The students, taking a second-year paper on computer operating systems, saw punched cards and punched-card equipment in action, at Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, during a series of tutorial sessions on Thursday.
The demonstrations were conducted by Bruce McMillan, an engineer skilled in early computers and the unit record machines, using punched cards, which preceded computers.
Mr McMillan is also a member of an informal information technology heritage group which works to help safeguard the museum's holdings of early computers and other data processing machines.
Emeritus Prof Brian Cox (78), the former head of the Otago computer science department, said he had been helping with the teaching of a small part of the university paper at the museum over the past 10 years.
Many current students had never seen, first hand, the punched cards, used extensively in data processing equipment more than 50 years ago, and in some early computers.
He joked that students these days were more used to data being processed on their smartphones.
Prof Cox, who is also a member of the heritage group, said the museum held about 2800 artefacts, including about 1500 hardware items, in its collection of early computers and other data-processing equipment.
Prof Cox was in charge of operating Otago University's first and then only computer, the huge IBM 360/30, which arrived on campus in 1966.
Computers had since made "mind-boggling'' progress, with every Otago University office now home to at least one, albeit much smaller, computer, he said.
