Google in 1960

What a find Randy! ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

My husband was intrigued – he is trying to remember times with the Univac mainframe used then – these queries could have been put on punchcard and fed to the computer which then printed out the answer.

Back then you had huge disks, 3 feet in diameter, and you could store about 5 million characters on the 10 possible disks per computer.

There was a read/write head that looked like a tuning fork that moved on air pressure that went in and read the disks.

They also had aluminum and copper tapes back then that were 3/4 inch wide. You could read and write to them also.

One of those computers was big enough to fill a two bedroom house with ease and generated enormous heat, so they needed a lot of air conditioning.

They worked very slowly and many tasks were done just as fast by hand.

So, theoretically this could have been done via snail mail for some types of info, but of course there was no web, groups, froogle and whatevers. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />