Sam Smith - Loading a 5MB IBM hard drive in 1956. A couple of years earlier my math teacher, Miss Darnell, had gone to Harvard for the summer to learn about computers. She had, in fact, almost been locked in one overnight because the machines of the day, with their innumerable vacuum tubes, occupied whole buildings while barely doing the work of an early Mac. (While I don't know the size of the one that almost swallowed her, a couple of years later Harvard acquired a UNIVAC, which had 7,000 tubes and 500 miles of wiring.) She came back and taught us the basis of boolean algebra. I wouldn't see a computer for twenty years, but when I did they didn't scare me.
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