On January 8, 1889, Herman Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782 described as

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

80 characters wide, and the punching is 8 bit-paths deep, so each character is represented as EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code). EBCDIC remains the standard character reprasenation on MVS Punched with a key punch machine.

Keep your deck in order. If you spill it, it's a pain. The deck is read with a card reader, the operator of which may have the job title Unit Record Equipment Operator.

Becoming obsolescent in the late 1970's, with the arrival of 3270 terminals.

One problem with reel tapes arose because computers read and write them in short, fast bursts. As the tape would feed off the reels during these bursts, it would come under a lot of strain, causing the tape to break. IBM solved this problem by feeding the tape off the reels into vacuum columns. When the tape was being pulled past the head it would feed from a loop in the column instead of directly off the reel.

Most datasets only use a small fraction of a tape. With reel tapes, this meant that the first few feet of tape were often heavily read and rewritten, and the bulk of the tape was unused. When a tape started to wear out, operators would cut off two or three feet, attach a new reflective sticker (that the drive used to find the beginning of data) and then would have a usable, if shorter, tape.