There's a picture in that article showing flatpack SMT ICs - note that's from 1966.
Of course, that machine was bleeding-edge state-of-the-art for the time period, and anticipated hobbyist machines of the late 1970s.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, it is fascinating to review the history of electronics. Things were pretty much strictly vacuum tube for a long time, but even there were a lot of innovation. When transistors came on the scene, things got weird quickly.
A great way I found to explore this, from a "contemporary interested layman hobbyist" perspective - is to go on google books, and look up Popular Science magazine. They have virtually all the issues scanned and available to read. Start from about 1940, and just peruse the issues. Plenty of great articles on interesting technology of the past eras, along with electronics projects and such using the "latest tech" of the period. You'll find some interesting things in there that you likely never knew about.
For instance - toward the end of the vacuum tube era, in a "last ditch" effort to keep them relevant, vacuum tubes went "solid state" - if you saw some today, you would think they were large metal-can transistors from the 1960s or 70s, but they were actually miniature metal-can vacuum "tubes" using similar construction and materials as those transistors; they had to be assembled inside a vacuum chamber! Most of them went into a few brands of high-end transistor televisions, but needed some tube components for their power-handling capabilities. So, hybrids developed...
For hobbyists, very unlikely. But there were large package (much larger than even what we consider a "large package" device of today) SMT devices.
SMT had been a thing for probably over a decade by 1979.
A lot of the miniaturization and SMT stuff that we take for granted today was done for the Apollo Guidance Computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
There's a picture in that article showing flatpack SMT ICs - note that's from 1966.
Of course, that machine was bleeding-edge state-of-the-art for the time period, and anticipated hobbyist machines of the late 1970s.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, it is fascinating to review the history of electronics. Things were pretty much strictly vacuum tube for a long time, but even there were a lot of innovation. When transistors came on the scene, things got weird quickly.
A great way I found to explore this, from a "contemporary interested layman hobbyist" perspective - is to go on google books, and look up Popular Science magazine. They have virtually all the issues scanned and available to read. Start from about 1940, and just peruse the issues. Plenty of great articles on interesting technology of the past eras, along with electronics projects and such using the "latest tech" of the period. You'll find some interesting things in there that you likely never knew about.
For instance - toward the end of the vacuum tube era, in a "last ditch" effort to keep them relevant, vacuum tubes went "solid state" - if you saw some today, you would think they were large metal-can transistors from the 1960s or 70s, but they were actually miniature metal-can vacuum "tubes" using similar construction and materials as those transistors; they had to be assembled inside a vacuum chamber! Most of them went into a few brands of high-end transistor televisions, but needed some tube components for their power-handling capabilities. So, hybrids developed...
That's just the tip-o-the-iceberg!