"The punch card remained a keystone of data processing until the 1970s, and its impact still remains."
I worked for an aerospace contractor in the mid-80s, and the corporate computing center was an IBM mainframe shop (originally 360s/370s, later a mix of 370s and 3033s, later the 308x multiprocessors series).
Even when I left that world in 1986, punch cards were still used in several contexts, such as the starter decks for all production jobs. But the greatest reliance on punch cards was that every employee's time card was a punch card. Recurring data was pre-punched, employees would write billing hours and projects on printed fields, then that data was punched in by the keypunch department at the end of the week. The timecards then were written to tape and fed into accounting, payroll, and shop order control.
Yet despite this primitive appearance, every employee got their paycheck by the following Thursday, every week.
I worked for an aerospace contractor in the mid-80s, and the corporate computing center was an IBM mainframe shop (originally 360s/370s, later a mix of 370s and 3033s, later the 308x multiprocessors series).
Even when I left that world in 1986, punch cards were still used in several contexts, such as the starter decks for all production jobs. But the greatest reliance on punch cards was that every employee's time card was a punch card. Recurring data was pre-punched, employees would write billing hours and projects on printed fields, then that data was punched in by the keypunch department at the end of the week. The timecards then were written to tape and fed into accounting, payroll, and shop order control.
Yet despite this primitive appearance, every employee got their paycheck by the following Thursday, every week.