As you are probably all aware by now, chad is the little punchout from computer cards. The origin of chad is obscure, at best, but it happens that I know the truth.

Children today don't even know what an eighty column card is, but us old-timers who used to have to read the cards by hand when the card reader mangled them know. They were the invention of the devil.

But that's a tale for another time. Because of the paucity of capacity in computers, we developed abbreviations and acronyms and other miscellaneous shortcuts to keep within the limited parameters. Whenever a card went through the reader with one interpretation and was later interpreted another way, we knew there was a dangler, one of the little oblong punches was flapping back and forth, being read as punched one time and unpunched another. When this happened we had to have a computer code to tell us. "Card has a dangler" was too long, so we abbreviated it to CHAD.

And now, the rest of the story.









There actually isn't a word of truth in the above, but it beats the hell out of having it come out that it was named after the Chad of Chad and Jeremy!


TEd