But, will anything still read them?

Naaaa, it's always good to know the "nuts and bolts" of what's going on. My first computer course was in '77. I was a junior in high school and we wrote our programs in Fortran, created the punch cards in class, then took them to city hall to run them on the city's mainframe. I flunked my first college computer class, I wasn't intrested in using the punch cards and Fortran to do DB programs, I was more interested in the mini-mainframes in the main computer room that I could write GRAPHICS programs for (and save on... wait for it... punch TAPE!) I took a computer architecture class (when I finally went back to college) in '85 and an assembly course (used an 8088). I think those were the best courses for understanding what the computer is really doing each time you make a call or store something in memory. Makes me really appreciate the programming advancements... though you can't beat assembly for shear speed! I got into programming by accident. Started out drafting, earned a Materials Engineering degree, taught myself AutoCad (on DOS). I started writing lisp to do the grunt work for me, then parametric programs connecting to an Oracle DB I set up on an AS400 (the company financials server), then Quick Basic w/ Assembly. From there I took a job as a "real" programmer. :-D