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Into The Bit Bucket With Thee
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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Nice, but it wasn’t a viewmaster. Similar idea, but it was an actual computer of some sort.
What you're describing sounds very weird because punchcards are mechanical media and colored cellophane would be optical. We didn't have any popular optical media until CDs. I think using optical media to store the extremely limited amount of data something like punchcard can store makes no sense.
It only really made sense as a way to give slides meant for human viewing, computerized data for sorting, filling, or otherwise using simultaneously with the slide. Like, a picture of an engineering diagram, patent, survey site, military target, etc.
Before we could store a picture as raw binary data, this was an interesting way to fill the need to digitally notate images. Punch cards like this were definitely in use for a while. I have a post above with an image.