#20: Punch Card Operator
Businesses depended on punch card operators to keep everything running. Many women worked at keypunch machines, converting payroll records, inventories, census data, and financial reports into stacks of coded cards that early computers could read. IBM’s punch card systems became a familiar sight in offices, universities, and government agencies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, magnetic storage and personal computers had taken over, making punch cards and the jobs built around them obsolete.
