Oooh, I love tales from the ancient times.

My professor in college had worked with punch cards. He told us about dropping a box full of cards once, and so having to repeat the process of printing them out again.

In the 90’s I worked for a printed circuit board manufacturer that used paper tape drives to load the base “OS” into their CNC machines.

Paper tape is essentially punched cards on a 1" wide paper tape on a reel-to-reel setup. I think it used an optical reader.

Those amazing eggheads figured out how to transform 3D cad drawings from their engineer’s computers into a data stream the CNC machines understood, and somehow added networking to those CNC controllers that were from the Apollo era (the paper tape systems). Wish I had the sense to take a pic with a disposable camera at the time. I don’t even know what to search for to show it.

Edit: This controller is similar to what I saw in the nineties, but looks even newer! Haha

Note the paper tape drive.