Businesses used punch cards for accounting, payroll, inventory, taxes, billing, and lots of similar applications. Way before computers, back to the early 1900s,

Businesses used punch cards for accounting, payroll, inventory, taxes, billing, and lots of similar applications. Way before computers, back to the early 1900s, businesses used electromechanical accounting machine to process punch card data. By 1944, there were over 10,000 of these accounting machines in use. Low-end computers often were a replacement for these accounting machines. The language RPG (Report Program Generator) was often used to generate business reports.