Probably the entire memory capacity of all the world's computers together then was less than 1 GB

"at MIT [...] Whirlwind was not just some piece of equipment inside a building, it xas the building. One room was the CPU, another the arithmetic unit and registers, and still another the operating console. Most of the basement was the power converter. On the upper floor were a few office rooms, buit most of the building (about as large as a good-sized house) was taken up by this 'electronic brain'." [...]
Probably the entire memory capacity of all the world's computers together then was less than 1 GB.
[...]
In short, significantly lower standards of quality were set for their work in computing courses than in other classes.
[...] In engineering fields, normal working engineers read technical literature with a distinct mathematical and scientific content and apply such material in their work; from experience, I know that this does not apply nearly as widely to normal working software developers. [...] For their part, practitioners should not be afraid to learn such lessons as that of the loop invariant, from which I gained so much."

Barber in Glass ouv. cité