The watch on my wrist has a thousand times — yes, that's a thousand — more data storage than the "big" 80 MB (no, that's not a typo either, megabytes, not gigabytes) hard drive my research group shared in graduate school. That hard drive was roughly the size of a washing machine.
PDFs weren't a thing, nor were email attachments, until after I had tenure. You submitted articles to journals by postal mail. And you might be notified of their acceptance by a small postcard. You ordered reprints.
I haven't hand drawn a figure using pen and ink for a technical article since before my kids were born (though I have for a few Nature Chemistry Thesis pieces). I note here they have both graduated from college.
Conference posters weren't carried in tubes (or as pieces of fabric), but in folders as single sheets of paper. Wise people brought their own tacks to the meeting to mount their posters. Color? Color? Only if you used colored ink.
I found a bunch of those in the file cabinet of my graduate advisor, who got her PhD in the 50s. technology is a wonderful thing :)
ReplyDeleteThey were a big thing all the way through the 80s!
ReplyDeleteI hired a typist for my doctoral dissertation, and kept hand-written drafts in the refrigerator. Word processing and personal computers were yet to be for the common scholar!
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