[John Graham-Cumming] might not be the first person to thumb through an old book and find an IBM punched card inside. But he might be the first to actually track down the origin of the cards.

A punch-card data entry machine. A deck of blank cards was placed into a hopper, and, upon operator command, the machine fed one card to a punch station. As characters were typed, a series of dies ...

Most people didn’t really use the switches. What most people did do, however, was punch cards. Technically, Hollerith cards, although we mostly just called them cards, punched cards ...