Mop and pail
“I’ve had it explained to me, but I still don’t understand it.” (The New Yorker, cartoon by Alan Dunn, 1957).
The “mop and pail” in the computer room were a constant theme for mainframes in the late 1950s and 1960s. In this cartoon the “it” is unclear, which is part of the humor. Is the “it” referencing computing in general, the fixation of people with computers, or an attempt to converse with the machine, or other possibilities?
The cartoon is from the book (with accompanying CDs of image files), The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, by Robert Mankoff and David Remnick, 2004.
