That wasn't technology, it was very heavy paperology. In the 1960s, West Virginia University was moving their data center. That was in the days when most of the data was actually on punch cards, in the days before widespread use of computer tape. They loaded it into a truck trailer. The bottom fell out.

Two common methods were used to rapidly return cards to their proper order. If data was only in columns 1-72, it could be sequenced in columns 73-80. The scrambled deck could be resorted ... if only one deck was involved. A fast method was to draw a diagonal ink line on the top of the card deck. Out-of-sequence cards could rapidly be detected and reinserted that way if the box was dropped.

Punch cards were made the size of the dollar bills at the time, and were used previously in a different format for the Jacquard loom.

The first industrial use was successful collating of the 1890 U.S. Census. The results of THAT were consumed by fire many years ago, with only a few fragmentary county results remaining.

Another more recent punch card had 120 tiny holes in a 60 x 2 format. It never caught on before both formats died.

I once had to move some data to different columns. The easiest way was to wire a plugboard to do it, feed the deck, and punch out new ones.

The results were naked cards with punches only. There was also a choice for printing the results on the cards. Another machine made large print of columns 1-40 on one line. After flipping a switch, you could feed the deck through again to print columns 41-80 on a different line. The other choice was to set up a drum for the 029 keypunch to print columns 1-80 in columns corresponding to the punch (easiest for programming purposes).

Several years after, in 1992, I applied for a job with the Texas Attorney General. Their application stated that all postcollege experience were to be with personal computers. (I still have one of the applications.) "What was I suppose to do for eight years", I said, "until the personal computer was INVENTED??"

Sure, it sounded like age discrimination to me. An Attorney General's office consists of a pack of lawyers, so you can't really sue them.

I took a summer computing course at a local college when I was in high school. This was the early seventies and everything was done with punch cards. We learned Fortran IV. Not only did I not know how to program, I also didn't know how to type. I spent every Saturday morning in ciderblock walled, windowless class rooms. Then the rest of the morning was spent in a cold computer lab with the worst fluorescent lighting I've ever been subjected to - punch card machines, band printers and card readers clattering incessantly. Every week I'd come home with an absolutely splitting headache. I swore I never have anything to do with computers - ever.

But then the first affordable micro computers came around. I got a little timex-sinclair - the one with the membrane key pad. It was a piece of crap, but I loved it. I was working at a mortgage bank and the IT department couldn't figure out how to code the financial data for one particularly complicated loan - negative amortization, adjustable rate, different interest caps, etc. I used the timex to code up a program in basic and gave it to the IT guys. I never heard anything about it until years later when I found out that they had converted it COBOL and were using it in production. Like the saying goes - no good deed goes unpunished - or in this case, gets any recognition. That bank was one of the many that went belly up in the late 80's - too f#@*ing bad.

Anyway, that's how I got hooked on silicon.

This is turning into an ancient hardware thread. I remember a $1500 calculator (not a computer, but equivalent to a $10-$15 scientific calculator now) with neon display that was kept in a locked room. The room has 2 in there for the whole dormitory to use and you had to pick a time if it got crowded. We had to leave a student ID and sign in to use the thing. My first personal calculator cost $150 and the batteries became nonrechargeable after only a few months. These were primitive Ni-Cads and they probably depolarized. Newer Ni-Cads are more reliable.

In the military, we had some 16K systems. The discrete metal doughnuts were placed at an angle and each had three wires going through the center in X, Y and Z directions. The cores were usually made by Indian tribes because they were used to doing fine beadwork and it was easy for them. We could either boot from tape, or hand-enter the boot code with fingers tips and lights .... then put 70 in the p register and hit start.

One summer it got VERY hot outside... 117 degrees F. The computers held up until it was 105 degrees F in the data center, and then gave out.
It was all discrete components in those days ... no circuitboards.

We had 5 level paper tape for data and 8 level Friden paper tape for reading in the programs. Got'ta love that "color shift" to get a bunch of other characters.