
Photos from Bell Labs Datacenter in 1960s (2019) - Zaheer
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/inside-bell-labs-datacenter-1960s/
======
function_seven
These are all fantastic photos. One thing that stood out to me is how
prevalent the AT&T/Western Electric blue is everywhere.

Much of my career has been spent inside telephone company central offices,
where I've seen equipment from dozens of different vendors. The 5ess is still
the sharpest and cleanest looking hardware I've ever seen. Bright white with
that distinctive blue accent trim.¹

It's really a timeless look, and shows just how much effort they put into
"irrelevant" details like that. A lot of vendors aim for a unified style, but
it's usually boring and hard to distinguish from their peers. But AT&T stuff
was distinctive, and I don't think it suffered from the passage of time. In
other words, it doesn't look retro-futuristic. It just looks nice.

Look at the the 8th photo². You see the cabinets in the background, the keys
on the console, the keys on the terminal, the platen knob, and the drawers on
the desk. All matching and designed.

[1] (I give Nortel some "anarchy" credit for their courageous use of brown and
green. It's fugly in an endearing sort of way :)

[2] [https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vaO-
bHVmCQ4/XciOziQqrqI/AAAAAAAAS...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vaO-
bHVmCQ4/XciOziQqrqI/AAAAAAAASjw/hyw68qKbSIUrUlXmRudkLZl4WkI80BV0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Bell_Labs_1960s%2B%25289%2529.jpg)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There's no switching hardware in these photos. It's an IBM System/360
installation, and everything is IBM System/360 Blue [1], not AT&T/WE. The same
branding is still used today.

[https://www.ibm.com/design/language/color/](https://www.ibm.com/design/language/color/)

DEC used similar colours in their mainframes

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/PDP-10_1...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/PDP-10_1090.jpg)

But varied the colours for minis

[http://www.pdp-11.nl/museum-center-group.jpg](http://www.pdp-11.nl/museum-
center-group.jpg)

Interestingly, it has become traditional to use blue (and teal) to indicated
advanced technology:

[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/expanse/images/c/c6/Prot...](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/expanse/images/c/c6/Protomolecule_structure_on_Venus.jpg)

[1] Also available in rust/red, not shown here.

~~~
function_seven
Thanks. I'm realizing this as well with sibling comment's photo and my reply.
AT&T's blue is not as vivid as shown in these photos and the ones you linked.
It's more muted/desaturated.

I know there's no telco switching stuff here, but I had (wrongly) assumed
that, since it was Bell Labs, that it was their own hardware using the same
scheme.

I stand by my admiration of that 5e, even though it appears the photos here
aren't representative of it. :)

~~~
PaulRobinson
Bell Labs was not just about telco stuff, it was quite a revolutionary R&D
unit in many ways. Seems to me a lot of people who worked there either did -
or could have - worked at MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc.

A read of the Wikipedia page [1] shows just how varied the research there was,
but I'm not sure it's up there today so perhaps it's slipped from our minds.

One interesting thing I found out about the place is that I believe some
university faculties have tried to model their research buildings on the
physical layout of Bell Labs: everybody gets an office, but common areas are
lengthy corridors away, meaning there is a good chance of serendipity and
meeting colleagues when you're not heads-down. I have a hazy recollection this
is how MIT built one of their newer buildings, but can't find a source for it
now.

And yes, you're right, the kit looks beautiful.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs)

------
Qasaur
My father used to be a programmer back in the 1960's for the IBM 700 series
mainframes, writing programmes and simulations in FORTRAN 4 (and I think some
assembler, too) for our now-defunct shipbuilding industry (Sweden). The
stories he told me about how debugging back then included manually going
through series upon series of punchcards (often by laying them out on the
floor in his house and crawling while reading) humbles me somewhat to how far
we've come in the industry where debugging something is as easy as pressing a
button and getting instant feedback. Back then results from a compute had to
be processed overnight even for relatively simple programmes.

One thing we've seemed to regressed on though is the professional stature of
our industry - back then private offices were the norm and the Orwellian open-
office hellscape of today was no where to be found.

~~~
bluenose69
In the old days, the first step was think through the logic very carefully,
because every mistake took a long time for the cards to get collected and run
through the machine. Most people started by scratching their head and looking
into space for a long time. Then they started drawing some sketches of flow
(maybe with flowcharts, but often not doing that formally). Then they wrote
out the code on coding sheets that had columns matching the columns on cards.
Then they spent time reading the code and thinking like the machine. Only then
were cards punched. And those cards were certainly checked for typos before
submitting the job.

This was all because the turnaround was so slow.

Another fun card fact was that most people drew diagonal lines on their card
decks, so you could more easily put them in order if they got scrambled.

The consequence of all of this is that debugging cards was actually not all
that common, because you were doing checks at all the preliminary steps.

This was all quite fun, actually. Think of driving a standard-shift car,
compared with an automatic.

~~~
majewsky
> Most people started by scratching their head and looking into space for a
> long time. Then they started drawing some sketches of flow (maybe with
> flowcharts, but often not doing that formally). Then they wrote out the code
> on coding sheets that had columns matching the columns on cards. Then they
> spent time reading the code and thinking like the machine.

This sounds a lot like how I work when writing new code that's not just a
quick throw-away script, but built to last. If implementing a new feature
takes me one week, then the first one is usually spent just reading the
existing code and thinking about the other parts of the application and
environment are going to interact with the new feature.

It takes more time initially, but it saves me a ton of pain down the line, and
luckily my managers appreciate that trade-off as much as I do.

------
stickfigure
I'm terribly curious what all these jobs are:

* Computer Operator

* Computer Operations Supervisor

* Tape Librarian

* Data Control Supervisor

From the article text, presumably these do not involve programming? I'm old by
HN standards but this predates me by a couple eras. I guess "Tape Librarian"
is obvious enough, but what does the day-to-day life of a Computer Operator
look like?

~~~
gregjor
I worked with mainframes and superminis back in the 70s. My first job was
night computer operator.

Computer operator: scheduling and monitoring jobs, managing the print spool
(queue) printing reports, stripping (removing carbon paper) and collating,
sometimes swapping disk packs, loading/unloading tapes, running backups. And
making sure the computer didn’t crash or halt. The minis and mainframes I
worked on generally ran one job at a time, and the jobs might have a sequence,
reading from and writing to disk or tape.

We kept transistor radios on top of the computer cabinets. Each job made a
distinctive sound, as did runaway programs (infinite loops, for example). A
halted computer did not make a sound so the radio was an early warning that
something wasn’t right.

Tape librarian: magnetic tapes degrade over time from use, stretching,
humidity. The tape librarian cataloged the contents and sequence of tapes, how
many times they were used, their age. When a tape had too many errors or got
to end of life the tape librarian would schedule a duplicate job.

~~~
majewsky
> We kept transistor radios on top of the computer cabinets. Each job made a
> distinctive sound, as did runaway programs (infinite loops, for example). A
> halted computer did not make a sound so the radio was an early warning that
> something wasn’t right.

You mean you used the radio like a baby monitor?

~~~
danmg
The different components would make different electromagnetic interference
patterns. You could tell what the computer was doing (or not doing) from the
static.

This is also how some of the first computer generated music was produced.

~~~
thelazydogsback
I remember listening to my TRS-80 that way -- easy to monitor outer/inner
loops, different sounds for Basic vs. asm code, etc. The downside was that
often people had no choice -- the TRS-80 was so noisy, that nobody in the
house could watch (OTA broadcast) TV if I had the computer on.

~~~
gregjor
Can confirm. I did some work on a TRS-80 in a Radio Shack store (inventory on
cassette tapes!). The “trash 80” as it was called would interfere with the
stereo equipment in the store, the manager would have to turn the little
computer on the counter off to demo a receiver.

~~~
thelazydogsback
> "trash 80" Boo! :)

Still much love for it...

------
reacharavindh
The picture with the tape library makes me wonder why we only have the option
of the small tape cartridges of today. It would be super cool to have a
horizontal arrangement of say 20 such “tape wheels” each with their own R/W
head. Imagine the capacity such a unit would achieve with today’s tape medium!
Our LTO-8 tape cartridge holds 12 TB of incompressible data. Imagine a wheel
that big could hold somewhere like 100 TB or so. If you put 10 of them in a
horizontal row, with 10 heads, you get a PB archival machine..

I’d feel badly of our tape robot now.

~~~
jasomill
Just for fun:

An LTO-8 tape is 960 m long and 5.6 µm thick.

A standard-length ANSI-standard 9-track is 2,400 ft long and 0.0015 in thick.

So naïvely assuming you could spool about 2,400 ft * (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm)
worth of LTO-8 tape on a reel, we have

145161/28000 = (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) * (2400 ft / 960 m)

so your imaginary LTO-8 reel could store around five times as much data as an
ordinary LTO-8 cartridge, or about 60 TB.

Sounds promising until you realize that, even assuming impossibly efficient
cylinder-packing and no additional overhead for automation, a single 9-track
reel takes about as much space to store as five LTO cartridges…

------
Aloha
[http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...](http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html)

Here is the original images.

Also that thring they call a computer terminal, I'm pretty sure is either an
TSPS, OSPS or TOPS console, basically used for telephone operators.

~~~
jeffbee
This has come up before here and on Twitter and nobody has ever known, but I
intend to keep asking: does anyone know where this Bell Labs facility was in
Oakland, CA? The only mention of it anywhere on the web lead back to this
page. I can find no other contemporaneous documentation of it, and I even
searched the Oakland Public Library periodicals archive.

~~~
iamhamm
According to this article it was in the basement of the Bermuda Building
([https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bell-labs-larry-
luckham-...](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-
techie-women-photos-13578683.php)) which was demolished after Loma Prieta
damaged it
([https://localwiki.org/oakland/Bermuda_Building](https://localwiki.org/oakland/Bermuda_Building)).

------
0ld
This is fascinating not only because of the datacenter

I wish we had the 60s fashion back

~~~
notenoughhorses
Looks like that office can't possible be as cold as modern offices. I would
freeze in dresses like that in a modern workplace.

~~~
082349872349872
I remember raised-floor machine rooms being distinctly colder than office
space. But more importantly, none of those shoes are barnyard acid resistant.

------
beenBoutIT
The monopoly Bell had made so much innovation possible - did society as a
whole really benefit when Bell was broken up?

~~~
Aloha
It's a very mixed bag.

We lost lots of good paying jobs, we lost the rollout of ISDN, which would
have spend up offering high speed network access, we lost hundreds of millions
spent on basic research.

We gained, a bunch of openness, mobility, and access to a wider breadth of
services. It's still a mixed bag.

~~~
xellisx
We had an ISDN at an office I worked at in 96, but we had cable internet
(@Home) at the house. IIRC it was 6Mbps/1Mbps.

------
nabla9
I can almost smell the formaldehyde smell coming from the 60's paints,
wallpapers and furniture.

------
kelvin0
The first thing that struck me in the images: so many women of all colors
working in tech!

------
jakebasile
I enjoyed these photos. I often wish I had been born earlier so I could've
been around for this part of the history of computing.

------
fortran77
> The Charge-Coupled Device or CCD, now universally used in digital cameras,

Not any more:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor#CCD_vs._CMOS_sens...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor#CCD_vs._CMOS_sensors)

------
chrisallick
cool to think diversity could exist in a tech company...

~~~
tyingq
Well, sort of.

 _" One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great
staff, mostly women except for the programmers who were all men. For some
reason only one of them was around for the pictures that day."_

~~~
chrisallick
haha yes, but computer programming was mostly women in the 40s and for a
while. i stand by my sarcasm.

------
walrus01
Two things stand out to me, other than the clothing/fashion...

So much raised floor

So many tapes.

~~~
praveen9920
And the hairstyles. :)

------
RickJWagner
Lots of women in IT (or 'DP' for 'data processing') back then.

I started in 1990 on IBM mainframes, a lot of what is depicted looks like my
first data centers. I saw the last of the punch cards, round tapes go to
square tapes, and more greenbar paper than I'd care to admit.

Good times.

------
rfreiberger
The Mountain View Computer History Museum is near by and I love making a
visit. The era that interests me the most is from the 60's where they started
to scale up from the tube era. It's just amazing considering the time and
effort compared to today.

------
etoulas
If the same kind of pictures would be taken today in the US (and most other
western countries) obesity would be the rule with a few exceptions. Seems like
the 60s didn’t have this problem yet.

------
jiveturkey
2nd "artist & work" photo. pencil sharpener attached to the wall. in a data
center? shavings debris danger.

------
fortran77
I like the way people used to dress for work.

------
maxekman
Very nice story and photos. It’s truly incredible how things have developed
since then!

~~~
2rsf
> how things have developed since then

and vice versa, how many things looks similar

------
reedwolf
Was expecting more pictures of 60s tech rather than ladies in tight dresses.

~~~
coldpie
Me too, but if you put yourself in the photographer's shoes, I guess you
wouldn't just walk around taking pictures of random stuff in your office (it's
just the equipment you work on, after all, who would ever care about that?),
but rather the people you interact with every day. Reading the article's text,
the photographer was clearly fond of the people he worked with. I'm also glad
it turned out to be this, instead of that. I've seen plenty of photos of old
equipment; it's cool to see candid shots of people actually performing the
work that was done on the equipment.

------
d--b
Geez, there certainly were more women in tech at that time.

~~~
loulou24
Because computer programmers played guitar at the time.

------
freakynit
This website is gold

