December 10th, 2005
Fast Fact: Three-Minute MP3 Would Consume 40,000 Punch Cards
I want to see the king nerd who figured this one out. But basically, if you stored a standard 3-minute MP3 file on old-fashioned 60s-era PUNCH CARDS, you’d need 40,960 cards, which would file 21 boxes stacked 5 feet, 9-inches high.
“Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40K cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput.” The 21 boxes of cards needed would by 5 feet 9 inches tall. That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory astonishes.” Source: Boing Boing via The Raw Feed
Rob says:
Makes me want to do a comparison between the data densitiy of a punch card and the data density of a HDD…
August 1st, 2005 at 8:42 pm
Don Smith says:
Why would anyone makeing such a comparison use only 8 of the 12 bits in each of the 80 columns on an IBM punched card. It is still a tremendous increase in capacity in less than 50 years, but you are discount the old card by 25%. Thanks Don
August 1st, 2005 at 10:06 pm
Bob says:
Things have really changed in 40 years. You can now run your computer without punch cards, but NASA can’t put a man on the moon.
August 2nd, 2005 at 12:48 am