[molbioguy]

Working with the real thing, I remember the horrible feeling when the rubber band holding the card deck together snaps! The FORTRAN cards all had line numbers, but what a pain for a several hundred line program.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I heard it mentioned by an old timer that some programmers in those days used to draw a diagonal line with marker across the side of the stack of cards. This was to make sorting the cards faster if the stack was dropped.

[molbioguy]

Yes, that helped you. But you still had to put them back in order :( Visual sorting O(n).