Enormous dimensions, complicated military calculations, and thousands of vacuum tubes—this was the early supercomputer.

It was an electromechanical computer, using gears, punch tape, relays, and a five horsepower motor to keep it all running in sync. If you want to dig into how it actually worked, the deliciously ...

Also in the 1960s, data entry began migrating from keyboard-to-card to keyboard-to-magnetic tape for computer input, and slowly but surely punch cards died out, although some companies still used ...