Yes. even in 1966 to 1970 it was still like this with IBM 1620 mainframes and IBM 360s. You still had
to use punch cards and batch programming and sorting machines to get what you wanted from the data then. RAM didn't exist yet (at least not in the business world just at NASA) because it was too expensive still to make it profitable to use in the private sector. So, microminiaturization and Ram being cheap enough to use made amazing changes in the industry starting in the 1970s and 1980s.
I learned to program Cobol and Fortran in College starting in 1966 when I was 18 but you fed your programs into the computer after you punched them into punch cards that machines could read.
And yes, that's megabytes not Gigabytes.
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https://historydaily.org/bizarre-photos-and-the-remarkable-stories-behind-them/46
Uncategorized | June 13, 2019
Here's what 4.5 megabytes of data in 62,500 punched cards looked like in 1955.
Before all of your information could fit in the palm of your hand, data was a beast to be wrangled, it was something to way in tons. Herman Hollerith invented punch card computing for use in the 1890 census, and that same card program existed with minor tweaks throughout the mid 20th century. When processing applications via card, no computer was required. Instead, the cards were run through a tabulating machine in order to count key punches.
These data cards had to be kept in a strict order. If anything was changed or lost it could ruin years of work and cause a massive headache for whoever had the fix the error. Thankfully, we’ve moved beyond such cumbersome means of calculation.
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