent to the monthly board meeting. When I left TW in 1984 I was using a PR1ME "mini" computer to do the whole job in a day, including typing the report. I wrote the necessary program in FORTRAN.

[@Joel-st5uw]

Matt Parker, Grant Sanderson and Ben Eater all standing in the 1401 lab where I first found @CuriousMarc. Four of my top-ten favorite youtubers 🤯

[@nssherlock4547]

I think the prelude to the punch card system used for "computing" came from England and was developed from weaving looms.There are still looms ,carpet and rug weavers running today that use the punch cards.

[@TassieLorenzo]

Yes! Programmable weaving looms! :)

[@RonGarrisonProductions]

Watching the keypunch machines brought back some horrible memories of my Fortran class at San Jose State. Most of the machines didn't work, and I hadn't taken typing in high school, so there were some long nights in the computer center. Several of those memories involve dropped decks of cards.

[@RaymondHng]

I was one of the few at City College of San Francisco where I did my COBOL class over my terminal and dial-up modem at home.

[@lowmipsdotcom7383]

Nice. 3 of my favorite YT personalities together. throw a curiousmarc in there next time, and you're golden!

[@jeffdege4786]

People managed a great deal of data processing, using Hollerith cards, mechanical sorters, collators, etc. The earliest commercially available computers were designed to plug into the Hollerith card data processing streams. Fred Brooks (of "The Mythical Man Month") and Ken Iverson (of APL) write a book in 1963 titled "Automatic Data Processing) that is well worth a read, if you're interested in these early days...

[@johnreagan2106]

Great museum. I used punch cards on a CDC6500 in University (THAT machine is in a museum in Seattle). The CHM is a great place to spend the day. Lots to see. Besides the IBM 1401 demo, pop nextdoor to the PDP-1 demo running Spacewar!. And if you are lucky, Steve Russell will be doing the demo. He is quite famous for the PDP-1 and the LISP programming language. Steve also knows just about everything else in the museum.

[@MrAlFuture]

Super interesting! I love how Ben Eater is just some guy with a "computing channel"... man, have you seen what that man can build on a breadboard?!?! :)

[@richbuilds_com]

Good to know there's a job waiting for me in computing museums curating zx-81's in my retirement!

[@jonadabtheunsightly]

The dominant use of the giant sliderule was for math professors to use at the front of the classroom (typically, it would be hung in front of the chalkboard), to demonstrate the operation of the sliderule to students. It MAY have also been used by engineers in certain fields, for the extra precision, but if so that would've been a niche use, not the main motivation for the product (which, yes, was made on assembly lines in the early and mid twentieth century).

[@avi12]

One of the best crossovers Now, to make the best crossover, we need Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown), Matt Parker and Brady Haran (Numberphile)

[@YatriTrivedi]

Matt and Grant... together... irl AND with a video? this is unexpectedly amazing even before the punch cards!

[@robertb8824]

Believe it or not I was using this type of equipment in 1995, for a now defunct (no surprise there) department store chain Jacobson's.

[@michaelmcchesney6645]

I'm not sure how data driven Thomas Jefferson was, but I doubt he was very involved with the census provision. Jefferson was not a part of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, because at that time he was serving as the U.S. Ambassador to France. I used to teach American History at a high school in the South Bronx. I asked my 1st period class if anyone knew why Jefferson wasn't there and I wasn't too surprised nobody knew. But when I told them it was because he was serving as an ambassador, one student asked me what an ambassador was. I threw it open to the class and no one knew (or was willing to raise their hand). So I asked each of my remaining 3 history classes what an ambassador was and nobody could tell me until I got to an honors class. I found their lack of vocabulary very depressing.

[@DaveScottAggie]

I definitely want to visit this museum, someday.

[@K-o-R]

"into liquid mercury" because _of course_ it uses liquid mercury.

[@IceMetalPunk]

It's liquid that conducts electricity super well! Why would anyone NOT use it?! :D

[@tncorgi92]

My grandfather worked for Sperry Univac and they used tanks of mercury in their systems.

[@sam08g16]

"Mercury is the liquid gold!", said the old man years before dying of mercury poisoning

[@alazrabed]

@@sam08g16 ... said the old man minutes* before dying of mercury poisoning.

[@daminox]

If you're inventing things in the late 19th century and you aren't using mercury then... what are ya doin? Whatever yer doin' ya aren't doin it right if you aren't incorporating some good old fashioned mercury (or as it was known back then: "grandma's delicious silver cider")

[@modusponens1094]

Parker, Grant, & Eater in one video! Love it. It's like they're forming the Avengers of nerd-KZbin. I would totally watch that channel.

[@hareecionelson5875]

Also name drops James Grime aka Singing Banana. Now I need to know why Grime is aka 'the little professor'

[@SaturnCanuck]

That was awesome. When I was in High School in 1977, we used punched cards to write programs in FORTRAN, send them off to the central computer in another city, get them back 2 days later and see your errors. LOL. You never mentioned how the size of punched cards were determined, Hollerith used standard counting machines that were designed to count US Dollar bills, that were bigger then. So the punched cards were the same size of the US Dollar bill so he didn't have to make new counting machines. Cool.

[@roderickwhitehead]

Loving the exposure Grant has been getting lately. His livestreams are great.

[@cheaterman49]

Matt, Grant and Ben? Match made in heaven! Do more of these please :-)

[@toolhog10]

I remember seeing those old looms and punch cards at greenfield village near Detroit.

[@CaptainSpock1701]

3:24 - "There will be after this..." That's just brilliant!

[@FORTRAN4ever]

When I worked as a computer programmer/analyst at the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters at Suitland, Maryland in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Punched cards were limited to some data entry and imput of programs. It was at that same time when CRT had been taken over. By the way, the mainframe computers used were Sperry Univac series machines. After moving on to other Federal agencies I have lost contact with my colleagues in my division.

[@LarryZAR]

Ingenious collaboration.

[@harveyrice8504]

James Burke gets to use one in the Connections series - one of the best documentary series