mainframe
People Working in Computer Room
As part of my dissertation I’m working with the Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives collection at the Huntington Library. The photographic collection is now available online at the Huntington Digital Library. A few years ago, when I first came across this collection, it was only available in-person on a single computer.
I stitched the two photos below into an animated gif, showing the transition within computerized space. The images are from “People working in computer room with 1” tape drives" in the SCE collection at the Huntington. These before and after photos taken in 1966 at SCE appear to show how people would fit alongside and interact with the mainframe computer.
Photographs such as these often show many people in the room, mostly trying to look busy, with a few of them staring at equipment or pretending to use the machine. These staged photographs for internal use are similar to those used for marketing. In both cases the images are designed to show how people and computers would work together.
The mainframe in these photographs is a Control Data Corporation mainframe, and it appears to be a CDC 3200 system.
The Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has a brochure for the CDC 3200 mainframe (PDF) available online as well.
(Originally published on my old site, “The Digital Imaginary” [imaginary.digital], on August 11th, 2015 – revised and republished March 29th, 2025.)
Project poster and talk last October
Last October I gave a “brown bag” talk over lunch in the History Department Library at the University of California, Riverside. I spoke for about 40 minutes and gave a wide overview of my project, using images and video clips to help illustrate my research. It was a great turnout of both professors and graduate students, and I received some terrific feedback that I was able to use for future talks.
On the left is the poster I created for the talk at UCR, and the images come from a variety of primary source materials. The inspiration for the color scheme comes the brochure cover on the right, which is featured in the online exhibit, “Selling the Computer Revolution," at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
The brochure is for an IBM 705 EDPM (Electronic Data Processing Machine), an IBM mainframe produced in the mid 1950s. Mainframes like the IBM 705 were powerful workhorses in the business world during the postwar era, handling payroll for thousands of employees at a time. The brochure’s cover features a computer processing unit at the center, with punched cards and magnetic tape for data storage shown below.
[caption id=“attachment_29” align=“aligncenter” width=“740”]
The IBM 705 Electronic Data Processing Machine (ca. 1954), showing the mainframe console and magnetic tape data storage units in the background. (via the Computer History Museum).[/caption]