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
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.