Drop it? How quaint. The university had a high speed card reader that I think used air pressure for sucking the cards through an optical reader. I think it took less than a minute to suck through a 2000-card stack (standard box size). I once witnessed someone not closing the collecting slider at the card exit. The machine shot a stream cards over a distance of several yards against the next wall where they ricocheted to the ground in a disorganized cloud. Very impressive and a lot more disruptive to card order. It was common practice to let a stack run through the puncher and have it sequentially numbered in the last 8 columns (which is why those columns are ignored by FORTRAN IV). There was one peripheral with several output bins that you could use for sorting a stack that had become undone. Those were the days. These days a mouse is an input device, but then it was the greatest danger to data integrity. Because a punch card box makes for great nests when hollowed out in the middle of all the data-carrying cards.