9 ms·

1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs

214 points by colinprince 8y ago

delish 8y ago
Great pictures! As a remote developer for SaaS company, and as someone who does both commercialized-work and commercialized-play on his laptop, I now see that I enjoy looking at people contributing to research by working on computers, back when computers were a subject of research.
dm8 8y ago
Great pictures. In one picture there is some flowchart on chalkboard. I'm always curious on how did flowchart symbols came to be. For example I'm pleasantly surprised that the disk plate/drum symbol (used to signify databases) that is drawn on chalkboard, which is prevalent nowadays is also used in 60s.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Back then it made literal sense. Now it's as symbolic as a floppy disk icon.
greggyb 8y ago
What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.
- shrewduser 8y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
- reaperducer 8y ago
  What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate. I don't know what slideshow you're looking at, but the vast majority of the pictures I see are women. http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0033.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0040.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0025.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0002.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0012.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... The real horror is how that page hijacks keypresses and touch gestures. It's unusable with Javascript on.
  - greggyb 8y ago
    We are agreeing. To expand: What happened to all the women in tech fields? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers (who are modern additions to organizations) salivate, because current workplaces do not look like this slideshow.
    - Aloha 8y ago
      I've spent most of my career in Telecom, this is how my experience in telecom is, AT&T got into equal opportunity early, and the notion stayed with the company past divestiture.
  - delish 8y ago
    The GP may have been saying, "What happened [recently] to all the women [that they're not around any more]?"
  - spooneybarger 8y ago
    "What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate." The OP meant, if you were to do a slideshow now, there would probably be considerably fewer women now.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Men took their jobs. At the time, programming wasn't held in such high esteem by the general populace since it wasn't far removed from the menial busy work of shuffling around card stacks and tape reels. When it became more lucrative, the demographics shifted.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  Not only that, but everyone's got some fashion sense here, while still dressing professionally. Today, there'd be nothing but grey and beige. The office is also colorful and better-decorated than most these days.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?
      - naniwaduni 8y ago
        Moon?
        Latteland 8y ago
        My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.
        cm2012 8y ago
        Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AProperty_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.
- codemac 8y ago
  There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business. Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality
  - antt 8y ago
    >Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. That's largely bullshit. The position of 'programmer' today would be that of a systems architect from 1960. The position of 'programmer' of 1960 is the linker/assembler program of today. The jobs where women used to be a majority of the staff were simply automated away. Before you cry sexism the position of CNC programmer, a largely male dominated profession, has suffered from the same. With the job going from being a hugely skilled profession in the 1960s to being something you press a button in a cam package, with the pay dropping correspondingly from the 60s to today.
    - derangedHorse 8y ago
      That’s all based on the potentially dangerous assumption that the majority of women were working in now obsolete jobs. Your post also implies that those same women weren’t qualified to work other jobs even after their old jobs were retired. I would also say that the assumption isn’t entirely correct based on the percentage of CS graduates that were female around that time compared to today. Maybe these early women in tech could transfer to other positions but got rejected on application because of biases among employers?
- fmajid 8y ago
  Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code, mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation (I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like. If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.
  - lloydde 8y ago
    > If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s I agree with your points, but I wonder if looking at CS won’t reveal the scope or timing of the problem. Based on my own experience entering the workforce mid-90s, it was only sometime in the 90s when the majority of software developers had CS coursework. When I started near a majority had physics, math, engineering and other backgrounds, with their computing experience being industrial.
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Agreed, when I was a kid I met a programmer who used to be a computer. She was older than my dad, and he considered her an expert in his 30s. Punch cards were the rage. Since then, I've met 2 women who worked directly at Bell Labs (with LeCun) in the 90s, both of whom I would consider experts in AI (and the present tools of DL), even though they are now retired. They started studying CS in the 70s. The real boom happened in the 80-90s when it wasn't a respected field and educated women went into Medicine, Law, Marketing... It's only in the last 15-20 years that programming has been considered a "real" major. Before that most programmers had an education in something else.
  - ido 8y ago
    If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s It apparently peaked at 1984: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer-science-grads--the-bump-before-the-decline.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer...
- ghaff 8y ago
  I have a book from a minicomputer company I worked for in the late eighties and nineties. A Year in Development. Basically documentation of projects and people in 1984 or 85. Showed it to a friend of mine and her first reaction was Wow, so many women.
- bartimus 8y ago
  For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture. So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those. Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe. I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment. We get the weird situation we see today.
- salivation 8y ago
  Salivation? Isn't that a form of uninvited, micro-aggressive sexualization?
newprint 8y ago
Notice interesting thing - a lot of women in the pictures. My mom worked with a large mainframe in early 80's and from what she told me, majority of employees were women. They had just few guys, they quickly got taken out of dating pool.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  My mom worked with a large mainframe in early 80's and from what she told me, majority if employees were women. I remember this, too. In fact, the first two people who taught me how to use a computer (back in 8" floppy disk and 2K RAM days) were women. And nuns.
oil25 8y ago
Nothing but blank pages in Firefox without Javascript, which I disable for non-HTTPS protected sites. If your site needs Javascript to display a simple image on an HTML page, please consider your users and their accessibility needs.
- closetohome 8y ago
  I'm in Chrome with...I don't know, some add-ons, and the whole thing is basically broken for me. What an absolute POS gallery app. Something wrong with using static HTML to display all of a couple dozen jpegs?
  - deleted 8y ago
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- TooCleverByHalf 8y ago
  Trying to understand how disabling javascript is related to accessibility needs. Mind helping me out?
  - shakna 8y ago
    As someone who uses voice software, sometimes to see, sometimes to control... JS is hell. It can hijack elements after I think I know what they contain. It can abandon the DOM and use the canvas. And most of the time if you're rebuilding elements in JS the developer forgets to tag things correctly... So all I know is that there's an img that has appeared out of nowhere.
- Aloha 8y ago
  Here is a static gallery version
Dig1t 8y ago
This is one of the coolest things I've seen posted on HN.
- braink 8y ago
  I totally agree. BTW, I'm having problems getting all the pictures rendered in my browser (Safari), but the ones I've been able to see are really inpirational. I teach mostly (+95%) men in audio design studies at university level and women are painfully lacking in the field. It would certainly help make the field richer, more interesting, and more dynamic (not only for us men, but in general),if there was more gender diversity in tech in general and audio (this is where I see it the most because it's my domain) in particular.
deleted 8y ago
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mikeytown2 8y ago
Faster Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryl...
peteradio 8y ago
All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0001.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...
- antt 8y ago
  What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking amazing.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    The women who used to be secretaries (some subset of them, at least) are now lawyers, doctors, investors, managers, engineers, etc. That's always been the point of eliminating jobs: it frees up the people who used to do those jobs to do other things.
    - antt 8y ago
      The jobs created in the last 20 years have been worse paid and less secure than the jobs that were destroyed. The granddaughters of the 60s secretaries are baristas, nurses, cleaners, retail workers and other jobs with terrible working conditions and security. That's the problem of the current system, losing jobs is fine as long as they are replaced by better jobs. When they are replaced by worse jobs you have a broken system. And we have a very broken system.
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      Ironically it doesn't free up the people who used to do them to go about doing what they want with their time - it only frees them up in the same way that the computer will free up memory, the people are able to be allocated to other places in the economy. The observation that automation tends not to free people in any genuine sense even runs against Keynes' predictions for how much we'd be working today.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
One of the things I notice is that there is not a single Asian male in any of the photos. If you went into any software office around Oakland, CA or the larger Bay Area now, I would guess that 30-50% (if not more) of the programmers you see would be Asian males.
- shakna 8y ago
  Well until '65 there were agressive immigration restrictions on Asians, so I expect that would reduce the number available with the required skills.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    I grew up in San Jose. There were Asians most of them were well assimilated Japanese and Chinese who's families immigrated before 1930. Weren't that many maybe 1 out of 10. The big immigration came later in the 1980's with the end of the Vietnam war/killing fields, and opening of China. A lot of ethnic Chinese in South East Asia fled in the 1970-80's. And these pictures are from Oakland circa 1970.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    India was quite closed off until relatively recently its only in the mid 80's that India began to compete when it abandond soviet style central control. "you can have any car you like as long as its a hundistan ambassador"
- ghaff 8y ago
  I worked for a computer company in the Boston area in the late 80s/90s and there were a minuscule number of Asians. We did some support work for legacy products in India through a partner and had a Japanese subsidiary but it was a rarity for any people from those orgs to be located in the US.
- salivation 8y ago
  Gee, no Indians either, so I guess we have to interpret that as unfair hiring practices.
drakenot 8y ago
I just finished the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" about the early history of the internet and I highly recommend it. It covers the invention of packet switching, ARPANET, ethernet, email and a lot of stages the "internet" went through post ARPANET. Seeing these pictures really helps bring the people from this time period in the book to life for me.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
This went around a little while ago and at that time I could find no other information about a Bell Labs facility in Oakland. Does anyone have any information about that? Where was it?
Aloha 8y ago
So for those who are curious to know more about this: https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-techie-women-photos-13578683.php https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-lu...
nikodunk 8y ago
It's funny how current these photos seem when they're colored like contemporary photos.
atomlib 8y ago
1969 and 1970. That was the time Bell Labs withdrew from MULTICS project and a couple of developers who found themselves without a job starter working internally on a little word processor suite called UNIX.
Aardwolf 8y ago
One thing that really evolved since then is chairs. How could people manage to sit all day on chairs like this! http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0010.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0016.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...
readingnews 8y ago
Love your pictures!! Wow, it actually looks like a bunch of people who are happy to be there. Look at that Tek scope on the scope cart! I purchased one of those as an undergrad in EECE, what a great old scope. Also, is the part of your website that loads images behind a 1970s switch at bell labs, perhaps? :) I thank the other HN members for the mirrors.
major505 8y ago
great photos. I kinda envy those who could live at that time. See tech evolve in such a fast pace. It must been very exciting.
_the_inflator 8y ago
Thanks to all these retro filter apps, these pictures look surprisingly up to date. It does not look like a memory from the past but like a retro picture shooting. Weird.
abdulhaq 8y ago
Wonderful photos and the color is superb. The people look happy and seem relaxed. I'm also really loving the colored theme of the controls that extends to the desks and teletype machines. The blue is beautiful. Fantastic.

214 points by colinprince 8y ago

Great pictures! As a remote developer for SaaS company, and as someone who does both commercialized-work and commercialized-play on his laptop, I now see that I enjoy looking at people contributing to research by working on computers, back when computers were a subject of research.

dm8 8y ago

Great pictures. In one picture there is some flowchart on chalkboard. I'm always curious on how did flowchart symbols came to be. For example I'm pleasantly surprised that the disk plate/drum symbol (used to signify databases) that is drawn on chalkboard, which is prevalent nowadays is also used in 60s.

nine_k 8y ago
Back then it made literal sense. Now it's as symbolic as a floppy disk icon.

greggyb 8y ago

What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.

shrewduser 8y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
reaperducer 8y ago
What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate. I don't know what slideshow you're looking at, but the vast majority of the pictures I see are women. http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0033.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0040.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0025.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0002.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0012.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... The real horror is how that page hijacks keypresses and touch gestures. It's unusable with Javascript on.
- greggyb 8y ago
  We are agreeing. To expand: What happened to all the women in tech fields? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers (who are modern additions to organizations) salivate, because current workplaces do not look like this slideshow.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    I've spent most of my career in Telecom, this is how my experience in telecom is, AT&T got into equal opportunity early, and the notion stayed with the company past divestiture.
- delish 8y ago
  The GP may have been saying, "What happened [recently] to all the women [that they're not around any more]?"
- spooneybarger 8y ago
  "What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate." The OP meant, if you were to do a slideshow now, there would probably be considerably fewer women now.
- deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Men took their jobs. At the time, programming wasn't held in such high esteem by the general populace since it wasn't far removed from the menial busy work of shuffling around card stacks and tape reels. When it became more lucrative, the demographics shifted.
caymanjim 8y ago
Not only that, but everyone's got some fashion sense here, while still dressing professionally. Today, there'd be nothing but grey and beige. The office is also colorful and better-decorated than most these days.
- Latteland 8y ago
  It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?
    - naniwaduni 8y ago
      Moon?
      - Latteland 8y ago
        My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.
        cm2012 8y ago
        Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AProperty_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.
codemac 8y ago
There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business. Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality
- antt 8y ago
  >Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. That's largely bullshit. The position of 'programmer' today would be that of a systems architect from 1960. The position of 'programmer' of 1960 is the linker/assembler program of today. The jobs where women used to be a majority of the staff were simply automated away. Before you cry sexism the position of CNC programmer, a largely male dominated profession, has suffered from the same. With the job going from being a hugely skilled profession in the 1960s to being something you press a button in a cam package, with the pay dropping correspondingly from the 60s to today.
  - derangedHorse 8y ago
    That’s all based on the potentially dangerous assumption that the majority of women were working in now obsolete jobs. Your post also implies that those same women weren’t qualified to work other jobs even after their old jobs were retired. I would also say that the assumption isn’t entirely correct based on the percentage of CS graduates that were female around that time compared to today. Maybe these early women in tech could transfer to other positions but got rejected on application because of biases among employers?
fmajid 8y ago
Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code, mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation (I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like. If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.
- lloydde 8y ago
  > If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s I agree with your points, but I wonder if looking at CS won’t reveal the scope or timing of the problem. Based on my own experience entering the workforce mid-90s, it was only sometime in the 90s when the majority of software developers had CS coursework. When I started near a majority had physics, math, engineering and other backgrounds, with their computing experience being industrial.
- kurthr 8y ago
  Agreed, when I was a kid I met a programmer who used to be a computer. She was older than my dad, and he considered her an expert in his 30s. Punch cards were the rage. Since then, I've met 2 women who worked directly at Bell Labs (with LeCun) in the 90s, both of whom I would consider experts in AI (and the present tools of DL), even though they are now retired. They started studying CS in the 70s. The real boom happened in the 80-90s when it wasn't a respected field and educated women went into Medicine, Law, Marketing... It's only in the last 15-20 years that programming has been considered a "real" major. Before that most programmers had an education in something else.
- ido 8y ago
  If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s It apparently peaked at 1984: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer-science-grads--the-bump-before-the-decline.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer...
ghaff 8y ago
I have a book from a minicomputer company I worked for in the late eighties and nineties. A Year in Development. Basically documentation of projects and people in 1984 or 85. Showed it to a friend of mine and her first reaction was Wow, so many women.
bartimus 8y ago
For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture. So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those. Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe. I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment. We get the weird situation we see today.
salivation 8y ago
Salivation? Isn't that a form of uninvited, micro-aggressive sexualization?

newprint 8y ago

Notice interesting thing - a lot of women in the pictures. My mom worked with a large mainframe in early 80's and from what she told me, majority of employees were women. They had just few guys, they quickly got taken out of dating pool.

reaperducer 8y ago
My mom worked with a large mainframe in early 80's and from what she told me, majority if employees were women. I remember this, too. In fact, the first two people who taught me how to use a computer (back in 8" floppy disk and 2K RAM days) were women. And nuns.

oil25 8y ago

Nothing but blank pages in Firefox without Javascript, which I disable for non-HTTPS protected sites. If your site needs Javascript to display a simple image on an HTML page, please consider your users and their accessibility needs.

closetohome 8y ago
I'm in Chrome with...I don't know, some add-ons, and the whole thing is basically broken for me. What an absolute POS gallery app. Something wrong with using static HTML to display all of a couple dozen jpegs?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
TooCleverByHalf 8y ago
Trying to understand how disabling javascript is related to accessibility needs. Mind helping me out?
- shakna 8y ago
  As someone who uses voice software, sometimes to see, sometimes to control... JS is hell. It can hijack elements after I think I know what they contain. It can abandon the DOM and use the canvas. And most of the time if you're rebuilding elements in JS the developer forgets to tag things correctly... So all I know is that there's an img that has appeared out of nowhere.
Aloha 8y ago
Here is a static gallery version

Dig1t 8y ago

This is one of the coolest things I've seen posted on HN.

braink 8y ago
I totally agree. BTW, I'm having problems getting all the pictures rendered in my browser (Safari), but the ones I've been able to see are really inpirational. I teach mostly (+95%) men in audio design studies at university level and women are painfully lacking in the field. It would certainly help make the field richer, more interesting, and more dynamic (not only for us men, but in general),if there was more gender diversity in tech in general and audio (this is where I see it the most because it's my domain) in particular.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mikeytown2 8y ago

Faster Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190404234511/http://www.larryl...

peteradio 8y ago

All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0001.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...

antt 8y ago
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking amazing.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The women who used to be secretaries (some subset of them, at least) are now lawyers, doctors, investors, managers, engineers, etc. That's always been the point of eliminating jobs: it frees up the people who used to do those jobs to do other things.
  - antt 8y ago
    The jobs created in the last 20 years have been worse paid and less secure than the jobs that were destroyed. The granddaughters of the 60s secretaries are baristas, nurses, cleaners, retail workers and other jobs with terrible working conditions and security. That's the problem of the current system, losing jobs is fine as long as they are replaced by better jobs. When they are replaced by worse jobs you have a broken system. And we have a very broken system.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    Ironically it doesn't free up the people who used to do them to go about doing what they want with their time - it only frees them up in the same way that the computer will free up memory, the people are able to be allocated to other places in the economy. The observation that automation tends not to free people in any genuine sense even runs against Keynes' predictions for how much we'd be working today.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

One of the things I notice is that there is not a single Asian male in any of the photos. If you went into any software office around Oakland, CA or the larger Bay Area now, I would guess that 30-50% (if not more) of the programmers you see would be Asian males.

shakna 8y ago
Well until '65 there were agressive immigration restrictions on Asians, so I expect that would reduce the number available with the required skills.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  I grew up in San Jose. There were Asians most of them were well assimilated Japanese and Chinese who's families immigrated before 1930. Weren't that many maybe 1 out of 10. The big immigration came later in the 1980's with the end of the Vietnam war/killing fields, and opening of China. A lot of ethnic Chinese in South East Asia fled in the 1970-80's. And these pictures are from Oakland circa 1970.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  India was quite closed off until relatively recently its only in the mid 80's that India began to compete when it abandond soviet style central control. "you can have any car you like as long as its a hundistan ambassador"
ghaff 8y ago
I worked for a computer company in the Boston area in the late 80s/90s and there were a minuscule number of Asians. We did some support work for legacy products in India through a partner and had a Japanese subsidiary but it was a rarity for any people from those orgs to be located in the US.
salivation 8y ago
Gee, no Indians either, so I guess we have to interpret that as unfair hiring practices.

drakenot 8y ago

I just finished the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" about the early history of the internet and I highly recommend it. It covers the invention of packet switching, ARPANET, ethernet, email and a lot of stages the "internet" went through post ARPANET. Seeing these pictures really helps bring the people from this time period in the book to life for me.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

This went around a little while ago and at that time I could find no other information about a Bell Labs facility in Oakland. Does anyone have any information about that? Where was it?

Aloha 8y ago

So for those who are curious to know more about this: https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-techie-women-photos-13578683.php https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/bell-labs-larry-lu...

nikodunk 8y ago

It's funny how current these photos seem when they're colored like contemporary photos.

atomlib 8y ago

1969 and 1970. That was the time Bell Labs withdrew from MULTICS project and a couple of developers who found themselves without a job starter working internally on a little word processor suite called UNIX.

Aardwolf 8y ago

One thing that really evolved since then is chairs. How could people manage to sit all day on chairs like this! http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0010.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/slides/Bell_Labs__0016.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...

readingnews 8y ago

Love your pictures!! Wow, it actually looks like a bunch of people who are happy to be there. Look at that Tek scope on the scope cart! I purchased one of those as an undergrad in EECE, what a great old scope. Also, is the part of your website that loads images behind a 1970s switch at bell labs, perhaps? :) I thank the other HN members for the mirrors.

major505 8y ago

great photos. I kinda envy those who could live at that time. See tech evolve in such a fast pace. It must been very exciting.

_the_inflator 8y ago

Thanks to all these retro filter apps, these pictures look surprisingly up to date. It does not look like a memory from the past but like a retro picture shooting. Weird.

abdulhaq 8y ago

Wonderful photos and the color is superb. The people look happy and seem relaxed. I'm also really loving the colored theme of the controls that extends to the desks and teletype machines. The blue is beautiful. Fantastic.