May I show you my collection of slide rules?
When it comes to doing econometrics, students today just have no idea how lucky they are - compared with old geezers like me, that is. So, just for the record, this is how it went down when I was running regressions as a student, in the pre-P.C. (personal computer and politically correct) era:
Punch-card with a single SHAZAM command:
GENR LAHERCPI = LOG(AHERCPI)
GENR LAHERCPI = LOG(AHERCPI)
Punch-card with one row (5 integer fields) of input data
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Here, we have one row (one sample observation) from a data matrix for five input variables. For a sample of size n there would have been a stack of n cards like this.