I don't know about the thread, but the website article can be found here.

When I was in grad school (many years ago, don't ask) many of us used a punch card system to gather and sort data. The cards were roughly 3x8 in. and had a series of little numbers in circles that ran around the perimeter. The researcher assigned meaning to each number. You wrote your notes on the card then punched through the relevant numbered holes. For example, say you were interviewing a group of people and wanted to be able to sort by what the interviewee said and their age or gender or some other combination of factors. You would assign the circles to meaningful data categories for your research. Hole #1=male interviewee, #2=female, #3=adolescent, #4 adult aged 20-30, #5 adult aged 70-80, #33 answered "yes" to interview question 8, etc. You punched all the numbered circles that applied to that note. Then, to sort the data, you used a knitting needle looking device to gather all the cards with a certain hole punched, then repeated that action to find subsets within your set. I used it for about a month then moved onto that new and exciting tool on campus, the mainframe computer! It took a while to write a basic program for sorting data but hey, it was better than punching all those little holes and jabbing myself with the knitting needle thingy. I can't remember the name of the cards but I'll see if google will be my friend and find it.