Yes, although we might laugh at the thought now, the oh-so-primitive punch card machine was indeed the forefather of the sleek and smooth PC on which you are looking at now. And strangely enough, they have survived even well into the 20th Century, because not only were they used to code programs in the mainframe era, they were also used as bookmarks, notepads, or perhaps even Post-It notes!
The first company to use the punch card was the Andrew R. Jennings Computing Center of the Case Institute of Technology, and an entire generation of computer programmers punched their first programs onto them, usually written in Algol for the Case UNIVAC 1107. Yet in 1967, Case Institute of Technology shut down the 1107 to "keep up with the times", and instead opened the Chi Corporation, a private computing utility (nobody really knows what that is supposed to mean; another relic catchphrase of the 60s). Chi -which was Greek for the X, the unknown- was supposed to provide universities computing services.