Nice article. I liked very much seeing the "temp-in-place" technique applied, I guess it's very rare these days.

But I didn't recognise the description of the early 70s. I started in computing somewhere between 5 and 10 years ealier than you, and although I did work briefly on (sometimes "in" rather than "on" - walking around inside them was not uncommon) machines with very small stores (one using mercury delay lines for main storage, another using magnetostrictors) , they were already very obsolescent and long before 1970 this sort of thing was thoroughly obsolete. Typical "small" machines of the early 60s like the Elliott 803 (1959) and the IBM 1620 (also 1959) and the PDP-1 (1960?) had minimum shipable configurations with thousands of words/digits/whatever (they didn't use "bytes") of memory - you couldn't get one http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Skins/Classic/Images/RichTextBoxTable/tbl_bottomleft.gifwith less than 160kbits, 60kbits(?? maybe 72kbits, can't remember), and 72kbits respectively. And of course the at the opposite extreme were were things like the IBM 709, with 1152kbits memory, as early as 1958, the Ferranti Atlas I with 5Mbits of "One level storage" (Virtual Memory) 1962 and Ferranti Titan with 6Mbits of core store in 1964. I can't remember even seeing a machine with as little main memory as you mention after March 1969 (except in museums).

As for kilobyte discs, I was using 7Mbyte removable discs in 1967 (7Mbytes capacity, not kilobytes). These were the cheap option - the expensive option was 30 MBytes on a single exchangeable disc pack (the 30MByte version - actually 29MByte - was introduced by IBM early in 1965). Even some "drums" (in quotes because they were mostly single platter discs with a head per track, instead of the cylindrical drums with recording surface parallel to the axis of rotation of the 1950s) were by then up to 1 Mbyte. I really don't remember discs measured in kilobytes.

So it would be nice to know what machine models you were using - there seems to be a whole thread in the development of modern computers that I somehow managed to miss, and I'd like to read up on it.