One line of computer programming, whichever language you were using. Up to 80 characters wide, same as the card's width.
I remember. And we loved it. No home computers, no cellphones, no internet. Mid 70's in my case.
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@Full_marx Librarian in me says...
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era
@Full_marx
A nicer photo, showing a used card and details.
We can see the card's instruction, I highlighted in green :
Z(1) = Y + W(1)
In English, it takes a lot more wording to transmit the instruction, but I believe it would read as: "Let array Z, cell 1 be equal to variable Y plus contents of array W, cell 1"
...where Z and W were previously defined and initialized as single dimensional (think a straight line of mailboxes, each cell contains some value you chose to store there) arrays.
It's been a long time, Fortran. 😉