steveanderson.digital

“Univac - For Finding Lost Moons of Lost Dollars”

Early computers, from the scientific world to the business world.

Video from our trip to the 2024 Tour de France, it’s 15min but quite entertaining!

We toured with Custom Getaways and had a wonderful time. They’re an official tour operator of the Tour de France, making us part of the tour with special access and events, amazing!

The video was taken with an iPhone 15 Pro and a DJI Osmo Pocket 3.

Photos from our trip to the 2024 Tour de France, week three in Nice.

We toured with Custom Getaways and they were absolutely amazing 👌

Hyper-Reality on Vimeo was posted 9 years ago, but it feels like the not-so-distant future, like in the next 5 minutes.

Is it just me, or was there a pre-roll before Craig’s F1 driving showing an Easter egg of the iPad Window Controls? I think there was a quick image of the traffic light buttons on an iPad window floating by in the montage, but it’s not on the published video as far as I can tell.

One of the best parts of the WWDC 2025 Keynote, “6 out of 5 ⭐️” by Allen Stone.

Histography is a data visualization project by Martin Stauber, and it’s pretty amazing.

“Histography" is interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions.

The project reminds me of The Fifth Element when Leeloo is researching “War." It’s not the interface, but the way so much information can be visualized in such a compact form – it can be a bit overwhelming.

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

I’ll be presenting a paper at the “Deep L.A.” graduate history conference taking place at The Huntington on October 3rd.

The conference is sponsored by UCLA and USC, with a focus on Los Angeles and Southern California regional history: http://lahistoryconference.tumblr.com

I’m presenting a portion of a chapter in my dissertation, which focuses on mainframes, paperwork, and the electrical utility company Southern California Edison during the postwar era.

(Revised and republished March 28th, 2025)

The Census has always been “Big Data,” with or without computers and the automation of information.

Census and Sensibility: A Little History of Big Data at IEEE (Wayback Machine link)

Consider just one use of today’s big data with a deep history and a major impact on computational technology: keeping track of a country’s citizenry. This has often been accomplished through a periodic counting, or census. Many references to censuses exist in the ancient world, from Egyptian tomb inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible to, perhaps, most famously, the “worldwide” Roman census described in the Book of Luke in the New Testament.

The Virgin and Saint Joseph register for the census before Governor Quirinius. Byzantine mosaic at the Chora Church, Constantinople 1315–1320 – via Wikipedia

(Revised and republished March 28th, 2025)

Something tells me I should have applied to the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference this year – the theme is “Digital Imaginaries.” The CFP has already passed, but the conference itself is coming up in late October, 21–24th, in Phoenix, Arizona. http://aoir.org/ir16/

The 16th annual Internet Research conference will provide an opportunity to question the ways that networked technologies are imagined and enter into collective imaginaries. In what ways do we culturally apprehend and make sense of digital media? These imaginaries influence our actual and potential uses of technology, as well as how we constrain, encourage, and dream about those uses.

(Revised and republished March 29th, 2025)

Great article over at Polygon on new video game arcades: What it's Like Running an Arcade in 2015

It's a costly business, and it's no secret that many arcades have been looking for other ways to supplement that income, including combining arcades and bars together. "[Most people] have illusions that beer and arcades are a perfect gimmick," Wilson says. "If you don't love video games or know anything about repairing them or how to maintain them, you will lose your hat faster than the few minutes it takes to sign the lease on your new spot."

It’s great that they list figures for the businesses too. When you’re in one of these places it seems like the money is just pouring in, but that’s not the financial reality.

Plus, you’ll need to be really good at repairing these old machines, and in ways that retain their authenticity.

“It’s very important to have a very good video game repairman,” Horne says. “It’s very important. Probably the number one thing. And bring your patience when it comes to sourcing the games.”

Prices for the cabinets can wildly vary, on average costing around $1,000 a unit. For example, Mario Kart can run $2,500 to $3,000. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! can run $1,500. Mortal Kombat 2 has doubled in price since Horne started buying machines.

(via kottke.org)

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

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.

(Revised and republished March 29th, 2025)

I came across this Univac photograph online, showing three people working in a computer room. Using a reverse Google Image Search, it appears that this image and a few others like it were posted online around 2006. From there it looks like the pictures were blogged here and there, recently posted to Pinterest, then making their way to Instagram. I can’t seem to find the original image online, but this one looks like a scan of a partially damaged photo most likely used for marketing. It’s possible that this image could be printed in a brochure other other advertisement.

The image above is a little fuzzy, but the mainframe appears to be a Univac 494. This would date the photograph to 1965 or 1966 or so. The additional photographs below offer a closer view of the mainframe console and its peripherals. There’s also more information on the Univac 494 at Ed Thelen’s website (photos linked below).

(Revised and republished March 30th, 2025)

From November 2013, Derek Thompson writing for The Atlantic: The Amazon Mystery: What America’s Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up To (Wayback Machine link)

Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics machine?...

In a way, this strategy isn’t new at all. It’s ripped from the mildewed playbooks of the first national retail stores in American history. Amazon appears to be building nothing less than a global Sears, Roebuck of the 21st century—a large-scale operation that aims to dominate the future of shopping and shipping.

From October 2014, also Derek Thompson for The Atlantic: What in the World Is Amazon? (Wayback Machine link)

...there is something devilishly seductive to the conveniences of digital capitalism that makes life better for us as consumers and worse for us as workers. Does buying diapers once from Amazon make one morally complicit in the working conditions of its warehouse employees? What about subscribing to Amazon Prime? Having an Amazon credit card?

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

“Percussive Maintenance,” by Duncan Robson

What a great supercut. Montage videos like this are good conversation starters, and they help run a thread through seemingly disparate genres of film and history.

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

Matthew McConaughey’s reaction to Star Wars teaser #2 (an Interstellar and Star Wars remix)

I feel the same way, but I cried more.

I love when he puts his hand up, so good. I saw the reaction video a couple of days ago, and it had about 40,000 views. Now it’s close to 5 million.

Here’s the full trailer on YouTube.

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

The Story of the Indiana Jones Bridge Scene

The night before I said to Steven [Spielberg], whatever you do, if you stop cameras don’t shout-out “cut,” just shout-out “stop cameras,” because I might go and cut the bridge.

(via Academy Originals)

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

Excerpts from The Undersea Network, Duke Press, 2015, by Nicole Starosielski.

These excerpts are found in an article on The Undersea Network, at Scientific American:

This vision of autonomous networks is shaped more by Hollywood cinema than by actual cable operations. In reality, our global cable network is always in a sort of crisis and, at the same time, highly dependent on humans to power the steady flow of information transmissions.

It would perhaps be more precise to say that cables are always in a state of “alarm.” An “alarm,” in network-speak, is anything from an indication that the cable has been severed to a reminder about a needed computer update.

Even if our signals continue to pass through cable systems without delay, the undersea network never quite functions perfectly on its own, that is, without alarm and without human assistance.

When I ask operators about the vulnerabilities of today’s undersea network, many express concerns about downsizing and retirements. They fear that carefully sustained industry knowledge will be lost and that there will be nobody to take their place that will adhere to the same standards of reliability. Recruiting the next generation of workers is difficult. There is no direct path to the industry and it remains largely invisible to the public.

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)

Australia’s vulnerable submarine cables, by Jessica Woodall at The Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Scattered across the ocean floor in intricate webs, submarine cables transfer high data volumes between onshore nodes. Five main international cables connect Australia to cyberspace and global voice networks. They carry 99% of Australia’s total internet traffic, dwarfing the capacity of satellites. Submarine cables are vital to our communications, economic prosperity, and national security. They also tend to break. A lot.

In most regions of the world this isn’t unexpected, or particularly worrying. Submarine cables aren’t much thicker than a garden hose and for the most part sit untethered and unprotected on the sea floor. Inadvertent breakages from ship anchors, nets and natural phenomena such as undersea earthquakes occur frequently, averaging at least one a week. To mitigate this risk, international agreements between cable operating companies are extensive, repair ships are quickly deployed and traffic is usually rerouted through other cables.

Unfortunately, the situation for Australia is more complicated. Sitting in the Southern Hemisphere, we’re largely isolated from the busy network of Transatlantic and North Asian Cable lines. We’re also unable to use overland fibre optic cables from other countries, leaving us reliant upon just a handful of international undersea cables.

Image below: Australian submarine cables at submarinecablemap.com

(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)