this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
323 points (98.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
32557 readers
1608 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nice, but it wasn’t a viewmaster. Similar idea, but it was an actual computer of some sort.
What you're describing sounds very weird because punchcards are mechanical media and colored cellophane would be optical. We didn't have any popular optical media until CDs. I think using optical media to store the extremely limited amount of data something like punchcard can store makes no sense.
It only really made sense as a way to give slides meant for human viewing, computerized data for sorting, filling, or otherwise using simultaneously with the slide. Like, a picture of an engineering diagram, patent, survey site, military target, etc.
Before we could store a picture as raw binary data, this was an interesting way to fill the need to digitally notate images. Punch cards like this were definitely in use for a while. I have a post above with an image.