What you're describing sounds very weird because punchcards are mechanical media and colored cellophane would be optical. We didn't have any popular optical media until CDs. I think using optical media to store the extremely limited amount of data something like punchcard can store makes no sense.

[–] Nouvellalia@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

It only really made sense as a way to give slides meant for human viewing, computerized data for sorting, filling, or otherwise using simultaneously with the slide. Like, a picture of an engineering diagram, patent, survey site, military target, etc.

Before we could store a picture as raw binary data, this was an interesting way to fill the need to digitally notate images. Punch cards like this were definitely in use for a while. I have a post above with an image.