I’m 34. And glad I’m not alone!
The better card punch machines could be set to automatically put a sequence number in specified columns. Then if you dropped a deck, you just fed the cards into the automatic sorting machine. Paper tape was slower and more fragile than cards.
The first computer I used (1973) was an IBM 1130:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/1130/1130_intro.html
22 here…
how many bytes are on a punch card?
My first PC was a DOS box, not exactly ancient history really, although i do remember friends had a commodore 64 with a tape deck and yeah it was really slow.
whereas most people here came to java from lower level languages, i’m attempting to go the opposite direction… the first programming language i ever learned was Java, and although i would say i’m decent at it now, throw a C or C++ program my way and i’d probably break something… currently reading “C++ for Java Programmers”.
I never had anything to do with punch cards, I guess I’m too young for that. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 and I had to poke into BASIC REM statements to program assembly, because it could only load and save basic programs (not binaries)… Oh man, what a chore 
A standard card had 80 columns each with twelve rows. The common encodings produced a 64 character set, thus each column was equivalent to 6 bits. Programs were stored in boxes which held 2000 cards.
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/codes.html
and this paper seems to describe one of the systems I used in Adelaide back in 1973
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=810798&jmp=cit&dl=portal&dl=ACM
I knew the program was somewhat experimental, but hadn’t previously realised that it had resulted in published papers. This system used cards which you marked using a soft pencil instead of using a punch, thus avoiding the problem of sharing a limited number of punch machines amongst lots of students.
20 here! I played a bit on some old green screens in elementary school, and eventually go my first PC which was a Tandy. I learned how to manage Dos then eventually Win 3.1, but usually I wouldn’t load Windows and stuck to a little Dos loader app to load my games
Well then… I’m just 16! My first gaming experience was on the NES, playing duck hunt. Damn that dog…
My first computer had Windows 95 on it, and I was acctually programming small C-Apps with it. (Think ‘Hello World’ and ‘Console-Fireworks’) I didn’t get to have the joy of a command-line experience until I tryed out Linux. (Debian happens to be my favorite flavor, btw).
I feel young in this crowd…
Another 34 year old here - 34 but a women guessed my age to be 24 the other day - all those days locked in a room coding (out of the sun) is good for the skin 
Haha! ;D
That happened to me when I celebrated birthday lask week (29), some gils tought that I am 23 - 24…
Maybe there is something about coding after all (some commertial!)
Hah! I turned 42 last May so it turns out I’m not even the oldest fogey here!