(M60) here. first year of college, 1982. fortran programming. the basement of the physics building was called the "Student Input / Output Facility". A room full of keypunches, about 1/2 broken. two card readers and two line printers. there was a student employee on duty 24 hours a day with the job of keeping the printers in paper. The students had a line until 2 or 3am, waiting for the card reader.

There was also a room that said "graduate students only". It was full of ADM3 terminals, connected to the same CDC computer as the card readers / printers. Along with documentation. Lots of documentation. I never punched a card, but probably spent more time reading and learning how to use the time sharing system.

Hacker story. So, you want a student account and password? Make up a card deck with JCL that just copies from stdin to the printer. Put one 'blue card', which means "end of record". And no 'red card', which meant end of job. Get in line, run your job. The next student job (unless it started with a red card, which was recommended, but never done) would copy to the printer output of your job. First line was account name. Then a comma, and then the password.

You were in.....

That was the last year of cards. Undergraduates got terminals. And the CS dept got a pdp 11.

I work with a developer who’s a year older than you and says he was in the last class at his university to learn on punch cards, so you probably are among the youngest. At least for mainstream use; I’m sure younger computer history geeks still learn to use them for fun.

My understanding is that a year after taking the course that they scrapped all that equipment and reallocated the 3000 sq/ft of space for something else. So I just squeezed in.