Not my experience but a guy I worked with and respected. He retired and I haven’t heard from him, but from what he told me, one’s experience with punch card sys

Not my experience but a guy I worked with and respected. He retired and I haven’t heard from him, but from what he told me, one’s experience with punch card systems varied greatly due to the size of the shop. In larger shops: The programmer would typically write out the program with pencil and paper. He/she would then pass that along to another programmer, possibly several, to have them review it and look for bugs. The program would then be passed along to person who was skilled with a card punching machine and he/she would get the program entered. Once the program was on cards, the program would be run. The print out of the result would then be inspected to ensure the program ran successfully. Often, the programmers would rewire the output board to cache the output and allow multiple prints. Once terminals became available, that cache could also be inspected with a monitor. Eventually on-line terminals became available and card punching went out of favor. Tape replaced it. Eventually tapes were replaced (for many but not all use cases) by floppies. Naturally, tapes still exist in some arenas for backup/archival.