From LQWiki

The Bronze Age is a transitional period in the history of computing, that took place from the mid 1950s to 1961. It began with the mainstream use of transistors and drum memory and ended with the mainstream introduction of core memory, which introduced the beginning of the Iron Age. Many chronologies consider the Bronze Age to be just the latter part of the Stone Age. It can also be considered part of the elder days, which is sometimes used to refer to the entire period of time prior to 1980, but is more commonly

The transistor had been invented in 1947, but was not practical until transistors began to be made from silicon instead of germanium in the early 1950s. The integrated circuit had been conceived in 1952, and was independently developed in both 1958 and 1961.

During the Bronze Age, computers became cheap enough to be used by entities other than major governments. Now major universities and businesses could use them too. To cater to this market, the Datamation magazine began publication in 1957.

High level languages were developed at this time, as a quick-and-dirty way of making specific programs. They were used much the same way interpreted languages were used about 2000, and "serious" programs were still written using assembler or machine code. The first high level language was Fortran, which was designed 1954-57, and was used for mathematical calculations.

The computing field began to diverge culturally into business computing (this field is what data processing usually refers to) and university-based scientific computing (see Computer Science). The present-day hacker culture is mainly descended from the scientific computing community. MIT's AI Lab, one of the earliest centers of hacker culture, was founded in 1959.

The Story of Mel takes place during the end of this era, since it happend during the switchover to core memory.