My first CADD system (b4 that I drew on paper w/ pencils) was a VAX 11-730, later a VAX 11-780 (it may have been a 785 which was a slightly better model). The 780 was the size of a large side-by-side refrigerator and required a cold room and 220 volt power.
Internally, it had an 80mb operating drive and a 160mb storage drive. External were two 300mb disk drives, each the size of a dishwasher, also requiring 220 power & cooling.
Internal was also a “pizza oven” magnetic tape drive. It was called pizza oven b/c a front door opened downward and you inserted the 9-track mag tape reel (about 12” dia) as you would a pizza pie. Each mag tape held approx. 50mb of data. Every Friday I did weekly backups. Also did the dailies and we stored the monthly backups off-site.
Things were way different back then lol
I do remember that. I used a Vax 11 in college. In fact we had a 5 computer cluster. And your right, the tape drives were huge. But I went home and my father had bought the first IBM XT. So somewhere in the 70’s it went from a refrigerator size to a Kleenex box size.