it wasn't only the obvious things that held back the progress of business computing. Internal random access storage was at a premium. It seems ridiculous nowadays for many years the main storage in computers, programs and data being used were held, used magnetic core storage.
Because store planes were manually prepared by setting tiny magnetic cores into slots in a steel plate, keeping them in place with tape as a temporary measure and placing a frame over them. The cores were then physically wired by hand to form the core matrix. This was obviously time-consuming and expensive. Similarly the amount of electronic random access storage was so limited that there was little room to buffer the input and output information between the computer and its peripherals
in fact until the development of reliable magnetic disk systems information was held on magnetic tape. The amount of information that could be read into computer was therefore limited due to the small internal storage. Because data, as with any data recording device had to be transferred at a constant speed, the magnetic tape unit had to speed up to its operating speed and then slow down to stop and after transferring block of data. Thus most of the magnetic tape was taken up by these recording gaps known as into block gaps. I once calculated that the actual data stored on some 2400 foot tapes was about 1.5 MB