I'm old enough to know what carbon paper is.
I'm also old enough to remember that a floppy disk was 5 1/4", not 3.5'"......and there are adults today that don't know what I'm talking about at all.
I remember those, and the 8" floppies too.
en.wikipedia.org
I started working with computers when the most common mass storage device was magnetic tape. The standard back in the 1970s was 1600 bits per inch (bpi), but that was later improved to 6250 bpi.
Inter-record gaps were 1/2" unmagnetized spaces on the tape; inter-file gaps were 1".
When movies were made during that era that had a technical elements, what was usually shown were spinning tape drives.
I had a file cabinet in my office where programs I had written were stored as decks of punch cards, and the data they processed was kept on magnetic tape.
Those were not "the good old days" - it took a lot of time and effort to write and debug a program. A typical sequence consisted of punching up the program, taking it down to the computer area and handing it to a computer operator to be included in that night's run of batch jobs, followed by getting a printout the next day that said your program didn't compile because you didn't start one of the statement lines in column 7, which was required for FORTRAN compilers.
It was a necessary step in the evolution of technical work, but thankfully it's in the rear-view mirror now.
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