Punch Cards

I've been listening to this book:

https://www.wpr.org/code-six-james-grippando

An interview with the author:

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvtdB2WTuPo

One thing mentioned in the book that I never knew was that IBM sold punch card technology to the Nazis before World War II.  And that that enabled the Nazis to round up Jewish people in Germany with more ease.  Thomas Watson, the head of IBM, was given a medal by the Nazis - not a good look although he did give it back.  The book also mentions that Lindbergh also received the Nazi medal (but of course he never returned it).

I guess it never occurred to me before that something so clunky and old would have been such an assist to evil.  I used punch cards in college for running Fortran programs on the UWM mainframe.  There would generally be a crisis near the end of the term when the class accounts would run out of money and your program wouldn't run :)  Also used punch cards at GTE for programming the Sentry because that was the only way to edit offline - otherwise you had to tie up a zillion dollar tester just typing your program - understand that this was in the stone age before personal computing.  And finally probably my last encounter with punch cards was voting in Illinois.  

One other application for punch cards that I remember was in episodes of Dragnet, the old black and white ones.  Frank and Joe would have the "stats office" do a "run" to try and find the usual suspects for whatever serial crime they were investigating.  It seemed somewhat benign but  maybe it was just big data taking baby steps ?

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm