[RndTbl] Hey, old-timers!

[Gilles Detillieux]

According to me:
> According to Glen Ditchfield:
> > How big would a gigabyte of punched cards be?
> 
> Well, 2^30/80 is 13,421,773 cards.  Anyone remember how many cards fit
> in one of those big flat boxes they came in?  If it was 5000, it would
> take 2,685 of these boxes to store a gig.  What weight and volume that
> would occupy, I couldn't say at this point.  Trouble with us old timers
> is our memory starts to fail.  :-P  Anyone still have one of those big
> flat boxes of cards?

Another problem with us old timers is it takes a while to adjust our
habits.  Just did a Google search...

"The overall dimensions of punched cards used for data processing
have remained the same since Herman Hollerith invented the medium:
7 3/8 inches wide by 3 1/4 inches high by .007 inches thick. Today,
these dimensions are set by the EIA standard RS-292 media 1 punched
card. This standard is augmented by ANSI X3.21-1967 governing the holes
in the card and ANSI X3.26-1980 governing the use of the Hollerith code
to encode alphanumeric data on cards."

(from http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html)

They came in boxes of 2000, i.e. 6,711 boxes/gig, or 48.25 cubic yards
of cards, at a cost of over $28,000 US (1996 prices).  I'd roughly
guesstimate the weight at 35-40 tonnes.  Doesn't compare too favourably
to DVDs, does it?

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)