I'm so old I remember when the internet didn't have commercials.
@kibcol1049 I remember dialup to connect to an ad free internet, worse than that I remember punch cards .
@harrymuzz At my first job, the computer room temperature was controlled with double door air lock to enter. The computer was huge with punch card operators typing and huge floor to ceiling reel to reel tapes. The print outs were on large sheets of paper and took several runs for all the errors to be corrected. With programmers, inputters and clerks, there were about 8 staff. Nowadays a kid of 8 or 9 could do it all and more on a smartphone and 30 times quicker! Hard to believe but true.

@kibcol1049 @harrymuzz

Use a rubber band around a small deck.

If the deck was more than an inch thick, draw a diagonal line on one edge face so if they got scrambled you could reassemble without sobbing.

Too big for a rubber band?
There were purpose-made boxes.

@nlarson830 @kibcol1049 @harrymuzz
I signed up for a community college sort of computer programming class, 'cuz I was certain computers would be a huge part of my career (correct).

Looked at the shopping list for the syllabus of the COBOL class, & saw I needed to buy a box of punch cards.

Immediately dropped the class. I would've been cool with learning COBOL, but if they were still doing punchcards when I already had an XT with dual floppy drives, they were too backward.

@kelvin0mql @kibcol1049 @harrymuzz

I wouldn't be surprised if banks still used punchcards for their COBOL

@nlarson830

I'm sure they don't. Mainframes are really up-to-date these days:

https://www.ibm.com/products/z17

And they offer at least 50 years of backwards-compatibility.

@kelvin0mql @kibcol1049 @harrymuzz

IBM z17

IBM z17 is the AI infused next generation mainframe.