Photos from a Bell Labs' data center from the '60s

Posted by Joel Johnson, February 4, 2009 8:41 AM | permalink

Lawrence Harley "Larry" Luckham was a data center manager for Bell Labs in the late '60s, supervisor of a data retrieval system powered by an IBM mainframe, a 9-track magnetic tape reel-to-reel, a Honeywell DDP-516 mini-computer, and several of these terminals pictured above, which Larry describes as "the first displays in which data was first written to memory then displayed."

He has a whole gallery online. It's essential viewing for fans of Bell Labs, early computing, and beehive hairdos. (Check, check, and check.)

This reminds me: If you have any old family pictures of you and your family's technology history, I'd love it if you could scan them in to share with everyone. Old pictures of people on the job, Christmas presents unwrapped and held aloft, or the family beaming in front of the new car. If you put them in Boing Boing Gadgets' Flickr pool that'd be even better, but otherwise you can just email to let me know where to find them.

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Duffong , February 4, 2009 8:54 AM

That picture looks pretty distopian to me. Slaves to the machine much?

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#2 posted by philipb , February 4, 2009 8:54 AM

Bea with an oscilloscope, I'm in love!

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#3 posted by strider_mt2k

, February 4, 2009 9:00 AM

All I have is memories alas.

My late aunt worked for the state of NJ in the 70's and used to bring us these huge multi-page tractor feed mainframe computer renderings of Snoopy done in what I think was just alpha-numeric characters, not even ASCII.

She was a very cool person in every way.

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#4 posted by airship , February 4, 2009 9:41 AM

There are links to this site and many more with pix of 'Models and Mainframes' in my 2007 blog post:

airship.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/models-and-mainframes/

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#5 posted by btb , February 4, 2009 1:35 PM

Duffong:
And to think, now you spend all day staring at a computer screen FOR FUN!

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#6 posted by skramble , February 5, 2009 4:14 AM

the operations manager has a copy of 2001 a Space Oddysey on his desk. I have a copy of that edition too, with the movie still on the cover.

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