When A Patch Was Literal

Description

The image shows a photographed museum-style page titled "The \"Patch\"" above an old strip of punched paper tape with red markings, dark punched holes, and two darker taped-over rectangular areas. The caption below reads, "Small corrections to the programmed sequence could be done by patching over portions of the paper tape and re-punching the holes in that section." A smaller credit line says, "Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives Center." The technical humor comes from seeing the word "patch" before package managers, CI pipelines, or hotfix branches: a software correction was once a physical repair to the program medium itself.