Engineers in the 1950s programmed early computers using punch cards, which were literal pieces of stiff paper with holes painstakingly punched in them to represent binary data.

A closer look

Engineers in the 1950s programmed early computers using punch cards, which were literal pieces of stiff paper with holes painstakingly punched in them to represent binary data. If you dropped your stack of cards on the floor, your entire program was ruined, and you had to spend hours manually sorting them back into the correct sequence while deeply contemplating your life choices. This archaic form of data entry makes our modern complaints about slow wi-fi or apps crashing seem incredibly pathetic by comparison. The pioneers of computing literally had to carry around the physical manifestation of their code in a fragile cardboard stack, proving that software engineering has always been an exercise in supreme anxiety and the constant fear of a single minor mistake destroying everything