The one advantage of relatively primitive formats is that, at a cost in speed, you can brute-force them with modern general purpose sensors. A punch card, for instance, isn’t all that tightly packed, so even a lousy scanner or imperfect photograph should allow you to work out where the holes are. Somebody with copies of ISO 1681:1973 and ISO 6586:1980 could bang together a ‘punch card reader’ in software that would probably work on your iRetina personal computer in 2090. If they used a sheetfeed scanner, the throughput would even be decent.
If you used some weird proprietary encoding, or the cards are physically degraded, you have issues; but you aren’t under any obligation to use a card reader.
