I missed punch cards by one year. The punchcard reader was still in the terminal room when I started working at the University of Illinois at Chicago computer l

I missed punch cards by one year. The punchcard reader was still in the terminal room when I started working at the University of Illinois at Chicago computer lab. I did get to do a lot of JCL debugging. And we had to use a limited plain TeX at first because our ASCII-IBM bridge that let us use inexpensive terminals instead of dedicated IBM terminals had reserved ~ for signalling escape sequences plus the state of the art for the Xerox laser printer allowed only predefined sets of fonts to appear in a print job.