In 1968 one of my school teachers (Brian Barker) introduced a computer programming class. We learnt FORTRAN and laboriously used hand punches that he had somehow borrowed from Imperial College. Each hole on the card was individually punched out by pushing it with a tiny hand tool through a clear plastic template that allowed us to only punch even columns. We could not add comments because comments were denoted by a "C" in column 7.
Every week he would take the cards to Imperial College get our jobs run and the next week we would get our print out back - 90% of the time it was showing us compiler errors so we could take a month or so finally to get a ten to twenty line program running.