TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.
One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn't throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn't need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.
We used unused punchcards to make flashcards in elementary school in the late 80’s / early 90’s. I guess the county bought a bunch and had to find another use.
And now I realize the primary definition of flashcard has changed since then, from study aid to digital storage.
Let's say that we have a more recent micro SD card of 1 TB. So to contain the same information in a punch card (with a byte density of 80 byte/156 cm² = 0.512 byte/cm²), we would need a card of 512,820,512,820 cm². If I'm not mistaken that would be a punch card the size of 51 km²!! This is wild :O
It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.
"To contrast, the human brain apparently can't remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard."