Every gamer hates constant updates, but why are they called patches?

If you play on the PC, PS5, Switch or Xbox, you have to download updates for your games regularly. But why are these updates actually called “patches”?

Very few games come out finished these days. Content is then often delivered later or developers push important fixes afterwards. You then have to download this patch.

Some games then want to download huge patches right away. For the new 3rd season in CoD you have to load about 40 GB from the servers. This annoys many players who just want to gamble. But instead they are busy with the download for hours.

But why are the updates, some of which can be huge, actually called patches?

The term “patch” comes from a time when you didn’t even think about PC games

Where does “Patch” get it from? In the past, so-called punch cards were used to store data instead of hard drives or discs. A punch card is made of thin cardboard and is not much larger than a page from a paperback book.

A punch card is a data carrier made of stable, thin cardboard that was previously used primarily in data processing to store data and programs.

But mistakes could also happen during the development of a punch card. Because with dozens of holes, one could quickly go wrong. If you punched the wrong hole and didn’t want to do the whole job again with dozens of holes, you stuck a kind of adhesive tape over the wrong hole. The term patch means here the physical covering of an error.

Even today, errors are ironed out with a patch, but this is “only” done digitally and no longer physically.

When did the era end? From the mid-1960s, magnetic tapes were increasingly used to store data. Because they were faster and offered significantly more space with a smaller volume. You could fill entire libraries with punch cards. Patches were no longer delivered with adhesive tape, but instead the diskette with the new data was sent to the colleague.

Today, hard drives are used in PCs, but patches still exist today

Hard drives today are hardly much larger than two BluRay cases stacked on top of each other. And for many users it is even worth installing an SSD in their PC. But 50 years ago it all looked different.

Because the first commercial hard drive was so big that it had to be transported by plane. Because the hard drive weighed almost a ton and was about as tall as a human being. IBM’s hard drive was first used at the 1960 Winter Olympics. Here the computer from IBM was used as the first electronic data processing system and it was also able to process the old punched cards.

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