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Stiff paper cards with holes punched in patterns to store instructions or data. They ran from the Jacquard loom of 1804 to the computers of the 1970s.
There's this beauty in the constraint of something like a punch card, where you have eighty columns, a very limited number of bytes of data that can fit. That single card acts as an input to the computer.
Matt DesLauriers, Matt DesLauriers on a Generative World
His film Hummingbird (1967), which MoMA purchased as one of the first computer-generated works in its collection, was very labor intensive. His line drawing of a hummingbird was transformed by a programmed sequence of movements. There were twenty-five motion sequences and 30,000 punch cards that had to be fed into the computer.
Caroline Csuri, Caroline Csuri on Charles Csuri and Computation as Playground