What a wonderful time that was for particle physicists! You could discover new stuff with two detectors small enough to be charged on a balloon. Today you need enormous machinery and several hundreds of people.
When I worked on KLOE (http://www.lnf.infn.it/kloe), I was able to see the entire DAFNE accelerator as it was small enough to be contained in a hangar (http://scienzapertutti.lnf.infn.it/concorso/2005/scuole_ital...); on the other side, the LHC is so big that you have to climb the Jura mountains in order to be able to see at a glance its entire extension (http://www.futura-sciences.com/fileadmin/Fichiers/images/Mat...).
