The average modern website takes more than this per page to display its content… it’s absurd.
What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday
Submitted 1 month ago by fantawurstwasser@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.vintag.es/2025/02/5-megabytes-of-computer-data.html
Comments
mp3@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The average modern website steals more personal data than this from you when you visit
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And most can be replaced with nothing with no loss in value
marker2002@midwest.social 1 month ago
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is the nice lady still inside?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
With all the onlookers.
futatorius@lemm.ee 1 month ago
When I started in software, my first employer was just phasing out punched cards for programming. One of my jobs was to work out how programming would be done using terminals instead of the old workflow of submitting coding sheets to card-punch operators who would then pass the jobs on to operations. Typically you’d find out if your code compiled the next morning.
By that time (late 1970s), cards had sequence numbers (usually numbered 10, 20, 30 so you could interpolate a few cards if need be). If you dropped a deck on the floor, you just had to carefully gather them back up (so they wouldn’t get bent or torn), feed them into a card sort machine, and wait until the deck was sorted. You could also run a special batch job to clone a card deck, for example if you wanted to box it up and ship it to another location.
The big challenge with cardless programming was that computer reliability wasn’t great in those days, so you needed highly reliable persistent storage of some kind. That was generally magnetic tape. Disk drives were way too expensive, and optical disks hadn’t been widely adopted yet. So to save your work, you used tar or some non-/Unix-OS equivalent. There was version-control software, but it was primitive (rcs, which later had svn built over it).
On the positive side, you could compile and build without an overnight wait.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Seems about right. One card had 80 columns, a byte for each one, so 5,000,000 bytes divided by 80 would be 62,500 cards.
JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The IBM 503, the last valve computer, that Cobol and Fortran, the first languages were developed had 20 bit words.
So an 80 column card could fit 4 words across. Thats why terminals had 80 coulmns of text - so they were the same size as punch cards.
Fortran only used 72 columns, so the last 8 were unused.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I remember our first personal computer had 40 columns on the screen, but we ended up getting an 80 column graphics card for it.
I taught myself basic, but the first language I took in college was fortran, and it was on cards. A bit of an aberration: they had moved on to somewhat more modern equipment, but the lab was being upgraded, so they reverted you the card system for a semester temporarily. It was out of date, but not wildly so at the time.
A_A@lemmy.world 1 month ago
One line of code was called a card - - if I remember correctly that was 1,000 years ago, maybe less, i’m not sure now 😆. Thanks for recalling me the 80 characters per line, fond memories, takes me way back.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well, it might or not be a line of code - depends a lot on the language. It’s 80 bytes, and a byte is one character. You could have continuation cards if your line was more than 80. That wasn’t ever needed for assembly language, rarely for Fortran, but very common for COBOL.
TechAnon@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I’m over here managing a local back up of about half a TB of pics and videos. Also - I moved from Google Photos to Ente. So much data and I know people out there have way more than I do. Crazy to think about.
geography082@lemm.ee 1 month ago
With that even less you could run the internet
treadful@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
It still looks like that but it did then, too.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What would be truly amazing would be a 5MB variant of this picture so no matter what it always looks like 5MB
blazeknave@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Wouldn’t it look the same printed out today? Aren’t punch cards just binary?
TseseJuer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
maybe you missed the point
A_A@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Image
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
She looks like she KNOWS you’re thinking of taking one single punchcard from the middle of the pile, thus rendering the whole thing useless.
And she’s not having your shit.
A_A@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes, she certainly has the look of someone who knows what a huge amount of work these piles of cards represent. There would have been no turbulent kids running around these.
JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
She lives in the Mary Poppins house and has to stabilize her stack of cards like this every time the neighbour fires the canon.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
one can number them with a pen, and then find the missing one or guess what was there
TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world 1 month ago
All your need to do is drop in one card randomly with all the holes punched out to screw up those things… there was a name for doing that to be a dick but I forgot and am drunk right now so I don’t feel like looking it up.
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Who is this programmer?
A_A@lemmy.world 1 month ago
i copied that image from the article of the post without reading that article itself. But, since you asked, i went in that article … and all i could find is this :
So, unfortunately, the nice lady might just be a “banana for scale” here 😯 !