The first time I ‘used’ a computer was in the early 1970s. At the technical university in Delft. As a student you made a pile of punched cards on a very large, noisy machine into which you had punched your ‘app’ [programs we called those app-lications], values for some parameters and your name and student number. You handed in your stack of cards to a computer employee. He fed those stacks to a large reading device that was in direct [ 🙂 !] contact with a gigantic machine that, in addition to a matrix printer, could also control a real plotter. As a result, you could then produce a beautiful image of a regular n-gon. That ‘n’ stood for the number of angles.
The first computer I actually worked with was a DPS7 from Bull in the 1980s. The image above is of a slightly older kind: ours no longer had those tape recorders. That round thing in the front is a removable hard drive. Unlike our customers, the software company I worked for didn’t have to change those drives very often.
They were easy to lift… The storage capacity: almost a whole MB. Some three photos with a size and pixel density of the photo above could have fit on it …
That tiny memory card that I just took out of my phone and put in my Chromebook can handle 128 Gigabytes. More than 100000 times as much as on such a disc.
By the way, if you look for an image of a removable hard drive, google search will find all kinds of storage media from somewhere between 70 and 95% of that 1973-2022 trajectory. Most of these are NOT disks.
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