Just a Japanese lady standing awkwardly with a mainframe

Fujitsu GS 8900 mainframe computer, Japan, 1997.

… and another Japanese lady standing awkwardly with a mobile phone.

NTT Docomo i-mode mobile telephone, Japan, 2001.

 

The white room

Hitachi supercomputer MP 6000, Japan, 1997.

Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 with consoles and magnetic tape units, USA, 1970. And do my eyes deceive me, or is the obligatory foxy female operator a foxy African-American woman? Progress! Well, sort of, because she still has to be foxy or GTFO of shot…

Colossus

Control panel and plugboards of the British Colossus computer, 1944. It was not programmable, had 2500 vacuum tubes, and it had only one hardwired purpose and algorithm: to crack the encryption of Germany’s Enigma machines, processing up to 5000 characters per second. Based on the work of mathematicians and cryptographers such as Alan Turing at the top secret Bletchley Park facility, the ability to break German codes was one of the factors that eventually turned the Second World War in favour of the Allies.

Another notable thing about this photograph is the strangely timeless/time traveller style of the woman on the left. I think she could walk down the street anywhere in the developed world at any time between about 1930 and 2030 and look like she belongs there.

Computers are boring

The TRS 80 home computer, USA, 1978. In these thrilling advertisements, a man does the household budget (on paper, while looking at the numbers on the screen) and some kind of prepubescent Oedipal classroom psychodrama is played out through the medium of multiplication tables.

Basically it’s a jumped-up pocket calculator, only much less convenient.

Don’t worry, puritans of America, you can’t do anything fun or interesting with these computers!

“F-3, Passport, page 2, title 4”

Brace yourselves, nerds. This week it’s an onslaught of vintage computer images from Computers: An Illustrated History by Christian Wurster, published by Taschen. Honestly it’s so interesting and visually arresting (and virtually wordless, as the title suggests) that I could scan almost every page of it, but I’m not going to. I strongly recommend that you buy this splendid book if you like the images I’m posting, just as I suggest you do for the work of any other authors, artists, musicians, or film makers whose efforts I feature here or that you see on other blogs, and just as I also gently suggest that you support me in a small way by buying one of my books if you enjoy this blog.

Anyway, commercial message over, here’s an inexplicable image from a 1984 German ad for the Atari 800 XL.

Caption: “Wow! I just said ‘Man in the Mirror’ and it replied ‘F-3, Passport, page 2, title 4’.”

The text on the screen describes what I initially assumed must be a fictional album, since the details seemed so daft: it says the genre is “jazzrock” and the songs have stupid titles like Mango Tango. Passport was, however, a real German prog rock and (shudder) jazz rock band who did indeed release an LP called Man in the Mirror in 1983. This confirms that the gentleman pictured here really is DJing at one of the shittiest discos ever. Probably best not to even try working out what narrative we’re meant to glean from this photo. Miss Average in Pink getting short shrift and a lecture on Hawkwind when she complains that nobody wants to hear prog and jazzrock at a disco?

Interesting with hindsight that actually playing a whole song as a file directly from a digitised playlist was still far beyond the capabilities of a home computer.