I am old (I have seen things). I still have my first program from college, in FORTRAN, on a card deck. I also worked as a "computer operator" (an extinct species) while going to college, putting card decks in the readers, running decks that were output from the punches through "interpreters" (which printed the characters across the top of cards), and remembering that you always (ALWAYS) drew a diagonal line across the top of a deck of cards with a pen, in case you dropped them (colloquially known as a "floor sort"). If you wanted to be really fancy, you'd use different colored cards for different sections of a program, but that was rarely worth the effort. Good times.<p>Besides card punches, readers and interpreters, other quaint machines I dealt with on a daily basis were chain printers (with carriage tapes - look it up), reel-to-reel tapes (which required cleaning the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs once a shift), and the most evil of all, decollators (again, look it up). All controlled via consoles that didn't have cursor keys, so to this day I have the TERRIBLE habit of backspacing to nuke and fix typing mistakes rather than cursoring and surgically correcting them. I bet the Backspace key on my keyboard is probably in the top 10 keys in my usage profile. :)
As someone who first started using computers in the 90s, I lacked the tactile experience with cards that the generation before mine had. I long suspected that I had missed something by not having used punched cards, little realizing just how much I had missed.<p>What was shocking to me about punched cards is the indelible mark that they left on modern day computing. Why do terminals default to 80 columns? That’s the width of a punched card. Why do tabs have variable length? The key used to move to the next “field” on a punched card, by way of a physical tab stop. Why did FORTRAN reserve the first few columns to line numbers? So you could put your FORTRAN deck in a card sorter if you dropped it.<p>The link above seems to mirror the first part of the exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which is well worth seeing in person.<p>Even better are the live demonstrations of the IBM 1401 that are also done at the Computer History Museum on Wednesday‘s and Saturday’s: <a href="http://ibm-1401.info/" rel="nofollow">http://ibm-1401.info/</a>
Another important market for IBM punch card technology during the 40's <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-willing-business-partners/303146/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...</a>
The layout for this page is so interesting and useful! Each section divided into little bookmarks, with each bookmark having its own bar denoting how much content is held in it. Never seen anything like it before, and it works great for this format.
Punch cards were also quite durable, you could dump them in a punch in 'dup' mode to make a backup, and usually they had printed across their tops the text on them so it made reading them pretty simple.