I felt the same. When I was a PFY, I hung out with the then middle aged mainframe technicians, and they had lots of fantastic stories like this from the early days of computing.

Stories about unbalanced hard disk units wandering around the room to be found blocking the door the next morning. HD crashes where you had to vacuum up metal shavings before replacing the platters (which were the size of a washing machine drum). Amusing tales of the little vacuum hose that was supposed to automatically suck the lose end of a tape spool into the drive going wrong.

Now I work almost exclusively with virtual machines, which makes such hardware failures much less exciting.