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Not very far off, the IBM 1130 was very much built around its punch-card reader. I've written a backprop in Fortran IV for the 1130 and while it works, it was tedious.

Add ten more years, and the IBM 801 could have been a CPU architecture good enough to scale all the way to the present day without emulation, unlike the 360.

A lot of our software really depends on things like fast disks and significant memory. I think we might have ended up with the development of memory-constrained algorithms that don’t exist now, and computing would be very much a batch-mode endeavor rather than the interactive process we have now.

In 1969 we had Lisp, and the PDP-10. Interactive computing was very doable even then. I'm sure Stallman would have love for ITS on the 10 to have remained the default.

The tragedy is that some folks 57 years later, still think their computers cannot handle something like Lisp, or languages with similar tooling.

The demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.

Either it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.