My dad was a programmer, and had decks of FORTRAN programs, some up to two feet long. He taught me the trick of using a marker to make a diagonal slash mark acr

My dad was a programmer, and had decks of FORTRAN programs, some up to two feet long. He taught me the trick of using a marker to make a diagonal slash mark across the top of the deck. If a card was out of place, it was obvious. If you were so unlucky as to drop all or part of the deck, it was possible to quickly put it back into rough order. Later in life, one of my first jobs was a computer operator. By that time punch cards were mostly gone, but every once in a while someone would bring a deck in and I'd run it through the card reader. Also, the CDC Cyber I operated could be booted off a small punch card deck. Essentially a bootloader in 3-4 cards.