LMAO!

I never did punch cards, but I have used paper tape with one of these:

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4051

And here is a video of the storage CRT: (they are beautiful to watch in person, and the one I used had a 2048x2048 vector space to draw in.

https://youtu.be/YQMQ62glZ44

On mine, I had a cassette like tape drive that had some CNC programming tools on it. Another tape had various utilities and some crude simulation programs.

User data was on paper tape, usually source code, or finalized G-code, or plots one might want to reproduce. Frankly, I love paper tape. And I have had to read it, patch instructions in with one of those little machines with all the hand push button punches and index gear to keep it lined up. Same for damaged tapes.

And my first machine language programs were hand assembled from blurry, photocopied data book pages mooched from the local university.

Sidenote: Moto was cool. I asked about documentation later for the 6809, and was able to have my parents take me to a local office where I got to chat with an engineer and left with a pile of docs, and reference databooks!

I did not get an assembler of my own until I mowed a lot of lawns and bought MAC/65 for my Atari. Prior to that, I was typing stuff into the mini-assembler on the Apple.

I was a kid, 14 for that stuff.

Later at 19 I ended up working in small shops using Tektronix hand me down gear while attending college. Super glad I fell into that experience frankly. Those Tek computers were odd, but well conceived and more powerful than one might think 8 bit stuff could be. The people in that shop made some impressive stuff essentially laid out and programmed on a 6800 CPU found in the Tek storage tube terminal / computers. They were interesting designs.

One could get one and just set it up for serial comms and use it as a weird but capable text display and or, graphics display like a paperless plotter. Xterm has Tektronix mode to support that even today.

Add some ROM and RAM, and peripherals, and then it was a powerful, technical computing micro computer. Disk drives, cartridge tape, paper tape read and punch, plotter, joystick, and off you go! Never did get to use a disk. But that fast cartridge tape drive and paper tape worked better than expected.

What I find interesting is younger people are checking this stuff out and or building their own gear. 8 bits is enough to really do stuff and understand the entire thing. While not practical given what we have today, it all is still educational in a way that appears to remain potent.

For my own fun reasons, and some product development, I have the luxury of...

I keep an Apple //e Platinum on my work bench. And I use it to do electronic projects the same way I did as a kid. Good for simple prototypes or to understand a sensor, do comms. When my current project slows, I plan on making a card with a Propeller chip on it to make a cool dev station that works like an Apple with command line, just type a line and go BASIC, as well as self hosted compiler and assembler... good times. And practical. People I work with and I have done a couple designs. It all works just fine and it is simple. No updates, no OS, just lean and mean.