“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”: A cultural history of the punch card
Punch cards became not only a symbol for the computer,[14] but a symbol of alienation. They stood for abstraction, oversimplification, and dehumanization. The cards were, it seemed, a two-dimensional portrait of people, people abstracted into numbers that machines could use. The cards came to represent a society where it seemed that machines had become more important than people, where people had to change their ways to suit the machines.
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