I actually did my very first programming with punch cards on a mainframe, thanks to an older neighbor friend who was auditing a comp sci class at the local university (this was the late '70s and they were still teaching intro classes with punch cards). Even worse than typing out BASIC and seeing if it ran correctly was poking holes in a bunch of cards, depositing them in your slot in the basement of the computer science building, and then picking up your inch-thick printout three days later to find out what you'd fucked up. Typing games into that VIC-20 seemed like heaven in comparison.