P.S. Kinsey's Punched Cards

"This new equipment is a godsend ..."

We live in an era of big data—numbers so large and complex that they require super-computer capability to process. Our phones can handle more data than Kinsey and his colleagues would have thought possible in the 1950s. For them, the cutting edge technology for data processing was the punched-card machine.

Interestingly enough, the punched card was developed to collect personal information. It got its start with the United States census of 1890. And, then punched-card technology accelerated along with a little company called “International Business Machines” —or, as we know it today, IBM.

So join me on this exploration of how technology advanced to handle big data in the mid-20th century and how Kinsey used it to process the sexology information he collected.

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