>One of the most brilliant innovations I ever saw came during the early 60's from an engineer at IBM who had the insight that rounded corners on punched cards (they had been square up to that point) would not reduce data capacity, but would save millions of tons of paper per year and reduce jams on card handling machines.
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>A complete win in every respect.

Saving less than 1% of paper... how? That paper still had to be produced and cut off. Perhaps recycling the corners was a saving.

The prevention of jams was the big thing, I think. A jammed card was a waste, the time needed to fix the jam, make a copy of the card, repeat the run - was probably even bigger waste. But I guess the "millions of tons of paper saved" sounds really good in an article, even though it implies "because we have to use billions of tons of paper for cards until better technology comes".