
1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs - colinprince
http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html
======
peteradio
All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what
happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was
a man with a plan.

Anyway heres Wonderwall
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0001.html)

~~~
antt
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced
by computers.

I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary.
The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a
comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails
that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people.

In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking
amazing.

~~~
nostrademons
The women who used to be secretaries (some subset of them, at least) are now
lawyers, doctors, investors, managers, engineers, etc.

That's always been the point of eliminating jobs: it frees up the people who
used to do those jobs to do other things.

~~~
antt
The jobs created in the last 20 years have been worse paid and less secure
than the jobs that were destroyed. The granddaughters of the 60s secretaries
are baristas, nurses, cleaners, retail workers and other jobs with terrible
working conditions and security.

That's the problem of the current system, losing jobs is fine as long as they
are replaced by better jobs. When they are replaced by worse jobs you have a
broken system. And we have a very broken system.

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oil25
Nothing but blank pages in Firefox without Javascript, which I disable for
non-HTTPS protected sites. If your site needs Javascript to display a simple
image on an HTML page, please consider your users and their accessibility
needs.

~~~
closetohome
I'm in Chrome with...I don't know, some add-ons, and the whole thing is
basically broken for me.

What an absolute POS gallery app.

Something wrong with using static HTML to display all of a couple dozen jpegs?

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readingnews
Love your pictures!! Wow, it actually looks like a bunch of people who are
happy to be there.

Look at that Tek scope on the scope cart! I purchased one of those as an
undergrad in EECE, what a great old scope.

Also, is the part of your website that loads images behind a 1970s switch at
bell labs, perhaps? :) I thank the other HN members for the mirrors.

------
greggyb
What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion
officers salivate.

~~~
fmajid
Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code,
mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually
laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more
lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation
(I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like.

If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it
actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively
marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.

~~~
mpweiher
> in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only.

I've seen this repeated a lot without, as far as I can see, any credible
evidence that (a) this was actually the case and (b) that the causality worked
the way indicated.

To me, it's at best a classic "wet roads cause rain" fallacy that doesn't make
sense at any level.

1\. Companies are dollar driven

This idea that companies would forego a massive market in order to...I don't
know, "keep the girls out of computers" just doesn't make any sense. Even
typing these words is weird, the idea is just so utterly ludicrous.

And the idea that it might have been just oversight also doesn't wash. At
least one company would have at some point asked the question, tried it out
and made a killing.

2\. Nobody wanted to keep girls out

Heck, I grew up in the 80s, and the very last thing on the mind of any of us
computer nerds was "oh my god, we need to keep the girls away from this
stuff". We would have given almost anything to get more girls interested. They
just weren't.

3\. The effects of marketing are vastly overstated

Us computer nerds did not want computers because they were "marketed towards"
us. We wanted computers because we really wanted computers. In fact, I had no
awareness of computers until exposed to Apple IIs in summer camp, first a
little BASIC and then shape tables. Oh boy, shape tables! And yes, the
computers were open to anyone who wanted.

In fact, we got an Apple, despite all the marketing material I remember being
the Tandy catalogs. They even had a 68K based model at that time!

4\. The ads were gender neutral

Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly
neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite
balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with
mom+dad+girl+boy.

~~~
bregma
> Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly
> neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were
> quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with
> mom+dad+girl+boy.

Hoo boy, are you naive. I still have computer mags from the 1980s (and maybe I
have a pack-rat problem, but that's not important now).

A awful lot of the hardware ads had buxom nubile while female models,
sometimes draped over the machine, sometimes with a sultry expression (why are
you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?), often with
caked-on hooker makeup. The software ads almost always had some young white
man with an IBM-approved white shirt and pocket protector.

Ads in popular computer mags in the 1980s were definitely target-marketed
towards white male hetero people. To claim the advertizing was ineffective and
such people "just wanted" the devices is disingenuous at best.

~~~
mpweiher
> (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?),

Hmm...and young boys are the target market for backup tape systems?

Maybe I should have been more specific: the context was _home_ computers, not
the professional systems. I thought that much was obvious.

And even there, do you seriously think that the motivation for those ads was
"oh, we must make sure that women don't enter the profession" or was it more
"we know that 95+% of our target audience is male" and so they used the same
sort of tactics that were used to sell cars and auto tuning products[1]?

Again: wet roads do _not_ cause rain.

[1] [https://www.autobild.de/bilder/die-goldenen-jahre-von-
d-w-83...](https://www.autobild.de/bilder/die-goldenen-jahre-von-
d-w-835920.html#bild13)

------
Aardwolf
One thing that really evolved since then is chairs. How could people manage to
sit all day on chairs like this!

[http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...](http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0010.jpg)

[http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...](http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0016.jpg)

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
One of the things I notice is that there is not a single Asian male in any of
the photos.

If you went into any software office around Oakland, CA or the larger Bay Area
now, I would guess that 30-50% (if not more) of the programmers you see would
be Asian males.

~~~
shakna
Well until '65 there were agressive immigration restrictions on Asians, so I
expect that would reduce the number available with the required skills.

~~~
Gibbon1
I grew up in San Jose. There were Asians most of them were well assimilated
Japanese and Chinese who's families immigrated before 1930. Weren't that many
maybe 1 out of 10.

The big immigration came later in the 1980's with the end of the Vietnam
war/killing fields, and opening of China. A lot of ethnic Chinese in South
East Asia fled in the 1970-80's.

And these pictures are from Oakland circa 1970.

------
dm8
Great pictures. In one picture there is some flowchart on chalkboard. I'm
always curious on how did flowchart symbols came to be. For example I'm
pleasantly surprised that the disk plate/drum symbol (used to signify
databases) that is drawn on chalkboard, which is prevalent nowadays is also
used in 60s.

~~~
nine_k
Back then it made literal sense. Now it's as symbolic as a floppy disk icon.

------
delish
Great pictures! As a remote developer for SaaS company, and as someone who
does both commercialized-work and commercialized-play on his laptop, I now see
that I enjoy looking at people contributing to research by working on
computers, back when computers were a subject of research.

------
newprint
Notice interesting thing - a lot of women in the pictures. My mom worked with
a large mainframe in early 80's and from what she told me, majority of
employees were women. They had just few guys, they quickly got taken out of
dating pool.

~~~
reaperducer
_My mom worked with a large mainframe in early 80 's and from what she told
me, majority if employees were women._

I remember this, too.

In fact, the first two people who taught me how to use a computer (back in 8"
floppy disk and 2K RAM days) were women. And nuns.

------
drakenot
I just finished the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" about the early history
of the internet and I highly recommend it. It covers the invention of packet
switching, ARPANET, ethernet, email and a lot of stages the "internet" went
through post ARPANET.

Seeing these pictures really helps bring the people from this time period in
the book to life for me.

------
mikeytown2
Faster Mirror:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html)

------
Dig1t
This is one of the coolest things I've seen posted on HN.

~~~
braink
I totally agree.

BTW, I'm having problems getting all the pictures rendered in my browser
(Safari), but the ones I've been able to see are really inpirational.

I teach mostly (+95%) men in audio design studies at university level and
women are painfully lacking in the field. It would certainly help make the
field richer, more interesting, and more dynamic (not only for us men, but in
general),if there was more gender diversity in tech in general and audio (this
is where I see it the most because it's my domain) in particular.

------
Aloha
So for those who are curious to know more about this:

[https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-
lu...](https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-
techie-women-photos-13578683.php)

------
atomlib
1969 and 1970. That was the time Bell Labs withdrew from MULTICS project and a
couple of developers who found themselves without a job starter working
internally on a little word processor suite called UNIX.

------
_the_inflator
Thanks to all these retro filter apps, these pictures look surprisingly up to
date.

It does not look like a memory from the past but like a retro picture
shooting. Weird.

------
abdulhaq
Wonderful photos and the color is superb. The people look happy and seem
relaxed. I'm also really loving the colored theme of the controls that extends
to the desks and teletype machines. The blue is beautiful. Fantastic.

------
nikodunk
It's funny how current these photos seem when they're colored like
contemporary photos.

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shereadsthenews
This went around a little while ago and at that time I could find no other
information about a Bell Labs facility in Oakland. Does anyone have any
information about that? Where was it?

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major505
great photos. I kinda envy those who could live at that time. See tech evolve
in such a fast pace. It must been very exciting.

