Mostly women, keypunch operators typed data and even program source code onto punched cards on machines like the IBM 026 and 029, one card per line of a program. Interactive terminals and video screens let programmers type code directly into the computer, and the job disappeared within a generation.
Keypunch operator no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1950s–1960s
Mainframes and batch programming
Early programs were submitted as decks of punched cards and run in batches, often overnight, so a single typo could cost a programmer an entire day waiting for the next run. Mathematicians, and in large numbers women, moved from hand computation straight into this new 'programming' work, since it was seen as clerical and detail-oriented rather than prestigious. FORTRAN (1957) and COBOL (1959) took hold in this decade, and the sheer difficulty of building reliable large systems on this hardware set up the 'software crisis' the next era would try to name and fix.
What else was happening then
1890
Hollerith's punch cards tabulate a census
Herman Hollerith's punched-card tabulating machines process the US Census in about a year, work that had taken the previous count almost eight years by hand; his company later becomes part of IBM.
1943–1945
Six women program the ENIAC
Kay McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman program the room-sized ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania by physically setting switches and plugging cables, with no manual and no programming language to guide them.
1952
Grace Hopper completes the first compiler
Hopper's A-0 system at Remington Rand translates symbolic mathematical notation into machine code automatically, replacing the error-prone practice of hand-copying subroutine addresses — a direct ancestor of every compiler since.
1957
FORTRAN ships for the IBM 704
John Backus's team at IBM releases FORTRAN after about two years of work; within two years, over half of all machine-run code in the US is reportedly written in it.
Where that work lives now
Writes, tests and maintains the code that runs modern life — and is one of the first professions watching AI automate its own daily work.
💻 Software Engineer →