Ah the memories! All of them bad!
I used many boxes of these punch cards to get my Computer Science degree on the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Rust Computing Center IBM 370/158 mainframe... which cost hundreds of thousands and yet had far less power than my Blackberry today!
My first 'home computer' was an ADDS-880 Teletype with a 300 baud acoustic modem which connected me to a Partition Data Set on that mainframe. I thought I was chopping in tall cotton; very few folks had mainframe access in their home!
The PC that I am typing this on is one of five networked throughout my house, any one of which has more capabilities than all of the computers in the State of Alabama had at that time combined. And data transfer - from 300 baud over phone lines to 1.5 Million bps cable internet access... that's some amazing change!
I can't wait to see what the next thirty years will bring.
Thanks for sharing this piece of history that most computer users today have never (thankfully!) even heard of!
I picked this up at the 4th Annual Celebrate Summer Event in Tishamingo Mississippi and brought it to my Irondale Pit Stop Travel Bug Hotel in Irondale Alabama.