The cards were just a worthless curiosity from a dusty antique store; something to put on my bookshelf and serve as a reminder of how things used to be: fragile, time-worn, and made of paper.

I bought the punch cards for eighteen dollars at Hinman's Vintage, somewhere off I-81 in upstate New York. They were wrapped in a crinkled leaf of paper and tied up with string so old it was turning hard and brittle. The card’s weight was reassuring in my hands, and once unwrapped, they rewarded me with the supple spring of cardstock. There were one hundred cards, peppered with square holes that spelled out precious ounces of information.

The cards were standard issue IBM’s, stamped in black ink with the word ARPA against a simplified globe. According to standards established in 1928, each card measured precisely 7 ⅜ inches by 3 ¼, and contained 80 rows of 12 characters each: the digits zero through nine, plus two extra markers to multiply the number of possible characters. I wondered if these cards contained government secrets, or—more likely—boring artillery trajectories. Sitting on my kitchen counter when I got home, the cards dared me to decipher their scripts. I think it was their packaging too, wrapped up like a postal delivery from a sender long forgotten, that sparked my curiosity.