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

At one time IBM made a large part of its income from punched cards.

That changed over time.
My first IT manager job was at a company that used about 25K cards per day. Once they got onto mag media, we sold the cards (and the little things that were punched out of them) to a recycler who sold them back to us as new cards, taking away a huge profit from IBM and reducing our card cost by more than half.

Then the CRT came along and the recycler went out of business.


Yes, the reduction in jams was huge. The square corner seemed to want to grab anything it could.