What Is Keypunch?

It's hard to fathom, but at one time, humans controlled computers. Before the advent of the internet, there were keypunches, punch cards and magnetic tapes. A keypunch precisely punches holes in specific locations on a stiff card. It was used in conjunction with early smashed card computers. The punched card served as the program instruction for the computer—and it had to be carefully punched by hand because each hole represented one bit of information. Computers used to have just two states: on or off. If you punched a hole into a card, that meant that bit was "on," and that bit should be "on" in your program; otherwise, it would remain un-punched and thus of. The location of each hole was determined by the keys being struck by a human operator typing on a keyboard, much like we do today. Instead of communicating with someone else over the internet via email or text message (or whatever), they were communicating with their computer! The keypunch was the first device to make it easy for people to input data into computers. It's a difficult concept to understand in today's world of computers that can read your thoughts, but at one time, people had to manually punch holes in cards with a machine just so the computer could understand what they were doing. That's right: before we had voice recognition software, before we had touch screens, and before we even had keyboards, we had these things called "keyboards" that you typed on—and if you made too many mistakes or missed a letter, you'd have to start over from scratch. It was like having an entire team of people watching over your shoulder and ensuring that every keystroke was perfect! That's not all! If even one mistake was made on the card—say, if you accidentally punched two holes instead of one—all of your work would have been wasted because the computer couldn't read it anymore!