steveanderson.digital

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]