An interesting and very artistic take on the materiality of digital culture, and the physical structures that support modern communication, computation, and data storage. The ventilation covers and shafts in the beginning of the video seem so mundane, but just a few steps inside is an entire world of noise and movement.
My muscle has been replaced by flex and copper. My brain a server. Ones and zeros my voice. I exist as a phantom, an iridescent color. I speak in shimmering tones to the hidden construction of the form. I desire to become data.
In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people [Geocities], the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit-torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
Outside the Spacecraft, an interactive museum exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. High resolution photographs, insight into curation and preservation techniques, even checklists and paperwork.
The exhibit reminded me of this recent tweet by The Onion:
Otherwise Reasonable Man Sincerely Believes U.S. Landed On Moon: The Onion
ROBOTS.TXT is a stupid, silly idea in the modern era. Archive Team entirely ignores it and with precisely one exception, everyone else should too.
Archive Team interprets ROBOTS.TXT as damage and temporary madness, and works around it. Everyone should. If you don’t want people to have your data, don’t put it online.
This rare look inside a Bell Labs computer center, specifically the one at the Holmdel location, which was referred to internally as the “HOCC” or the “HO CC”. This film was made as orientation for new employees who would need to use the computer center, and this, part 2 of 2 (see part 1), is about the programming center within the HOCC.
One thing that’s notable about this film — different from Part 1 — is the preponderance of women working in the Programmer Services area. Around 1966, 7 years before this film was made, there were over 500 women working in “technical work” at Bell Labs, rather than administrative work, and many were in computing. A book and blog by Nathan Ensmenger examines the sociological history of computing, and why during the 1980s the computing field became more and more the province of men. Stories about women in the early decades of computing still reside in the world of the personal anecdote; it’s hard to assess the exact data on how many women worked in the field in the 1960s and 1970s.
The original video isn’t available on the Wayback Machine, but the YouTube version is embedded below.
There’s some interesting artwork on the timeshare computer…reminds me of the “nose art” on military aircraft. In my archival research I’ve come across a few instances of pinup-style material, especially ASCII art printouts.
The video below is from 1973, slightly after the timeframe of my research, but certainly interesting.
The year was 1973, and the computer operating system UNIX, invented at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, had just morphed into its third iteration or improvement, and had just been rewritten in the C programming language.
This film, made as an orientation for the computer center at the Bell Labs Holmdel location, is a rare glimpse into the operations and procedures of an early 1970s research-oriented computing center. And as the 1973 Holmdel Computer Center only had IBM computers, it wasn't running a UNIX installation: the system was only ported to IBM computers in the years to come. In 1973, UNIX as a system was limited to installations on DEC computers, and there were UNIX installations at other locations of Bell Laboratories such as Indian Hill, Whippany, and, of course, Murray Hill (where UNIX and C were developed).
Computers in the Bell System weren't just relegated to computer science or the development of computer language. They were employed for all kinds of complex engineering calculations, telecommunications applications, and, very occasionally, for making art and music.
The original video isn’t available on the Wayback Machine, but the YouTube version is embedded below.
I happened across an historical US passport for Fred Soper (1893-1977), the American epidemiologist and public health administrator, while doing some research on paperwork.
The National Library of Medicine has a page on Fred Soper under their "Profiles in Science" project, but Soper's Wikipedia page is quite lacking (updates have been made since 2015). Updating Wikipedia for this historical figure would make a great project for a History and/or Digital Humanities class. There's also a listing of primary visual sources, with high resolution images.
It’s so much easier and less threatening to talk about whether (or how much of) a film is “true” than to confront the unpleasant—and indisputable—truth: that racial and sexual prejudice have persisted so long past the historical eras in which these films are set.
This happens quite often with student essays concerning historical films -- too much attention paid to the factual discrepancies and not enough contemplation of the larger themes. I use films in my research and teaching, they're invaluable for understanding how history has been interpreted in various ways.
One of my favorite clips for 20th Century United States history comes from World War Z. It's the moment when people are being removed from the aircraft carrier and The Charters of Freedom are being brought on board in their place. World War Z is fictional of course, however, the human response to catastrophe, whether caused by zombies or some other force, provides a great starting point for historical discussion.
The year on the photo is listed as 1999, which seems too recent given the feel of the picture. In the high-resolution TIFF, however, the date can be seen on the bulletin board, “21 Oct 99”. The Cyber 170 was produced in the late 1970s, so this unit is at least 20 years old.
The remarkable thing is not that the mainframe will be retired -- the 35-year-old system is "like a jet slowly losing its engines," said Dick Guertin, a software developer who has worked at Stanford since 1970. What is amazing, say those whose work lives have spanned much of the computer revolution, is that the mainframe system and the ground-breaking applications designed here to run on it have held up so well for so long.
At its peak, there were 30,000 accounts, including noncampus users, on the mainframe. Some of what McWilliam is doing requires real detective work, since many of the people who opened the accounts have long ago left Stanford or retired.
