These old photos do not convey the noise and spectacle. The guys are in white shirts and ties, but those old machine rooms were more like a factory floor than

These old photos do not convey the noise and spectacle. The guys are in white shirts and ties, but those old machine rooms were more like a factory floor than an office. Part of the reason they were separated off was to try to contain the noise. Those line printers struck the page with 132 characters at once - WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! - and the paper is almost flying out the top. Those high speed card readers consumed a stack of thousands of cards in a minute - it reminded you of a log moving into the whirling blade at a sawmill. Then there was the roar (not hum) of the fans and the banging of the keypunches and teletypes - much louder than typewriters. You really got the sense that computation was a physical, mechanical process that consumed a lot of energy.