Glyn,
I remember when we had the big rolls of punched tape that had to be ran through a reader. A real pain the the A**. I stared in computers in the 50s when the first one was nothing but some relays that you had to wire certain ways to get them to do whatever you wanted them too. The paper tape and punch cards were big advances back then. Our switching computers then got the IBM Trouble card punchers that punched holes in a long heavy paper card and you had to sit down and decipher just what it was saying as the holes were related to binary. Isn't it amazing that now a pocket phone or calculator has more power than the computers they had on the moon landers. One thing I don't miss is the horrible racket those thousands of relays would make when things got busy.
Ron