Herman Hollerith developed punched card and unit record technology for the 1890 census and founded the Tabulating Machine Company (1896) which was one of three companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), later renamed IBM. IBM manufactured and marketed a variety of unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after expanding into computers in the late 1950s. IBM developed punch card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines. By 1950, the IBM card and IBM unit record machines had become ubiquitous in industry and government. The warning often printed on cards that were to be individually handled, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," became a motto for the post-World War II era (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant).

From the 1900s, into the 1950s, punch cards were the primary medium for data entry, storage, and processing in institutional computing. According to the IBM Archives: "By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in Endicott, N.Y., printing, cutting and stacking five to 10 million punched cards every day." Punch cards were even used as legal documents, such as U.S. Government checks and savings bonds. During the 1960s, the punch card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by better, more capable computers that stored information more efficiently on magnetic tape. Punch cards were still commonly used for data entry and programing until the mid-1970s when the the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punch cards obsolete for this role as well. However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards displayed 80 columns of text, for compatibility with existing software. Some programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although fewer and fewer do as newer systems employ graphical user interfaces with variable-width type fonts.

Today, punch cards are all but obsolete outside of a few legacy systems and specialized applications.

This IBM card format, designed in 1928, had rectangular holes, 80 columns with 12 punch locations each, one character to each column. Card size was exactly 7-3/8 inch by 3-1/4 inch (187.325 by 82.55 mm. The cards were made of smooth stock, 0.007 inch (0.178 mm) thick. In 1964 IBM changed from square to round corners. There are about 143 cards to the inch.

The top two positions of a column were called zone punches, 12 (top) and 11. These often encoded plus and minus signs. The lower ten positions represented (from top to bottom) the digits 0 through 9. Originally only numeric information was coded, with 1 or 2 punches per column: digits (digit 0-9) and signs (zone 12,11 – sometimes overpunching the Least Significant Digit). Later, codes were introduced for upper-case letters and special characters. A column with 2 punches (zone 12,11,0 + digit 1-9) was a letter; 3 punches (zone 12,11,0 + digit 2-4 + 8) was a special character. The introduction of EBCDIC in 1964 allowed columns with as many as 6 punches (zones 12,11,0,8,9 + digit 1-7). IBM and other manufacturers used many different 80-column card character codings, see
and


For some computer applications, binary formats were used, where each hole represented a single binary digit (or "bit"), every column (or row) was treated as a simple bitfield, and every combination of holes was permitted . For example, the 704/709/7090/7094 series scientific computers treated every row as two 36-bit words, usually in columns 1-72, ignoring the last 8 columns (the 72 columns used were selectable using a control panel). Other computers, like the IBM 1130, used every column. For operator and visitor amusement, in binary mode cards could be punched where every possible punch position had a hole: these were called "lace cards" (such cards lacked structural strength and generally could not be further processed by unit record machines).

The 80 column card format dominated the industry, becoming known as just IBM cards, even though other companies made cards and equipment to process them.