My first exposure to a computer was in approx 1979, at school. We didn't actually have a computer at the school, but a local insurance company did. So we wrote our small programs on punched cards (in a dialect of BASIC IIRC), and at the beginning of next weeks class, were given listings of our compilation errors! I loved it! It was definitely the future!
My dad has some similar stories from his time in university learning to program. This used to be commonplace. Insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and large universities were typically the only places with computers at the time (mainframes), and so in order to ensure they had appropriate pipeline to hire more technical staff they would donate unused computer time for batch processing to smaller universities/colleges to ensure students could run their programs. My dad went to a very small religious university, but it offered some programming courses, and they ran their programs by "compiling" their punched cards in order, rubber banding them, and then handing them in where they were all stacked together in an accordion file, sealed, and then mailed via USPS to the state university to be run and returned, it would take on average 2 weeks to get results back as printed output + your original cards with markings from the sysop. I still have all his old punch cards, he kept them in a shoebox in my grandparent's basement.
Computers didn't begin becoming commonplace until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, even in business contexts or universities.
