Walls and walls of punch-card reading machines are the first glimpse we get in history of something that looks a bit like a “data center,” but back then it was called a “keypunch room.” IBM was the powerhouse behind the punch card system--developing a uniform paper card with rectangular holes (80 columns with 12 punch slots--exactly 7 3/8-inches by 3 ¼-inches, and 0.007-inches thick) in 1928, but they weren’t used for storing electronic data until the 1950s. Many early programming languages, like Fortran and Cobol, made use of only the first 72 columns of the punch card.