My dad switched into IT in the late 80’s, via community college. So being a community college, they still had a machine that ran on card readers.
As I recall they had a machine that took the “scantron” cards and spit out punched ones.
And I don’t remember if they had it or I just read about it later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save your bacon.
