[dboreham]

Note, I never actually used punch cards, but they existed when I was in college. The user interface was like this:

1. You prepared you cards, offline using a punch machine.

2. You got a form from the computer center and filled it in with various details for your job.

3. You wrapped the form around your card deck, secured with a rubber band and placed the assembled package into a box/shelf in the entrance to said computer center.

4. You went about your business for a day or so.

5. You checked your pigeon hole outside the computer center, or perhaps your department mailbox.

6. Eventually your card deck would show up there, accompanied by a line printer (fanfold) output that was whatever your program printed when run.

There were more complex workflows allowing things like tape input/output where you'd specify the tape label either on the form or in the deck.

This is where "Job control language" (JCL) comes from -- a scripting language to facilitate running batch jobs. The precursor to Dockerfiles and Github Actions YAML.

[euroderf]

IBM JCL was where the truly magical incantations entered the picture. We had grad students who hung out in the punch card room and they were the go-to guys for getting your JCL sorted out. SYSIN DD *, baby!

[fghorow]

Back in the Usenet days, I saw some greybeard's .sig line:

\\GO.SYSIN DD *

DOO DAH

DOO DAH

(Checks beard color and blushes.)

[rnk]

I used to know some jcl, those were the days. It was used in a few "advanced" classes when I was an undergrad. Was that the one that had the little hello pamplet with details, or was that yellow pamplet describing sys/360 assembly.

[ansible]

I've also never used punch cards, but I had seen the equipment in the computer lab at university.

One more trick for the young ones here that I've heard is: With your completed stack of punch cards, take a marker and make a diagonal slash across the edge of the stack from top to bottom. That way, if you accidentally dropped the deck of cards, you could put them back in at least the approximately correct order very quickly. You would still want to look through the cards one at a time to ensure the order, but the process goes much quicker if the deck is nearly sorted.

I mostly used serial terminals connected to minicomputers like various PDP-11s and Dual VAX 11/780s. I did get to experience the joy of trying to complete an introductory CS assignment near the deadline. The machine slowed to a crawl, but didn't crash. You would type in one character, and wait for it to appear. We were warned to submit our assignments early!