Unwrapped and laid out across my bedroom floor, the cards revealed few hints about their contents. The 80x12 matrix on each card worked out to 108 bytes per card, making for a 21.5 kilobyte message from the past. I was looking at a file the size of text-heavy PDF, or the logo image from a site’s nav bar. The thing was, though, that the paper enclosing the cards was numbered 601-700 in hasty pencil—just a piece of a bigger puzzle.

I carefully stacked the cards back in their original order, an anonymous slash of faded marker along the deck’s edge confirming my attention to detail. I left the cards on my dresser, intending to display them at some point amidst the other curios around my house, but they remained there as I continued to shuffle through them before going to bed each night.

Staring at my computer screen at work, I started to lag behind on clients’ projects as I scoured Wikipedia entries and testimonials from aged programmers for answers. I spent increasingly more time researching the mechanics of mid-twentieth century computing and resolved to figure out just what I had brought home.