Ashrill greeting card that sings whenever you open it has more computing capacity than the allies could muster in World War II. Your phone is more powerful than the NASA computers that helped people land on the moon in 1969. Computers have evolved at an astonishing rate, but in the 1970s, this hefty contraption of dials and lights (shown in a photo from the BU archives) was about as good as it got. In 1974, BU students and researchers—including one in a sharp white cap—were captured on film as they crunched data using the IBM 370 Model 145, which its manufacturer boasted had control storage expandable from 32K to 64K and main storage in increments up to 512K. (The feeblest of today’s Apple iPhone 6 range has a storage capacity of 16GB, or 16,777,216K.) The Model 145 also had a “time of day clock.”

We know that this photograph was taken on December 5, 1974, in BU’s computer and systems lab for use in a math and science brochure. According to BU archivists, “Math and Natural Sciences” was a departmental concentration at CAS—then CLA, the College of Liberal Arts—in the 1974/1975 academic year. But that’s all we have—and we’d like to know more. Are you in the photo? Do you know the people in the photo or remember using this “powerful new” machine? Tell us more. Email the editor at thurston@bu.edu. And don’t forget to read our feature story on the perils and promise of modern computers.