These punched cards were the same cards that later were used in computer system handling data feed.

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Before the introduction of magnetic tape, digital storage for early computers used punched cards, paper tape as well as more exotic technologies such as mercury delay lines and the phosphors on cathode ray tubes.

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In a competition between them it took 72 hours to record all the data on to Hollerith's punched cards, which was not vastly faster than the 144 hours and 100 hours taken by the other two machines.

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At the same time, he switched from a paper strip to punched cards. (Making the cards the same size as dollar bills meant that existing storage cabinets could be used.) By clever wiring of the tabulating machine, it was possible to count the number of cards with particular combinations of attributes.

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It would use magnetic-tape storage to replace punched data cards and printers to list the content of the tape.

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