Xref: utzoo comp.periphs:3736 rec.music.cd:15904 rec.music.misc:69467 comp.misc:12485 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!unixg.ubc.ca!buckland From: buckland@ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) Newsgroups: comp.periphs,rec.music.cd,rec.music.misc,comp.misc Subject: Re: card punches for storage Message-ID: <1991May9.162144.21857@unixg.ubc.ca> Date: 9 May 91 16:21:44 GMT References: <3048@cod.NOSC.MIL> <1991May8.231249.23778@Eyring.COM> Sender: news@unixg.ubc.ca (Usenet News Maintenance) Organization: University of B.C. Computing Services Lines: 26 Nntp-Posting-Host: swiss.ucs.ubc.ca In article <1991May8.231249.23778@Eyring.COM> bcc@Eyring.COM (Brian Cooper) writes: > ... >2000 cards to a box, I seem to remember, so 5.8 million cards is a bit less >than 3000 boxes. A box was about a foot deep, maybe 3 inches by 8 inches >(don't have anything directly here to measure). My figures are that you >would have a collection of data roughly 8 ft x 8 ft x 8 ft to reproduce one >CD with punched cards. (In metric, figure a cube about 2.5 meters on a side.) Figure one display or printed line per card, and you have about 83 screens or 40 pages per box of cards. For instance, a fat textbook would take about 10 boxes of cards. That's with dense information, though; program source decks had a lot of cards with just "I=1" in columns 7 - 9, and a lot of virgin card, which makes old source decks useful for grocery lists. One of the advantages of cards is that the data are very visible. Even a card half chewed and slobbered on by a dog, who then buried it, can likely be read by a *human*. An irrelevant aside on large rectangular piles: I once figured that the burgers MacDonald's claimed to that time to have sold would fit in a pile one kilometre square and a hundred metres high, not allowing for compression in the bottom layers. Since the burgers are round, careful stuffing should allow insertion into the pile of the appropriate number of fries, and the porousness of the buns should allow soaking with the appropriate quantity of cola. Bon appetit!