Gosh I got to take Electronics in high school. We studied the Super Hetrodyne Radio even had 2 weeks on transistors.
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1956, I was still in Junior High, 9th grade, maybe wood shop, drafting, a ways to go, never saw any electronics in our HS, other than part of Physics, a year or so out, at 18, I went to the big city of Chicago, DeVry Technical Institute, but I’d already been fiddling with old radios n such, stuff the radio shop here in NorCal were tossing, trade-ins, I’d drag 'em home, tear apart, if I couldn’t fix 'em… I should have pestered them into working for 'em, but… Then I fell into Western Electric, stuck around 40 years, saw transistor units come to field, spent many months over the years in training, troubleshooting stuff from relay based gear to solid state, data, cellular, microwave, carrier systems… Managed to retire in '02… Dodged management, wanted to stay in the equipment, making stuff work for either the first time, or updating existing stuff… Fun times…
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This came up on FB just now… Luckily I never had to deal with punchcards…
What 5 megabytes of computer data looked like in 1966: 62,500 punched cards, taking four days to load.
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I remember touring an insurance company’s data center here, locally, they had a mass data storage unit on one floor, it had arms in each unit, aisle, that when something was called up the arm would reach out, select the right tape module, and insert it into he reader it was like a wall with these arms scurrying about, the closest I can find is this image’ Other floors had removable disk packs setting atop them. Impressive for the time, maybe the '70s…
Their printer downstairs was a super fast line printer, it ate boxes of pinfeed greenbar paper so fast the output shot way up in the air before falling back into the collection bin…
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