Anyone gaming on PC, PS5, Switch or Xbox must regularly download updates for their games. But why are these updates actually called “patches”?
Very few games today are released in a finished state. Often, content is delivered later or developers push important fixes after the fact. You have to download these patches.
Some games even want to download huge patches right away. For the new 3rd season in CoD, you have to download about 40 GB from the servers. This annoys many players who just want to game. Instead, they end up spending hours on the download.
But why are updates that can be massive referred to as patches?
The term “patch” comes from a time when people didn’t even think about PC games
Where does “patch” come from? In the past, instead of hard drives or discs, so-called punch cards were used to store data. A punch card is made of thin cardboard and is no bigger than a page of a paperback.
A punch card is a data carrier made of sturdy thin cardboard that was primarily used in data processing to store data and programs.
However, errors could also occur when developing a punch card. With dozens of holes, it was easy to make a mistake. If you punched a wrong hole and didn’t want to redo all that work with dozens of holes, you would tape a sort of adhesive over the wrong hole. Thus, the term patch refers to physically covering up an error.
Even today, a patch is used to fix errors, but this happens “only” digitally and not in a physical way anymore.
When did the era end? From the mid-1960s onwards, magnetic tapes were increasingly used to store data. They were faster and offered significantly more space in a smaller volume. With punch cards, you could fill entire libraries. Patches were also no longer delivered with adhesive tape, but instead, you sent your colleague the floppy disk with the new data.
Today, PCs use hard drives, but patches still exist
Today, hard drives are hardly much larger than two stacked BluRay cases. And for many users it is even worth installing an SSD in their PC. But 50 years ago, everything looked different.
Because the first commercial hard drive was so large that it had to be transported by plane. The hard drive weighed nearly a ton and was about as tall as a person. The IBM hard drive was first used at the 1960 Winter Olympics. Here, the IBM computer was used as the first electronic data processing system and could even process the old punch cards.
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