LOU wrote on Jul 10^th, 2011 at 6:59pm:

This was a dispatch pool of almost a dozen airlines. I worked an IBM-360 with a two foot hard drive and punch cards to load the wind data to produce one of the first computer generated flight plans. The IBM-360 was state-of-the-art in the mid 60's, today you would fall off your chair laughing if you could see it.

;D I can imagine it to some degree.

The computer I worked with in the Army (1979-82) was a massive thing that filled up a room the size of a house. It used magnet tapes (like the ones on the old reel-to-reel tape recorders) to store the data. We had to change those tapes every time they got full, which didn't take very long at all. It was unstable and "fell over", this is what we called it when it crashed, at least once a week, sometimes more, leaving us to handle thousand of communications from the worlds military forces by hand until it got back up and running. I reckon my desktop computer would breeze through all that. It was an early sixties computer and it didn't have a hard disk drive (I never saw or heard about it). I used to hang around the Civilian technicians as much as I could and glean as much info from them as I could about computers. That's what led to me to the field of computers and IT.

Mark