The B&W laptop I handled c. 1991 wasn’t all that bad. It also wasn’t cheap, and no, I doubt that many university students had one, but the concept wouldn’t be alien. Jack’s understandable shock is making him exaggerate his problem.

And I don’t think that’s really a handheld card punch; I assumed it was a two-hole file punch, and Jack was just confused. The last time I used punch cards was in the ’80s, for mainframe batch control, and they were regarded as silly antiques and bloody nuisances even then.