What dual purpose did the physical punch card serve for early programmers?
Answer
Loading both program instructions and initial data sets.
As computing evolved beyond pure tabulation, the physical punch card inherited two roles simultaneously, forcing a versatile design. For early computer operators managing mainframes like the UNIVAC, the physical card represented machine logic, serving to load the sequence of program instructions (akin to Jacquard’s original logic). Simultaneously, the same card format was used to input the raw data sets that the program would process (akin to Hollerith’s statistical recording), requiring complex coding schemes to accommodate both machine commands and input variables.
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