That's how we did things when I was in high school. Local keypunch wasn't an option, and having somebody transcribe written programs was too expensive for suppo

That's how we did things when I was in high school. Local keypunch wasn't an option, and having somebody transcribe written programs was too expensive for supporting a couple of dozen schools in the district, so we used Mark Sense cards. Those were slow to read directly, so our cards were duplicated to punch cards on the cheap machine while the expensive machine was doing slightly more important things than printing out "syntax error, try again idiot". It was then much faster to batch a couple of hundred syntax error messages from punched cards during free time. One must think about process efficiency.