We think of punched cards as old-fashioned, but still squarely part of the computer age. Turns out, cards were in use way before they got conscripted by computers. Jacquard looms are one famous ...

From the early 20th century into the 1970s, Americans used punched cards to enter data into tabulating equipment and then electronic computers. This is an early key-operated punch, based on patents of ...

On June 8, 1887, Herman Hollerith applied for US patent #395,781 for his punch card counting machine, a device considered to be among the foundations of the modern information processing industry and ...

A punch card voting machine, complete with a butterfly ballot, became a museum piece Monday. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore handed over the portable suitcase-size Votomatic ...

The punch card, the first way to program a machine, turned 300 this year. The first semi-automatic loom was created in Lyon as early as 1725. To commemorate this, we have taken the liberty of updating ...

Before IBM, before punch-card computers, before Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, one of the very first machines that could run something like what we now call a "program" was used to make fabric.

When Berkeley's William Rouverol invented the original Votomatic punch-card voting machine in the early 1960s, he never dreamed his gizmo would become both famous and infamous. His son now calls him ...

LOS ANGELES - With a gubernatorial recall election pending in the state, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California today filed a lawsuit challenging the continued use of outdated, ...

It started with a cheap, punch-card programmable manual music box. Thirty-one hobby servos later, it ended as an automated MIDI music box, with a short pit stop as a keyboard-driven MIDI device. If ...