Yesterday

1971
IT LOOKS like a clunky telephone, but the equipment GSB professor Bill Sharpe is using in this photograph was state of the art at the time--a modem hooked to a Model 33 Teletype that punched rolls of paper tape to store information. Back then, students wrote programs in BASIC to do regression analysis. "This is something we now do on spreadsheets in a fraction of the time," Sharpe says. "It was a different era," he recalls. "At the time, I personally knew the president of almost every company we bought computer equipment from."

Photography by Jose Mercado