
1960s IT department - anigbrowl
http://www.luckham.org/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html
======
edw519
A few stories behind the pictures:

\- The programmer is probably playing guitar because he is waiting for his
compile. It had to be batched and returned, sometimes hours later. Imagine
getting things done with only one compile per day.

\- The programmer is giving an obscene gesture to the terminal because he
forgot a semicolon (more likely a period in his COBOL program) and will now
have to wait another day for a clean compile. Move that deadline back to
October.

\- The terminal the programmer is giving an obscene gesture to is a state-of-
the-art Datawriter, a PAPER-DRIVEN terminal. A moment of silence is needed for
all the trees sacrificed for our future.

\- The programmer was special because he had access to the Datawriter, which
was probably in the computer room. Anyone else, including all users, had to
use pencil and special forms (like taking their SATs) to enter data into the
IBM Mainframe. Those forms went to the Data Control Unit where teams of mostly
women keypunched the data onto 80 column cards which were fed into a hopper.
The early keypunch machines put the holes in the cards as you typed, so that
if you made a mistake, you had to start over with a new card. Later, these
machines had memory, so you could finish the virtual card, and hit a key that
did the whole card. Probably saved a lot of paper.

\- Notice all the coats hanging in the break room. It may have been winter,
but just as likely, they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in
there!

\- Note that the "Data Terminal" pictures are at the bottom of the page in the
mini-computer section. This was a big deal back then. Mini-computers got CRT
displays before IBM mainframes. That's how they competed with Big Blue. For
programmers, this was as big an advance as we would ever get. Imagine building
that web app today, buying cases of cards from Office Depot and getting one
compile per day.

\- The Demonstration Center was a big deal, too. Several places I worked had
the computer room behind glass in the lobby. Companies wanted their customers
to physically see how advanced their technology was.

Thanks for the memories. Now burn those pictures.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I'm old enough that my Mom was a keypunch operator and would bring me home
bags of "square confetti" from the chads punched out of cards and also
discarded keypunch cards to play with.

I may not have written my first program until I was 16-17, but I read my first
IBM manuals around age 8 or so :-)

 _they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in there!_

The other reason I liked going with her when she had to work Saturdays: it was
always air-conditioned.

~~~
robin_reala
Me too. All my first drawings are crayon-on-punchcard. This would have been
‘83,‘84, guess my Dad’s computing department we somewhat behind the times!

~~~
zavulon
Me too! Punch cards and punch tape.. rolls and rolls of it. And for me, it was
88-89, because Russia was (and still is) a backwards country.

------
S_A_P
Love how everything had color back then. Bright red Minicomputer, Aquamarine
phones, blue typewriter. My cube consists of varying shades of grey...

~~~
mkramlich
Hey at least your Swingline stapler is red. ... Uh... Where did your stapler
go?

------
cpr
Boy, that brings back fond memories of IBM 360 mainframes in big, noisy, cold
rooms.

I remember the transition from cards to online terminals, when hacking (as a
high-school junior) at the Naval Electronic Labs computer center in Point Loma
(San Diego) in the early 70's as a part-time systems programmer. (Don't
remember how I got a job there, but I do remember adding some small features
to their WATFOR Fortran compiler over one summer.)

TSO (time-sharing option) was a huge upgrade at the time, running as a
permanent "job" under OS/360, and virtualizing the job partition to run
separate sub-jobs per terminal user. After using punched cards for a while,
the thrill of actually typing in programs directly (mostly assembler and PL/I
in my case), running, and DEBUGGING them interactively was nirvana.

------
shykes
The predominance of women in the pictures is very striking. Was that common at
the time? If so, I wonder what happened to change the demographics so heavily.

~~~
sethg
Maybe “computer operator” was considered a secretarial role?

Note that once upon a time a “computer” was a _person_ who did computations,
often a woman with a BA in math. ENIAC’s programmers were women
(<http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/eniac.html>).

------
51Cards
In pictures 01 & 02 you can see a copy of the book 2001 - A Space Odyssey on
his desk.

Also this impressed me:

"The computer room was in the basement of a building for security and other
reasons. There was no natural light and I had a slim budget for decorations. I
also had staff with artistic talents so I bought the materials and they made
their own decorations."

With the guitars and the art projects it sounds like he fostered a very
progressive work environment.

------
rbanffy
The server is in agony.

Maybe a cache can help:

<http://www.luckham.org.nyud.net/LHL.Bell%20Labs%20Days.html>

------
lukeschlather
Out of curiosity, how were those photos preserved? As someone who was born in
the 80's, I'm used to anything pre-1990 looking washed out. Were you using an
especially powerful camera, or was it purely good preservation technique? Are
these restored somehow? Some combination of the above?

~~~
riffic
slides and negatives preserve rather well.

~~~
sudont
Not to mention the fact that chemicals degrade in certain ways, so an
experienced photo tech can correct off-balance scans almost by muscle memory.

Dan Margulis' book on this subject is definitive.

------
jschuur
I took one look at the sideburns and thought this can't possibly be real. It
had to be a well done (and amusing) hoax.

I was about 60% sure someone got access to a preserved data center that's now
a museum, raided the Mad Men wardrobe and took a bunch of pictures, but then I
saw the personal page of the guy and it's an older version of him:

<http://www.luckham.org/LHL_Index.html>

The Internet has made me such a cynic. But still... someone should take my
idea of faking old timey things for a different theme and set of pic ;)

~~~
jschuur
On a side note, I remember growing up in the early 80ies, travelling by plane
with my Dad who worked for IBM and he would sometimes bring these giant tape
spools with him in his luggage. I guess flying across the country with them
was faster than uploading the data across the Net ;)

Either that, or he was committing corporate espionage. In which case, I wasn't
getting nearly enough presents, Dad!

~~~
ams6110
Still is, though for larger amounts of data.

------
levirosol
the site sure loads like it's on a 60's internet connection... :)

------
cubicle67
lova to see a zoom enhance on the cartoon on the corkboard here
[http://www.luckham.org/images/Bell%20Labs%20Days/Bell%20Labs...](http://www.luckham.org/images/Bell%20Labs%20Days/Bell%20Labs01.jpg)
I know it can't be Dilbert (can it?) but it sure looks like it

~~~
ax0n
It wasn't around in the 1960s, but Crunchly was definitely one of the things I
had to go back in time and appreciate, despite having not been born when most
of them were drawn. <http://xivilization.net/~marek/imgs/crunchly/>

------
zaph0d
IMHO Roxanne & Helen were very beautiful.

~~~
w1ntermute
Umm, why is this sort of comment relevant or appropriate on HN?

~~~
meatsock
all users are human, and beauty exists.

~~~
chanux
..and both cases come to surface only in certain cases. And this is one of
those.

------
duck
In the early 80's I use to go into a place my dad did hardware contract work
every month to help him vacuum out filters in all their CAD machines. Their
server room didn't look much different from this (except for more crowded, and
probably a smaller footprint) and they even had one teletype box for their
tape library backups. I still have a huge plywood box the size of a toy chest
(actually, it was my toy chest!) that a 20MB hard drive and enclosure came in.

------
danielsiders
Anyone who hasn't seen Desk Set (1957) with Katharine Hepburn needs to.
(Reference department at a television network that gets its first 'computer')

------
dennisgorelik
Nowadays all that work [and more] can be accomplished by a single person.

~~~
VBprogrammer
On their mobile phone.

~~~
dennisgorelik
That's an overstretch. Although modern mobile phone has much more power than
mainframe from 1960-s, mobile phone does not have convenient interface that
allows to input and output massive amounts of data.

~~~
alnayyir
If we ever get an optic nerve tap and thought-writer worked out, we'll
scarcely have any need for physical interfaces that laptops and desktops
offer.

The thought-writers are halfway there already, they're working on tech for
disabled people that lets them manage somewhat crude gestures by thinking in
directions.

------
wyclif
The photo of the decor in the "Demonstration Center" is priceless. Almost
straight out of _Mad Men._

------
10smom
648 meg of hard drive! geezz. Would not even be able to view those pics on
that computer back then.

~~~
cubicle67
Pics as displayed are about 8k each, or 128 to the MB, so the drive would have
been capable of holding over 82,000 of them. Of course jpg format didn't come
about until 30 years later...

Full size images are 1600 x 1061, so with 16 bit colour and no compression
you'd be looking at about 25MB per image, or about 25 per drive. As a jpg
they're about 600k each

~~~
pmjordan
Leaving aside the fact that decompressing a decent-sized JPEG was a very CPU-
intensive task as recently as the 486 era, taking _seconds_.

------
wyclif
My father worked in the engineering department at the DuPont Corporation in
Delaware in the '60's, and I remember going there on "take your son to work
day" and seeing my first Cray. This really brings back some old, old memories.

------
spicerunner
This is cool. Can't say I'm sorry to see the sidburns gone though...:)

~~~
msbarnett
Clearly you're not based out of Portland. Those sideburns are alive and well.

------
duinote
thanks for the pictures, it is fascinating to see open colored pictures.
loving it.

------
mkramlich
Back in the late 70's I once knew someone who knew someone who knew someone,
who shall remain nameless, who was a fairly senior programmer for a large
bank. On certain occasions, this person was able to bring home thick printouts
of the actual COBOL code that ran in the bank's mainframes. Probably one of my
first exposures to source code. The lines would alternate between a green and
white paper color. Along both the left and right edges were rows of holes,
needed by the printer mechanism. The code itself was highly highly verbose
plus was probably >50% comments, both inline and in section delimiting blocks.
I later got into BASIC programming myself as my first language, then 6502
Assembly, then C. Though I appreciate Java's strengths, I totally understand
why some folks call Java the New COBOL: it's pretty verbose, full of ritual,
and it's used everywhere now in large corporations and government. (Not sure
if used in banks heavily, but would not be surprised. Though I know COBOL is
still running in many banks as well.)

~~~
tbrownaw
People apparently still use that:

[http://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer-
Paper-14-7...](http://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer-
Paper-14-7-8-x-11-3-Part/product_489121)

