PUNCHED FEATURE CARDS

Abstract

I first met punched feature cards in 1956. I was working as an assistant to E. G. Brisch, whose company classified the materials and components used in industry. His method brought similar articles together, both notionally in classified codebooks and practically when the classified items were stored in their code number order. The result was an excellent aid to variety reduction, standardization, and stock control. E. G. gave me a good grounding in analytical classification; but his office held other secrets too. One of these was a sort of punched card representing a property or quality, not an object or event as with all other punched cards I had met. On these other cards, notched or slotted for hand‐sorting with needles, or punched and verified in thousands for reading by machine, the holes stood for characteristics possessed by the item concerned. The new cards were different. Since they represented properties, the items possessing these had to be shown by the holes, and so they were. E. G. named them ‘Brisch‐a‐boo’: this I found was his special variant of ‘peek‐a‐boo’, a title by which they are still occasionally known. To stack some of them in exact register with each other is to find, as a set of through holes in numbered positions, the reference numbers of all the items recorded on them which have the qualities concerned.