I was coming up a staircase in the science building at university once when the whole place was suddenly filled with fluttering punch cards. Turns out that a couple of floors above me, a student dropped his box of cards and it bounced past the rail into that foot-wide space that plummets from the top of the stairs to the very bottom. At which point, of course, the box opened. Thousands of cards rained down. It was actually quite festive.

I had only minimal contact with them myself, and I'm profoundly ok with that. For the most part, we used to print out our code in a barely-legible blue ink on those double-wide rolls of yellowish "burst paper" that were so common in the dot-matrix age.