Comment by hermitcrab
3 days ago
I remember working with a guy who had programmed in FORTRAN in the days of punch cards. He said he once dropped the stack of cards and had to reconstruct the order. He always numbered the cards after that.
Apparently, programmers would 'unpunch' a hole in a card by taping some paper back in the hole to save repunching a new card! And sometimes these 'chads' would fall out, making for some interesting debugging.
It was good practice to draw a diagonal line across the top of a card deck with a magic marker, so that a dropped deck could be manually sorted easily.