Yes, Vir­ginia, we really used to write com­puter pro­grams this way. This ad is from 1971, when IBM intro­duced its last key punch, the 129. The first in the series was intro­duced in 1964. Notice the sim­ple ad copy, which actu­ally includes sen­tence frag­ments… from “the com­pany behind the com­puter.” Those were the days.

I used one of these in the early 1980s, and I don’t recall the buffer allow­ing me to cor­rect before the card was punched, so it must have been an ear­lier model. I com­bat the impres­sion of me being that old by sug­gest­ing that I was using out­dated equip­ment at the time. Hey, my high school was in the process of con­vert­ing things over to the Com­modore Super­PET. Yup, that’s a 1MHz proces­sor with 96KB of RAM. In Inter­net years, this is pre­his­toric mate­r­ial of the type Indi­ana Jones might unearth. Hmmm, maybe I am old.