[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!