All of the Computer Science courses at WPI required use of the dreaded Spectra batch computer (the professors were more comfortable with it). You actually had to punch your programs into a deck of cards, 1 line per card, and hand them to the operator. Minutes, hours, or occasionally days later, you would get back the deck of cards and a printout of the output (which, more often than not, consisted of a bunch of syntax error messages).

A keyboard-actuated punch that punches holes in a data medium.

n. A keyboard-activated device used to punch holes in predetermined locations on paper cards roughly the size of a business envelope. It was used to provide programs and data to early computing systems.

Manually entering data into a computer from a paper survey.