The main computer at Purdue when I was in school (mid 70's) was a CDC 6500 with punched decks.    During finals week, students fell all over each other living in the basement of the Math Science building where you had access to the student punches, submitted your jobs, and somtimes hours later got the printouts of the results.

I recall one session where I saw a girl drop a full box of cards... and she had not sequenced them.    She just sat down on the floor and cried.    You should have seen the mass of people head to the room where you could put a deck of cards into a machine and get back a deck punched with sequence numbers.     Kind of the early predecessor to the hard disk crash on a personal computer.