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Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of computers/hardware
The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans. Early mechanical tools to help humans with digital calculations, such as the abacus, were called "calculating machines", by proprietary names, or even as they are now, calculators. The machine operator was called the computer.
The first aids to computation were purely mechanical devices which required the operator to set up the initial values of an elementary arithmetic operation, then manipulate the device to obtain the result. Later, computers represented numbers in a continuous form, for instance distance along a scale, rotation of a shaft, or a voltage. Numbers could also be represented in the form of digits, automatically manipulated by a mechanical mechanism. Although this approach generally required more complex mechanisms, it greatly increased the precision of results. A series of breakthroughs, such as miniaturized transistor computers, and the integrated circuit, caused digital computers to largely replace analog computers.
I remember my dad talking about punching cards to Program the huge computer at Queens university. In high school, I was filling in the cards with a pencil. My young (at the time) brother-in-law won a vic-20 and was typing his commands.
My first personal computer was an Acorn Atom... I could only dream of the 64k that Bill Gates said was enough for anyone. I could never get the cassette tape to record my carefully typed and debugged programs.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 22 2016, @10:14AM
I too remember that - cheap and mono, but also anything that had chrome or metal tape settings was right out. This was for the BBC micro in my case, but any cassette-based system had essentially the same issue. However I also remember it being common knowledge at the time (early 80s), that might have depended on where you were though.
Counterintuitively (at least until you think about it a bit more), a good quality tape-to-tape deck was better for copy^H^H^H^H sharing software, when compared to two cheap mono decks speaker-to-mic and wrapped in a towel. But the latter would still do at a pinch - might take several tries though.