But otherwise there will never be another era like this – and the one we’ve had is growing hazier by a year. The reason many of the photos above are fuzzy scans of ads, is that many of the machines themselves never made it to 2019 – thrown away as too large to keep, too young to preserve, too corporate to care.
And that’s why it’s worth treasuring a good photo of a large furniture-like computer, and I want to leave you with a modern one that’s among the best of them all. It’s a photograph of a 1965, display-less IBM 1130, made by James “Docubyte” Ball as part of his stunning
Guide to Computing. It does a great job showcasing a forgotten beauty of those old machines, and reminding us of that weird time where keyboards were among the smallest part of a computer rather than – as today – the biggest: