The card punch machines at my school had a hopper for all the holes punched out. I would collect this confetti and deliver them to a little girl on my paper route who was delighted by it.
My first programming classes in college in 1984 were on an IBM mainframe and we used punched card readers to submit our jobs. Years later, my first real job after college was working at what was then the Defense Communications Agency in the basement of the Pentagon, and my best friend had a large collection of punched cards that he kept. He liked to always have a few in his shirt pocket for when he was taking notes.
For those interested in old data storage technologies like punched cards, see also punched tape.[0]
Forty-odd years ago, I worked for a company that had a lot of files stored on punched tape. One day a fire broke out a couple of floors below it, and by the time the fire was out, the punched tapes were thoroughly soaked. Those who needed the files had quite a time getting them read and re-created.