Found Object: Circa 1975

After nearly fifty years of faithful service as dust-collectors and bookshelf ballast, I finally decided it was time to part ways with my university textbooks. These were not the kind of books that aged well—no leather-bound volumes of Plato or poetry. No, these were tomes with titles like Structured Programming in FORTRAN IV and Compiler Construction for Digital Computers by David Gries. Not even the most desperate used-bookstore clerk would touch them. I tried giving them away. I posted online. I even left a few “accidentally” on a park bench. Nothing.

Punchcard

From the pages of one particularly joyless volume—Queueing Theory and Other Ways to Spend a Friday Night—a small blue rectangle fluttered out and landed on the floor. A punch card. A genuine, honest-to-God computer punch card. Blue, which meant batch-control. The white ones were for code—one line per card, 80 columns of possible glory or disaster. Drop a stack of 500 and your afternoon was over.

There it was: a relic of the Control Data Corporation—CDC, in tiny type along the bottom left, like a brand signature on an ancient amphora. Long gone, like its machines, its manuals, and most of my knowledge of what those programs ever did. But for a brief moment, I remembered it all. The harsh clatter of the card reader. The shuddering grind as it devoured the deck. The sudden halt when it jammed halfway through reading the deck. The smell of warm dust, mechanical oil, and institutional coffee.

I used the punch card as a bookmark, apparently. A small act of technological repurposing. It had faithfully marked my place for half a century. Perhaps a fitting metaphor for the entire era: precise, rectangular, and almost entirely obsolete.

I put it aside, unsure whether to throw it out or frame it. Maybe I’ll slip it into Python for Dummies and leave it for someone to find in another 50 years. Let them marvel. Or puzzle. Or, more likely, Google “What is a punch card?” Or maybe—I will post about finding it on this newsletter!