My favorite punch card recollection from the good old days almost defies belief. Registering for classes at FAU back in the last century involved getting your master ID punch card at the admin building, then schlepping around all over campus to each department where they had pre-punched cards for all the available slots in all the classes. You'd collect all the cards for all the classes you wanted to take, then bring them back to the admin building where the real magic would happen: With the master card in front of the class cards for each student, the cards would be piled into one of those massive patchboard programmable duplicators. This would copy the student ID from the master card and punch it onto the following class cards, except when it failed to recognize the next master when it would continue to duplicate the ID on the next student's master. Fortunately the highly trained operators could detect the sound of ID numbers being duplicated on top of cards that already had ID numbers on them and stop the machine so the screwed up cards could be taken out and new copies punched by had to feed back in on another try. Once the ID numbers were on all the cards, you'd take the fantastic pile of cards accumulated and bring them to the other machine: The card sorter where, in pass after pass through the night, the intrepid operators would eventually get the cards sorted by ID. Finally this offering of cards was fit to be fed to an actual computer program which would update a new student record tape from the sorted input cards and the old tape in a classic one pass update algorithm. In a major upgrade to the system at one point, they got rid of the patchboard duplicator, and instead fed the cards to a computer program which did the duplication of the ID numbers and punched out a new deck they could then run through the sorter :-). [How many trees did that kill I wonder]. To the question of why they couldn't do the sort on the computer as well, the answer was always "don't ask". I'm aware that this boggles the mind, but I swear this is the absolute truth (if I was gonna stretch things, I'd have put in something about having to carry boxes of cards through sniper fire :-).
