Punch cards were fed into computers by card readers ... on separate machines called "sorters," "collators," "reproducers," "calculators" and "accounting machines." Except for the sorter, all ...

This broke the bottleneck caused by students sitting at the punch card terminal. We think that [HPF] sent in this project after seeing the antiquated hardware from that 1970’s calculator.

Most people didn’t really use the switches. What most people did do, however, was punch cards. Technically, Hollerith cards, although we mostly just called them cards, punched cards ...