I started out programming on an NCR 315 when it was in competiton with the just released IBM 360s in the mid 60’s. We had punch card and paper tape readers, mag tape drives, mechanical line printers and a whopping 10-20K of RAM. Filled up a good size room which had to be temp and humidity controlled with a raised floor for all the cabling.
You've rekindled old memories. Was a programmer on the 360s starting in 1967, coding in RPG and using a punch card compiler that was a foot high - you inserted your program in the middle. Got looked down on by the COBOL guys but we did some NEAT stuff with it. We replaced our tape drives with SEVEN MEG hard disk drives and nearly wet ourselves with random access and all that space, which was more than we would EVER use.
Think out mainframe was 16K and when we wrote programs that were too large, all we got was a "Program too big" message. You had to blindly start trimming wherever you could as you didn't know how far you had exceeded memory. One time we got an invoice to print by removing a period.
For a long time we prided ourselves on writing tight code ('cause we HAD to). Computer time was more expensive than programmers until one day we realized power had increased so much that the reverse came true. I used to get yelled at because I didn't spend hours desk-checking code (and still get compile errors) and instead just let the computer find them in seconds. Had a hard time explaining to the non-geek manager that times had changed.
Years ago some government guy said not to worry about them tracking you as they had tons of info on punched tape or regular tape that they couldn't read as nobody had the programs or knew how to change them. Hope that's still true.