4.5 megabytes of data represented by punch cards - photo

[Duke_of_URL]

The Fortran days... ah the memories. I tell young'uns today that when I learned software we had no such thing as a monitor, mouse, or keyboard, just a keypunch machine, cards, and a line printer for the results (good, or error codes). I used to dread being behind a PhD Engineering student in the line to the card reader. They usually had two or three large boxes of cards to feed, and it would take a good 10 minutes to successfully load them. Graphics? Ha! I had to write my own program to graph my results. Software had to be very elegant when working under a memory restriction.