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Photos from Bell Labs Datacenter in 1960s (2019)
- rfreiberger 6y agoThe Mountain View Computer History Museum is near by and I love making a visit. The era that interests me the most is from the 60's where they started to scale up from the tube era. It's just amazing considering the time and effort compared to today.
- loraa 6y agoMuch more women than men. Even minorities. Don't let 2020 see this.
- chrisallick 6y agocool to think diversity could exist in a tech company...
- tyingq 6y agoWell, sort of. "One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women except for the programmers who were all men. For some reason only one of them was around for the pictures that day."
- chrisallick 6y agohaha yes, but computer programming was mostly women in the 40s and for a while. i stand by my sarcasm.
- beenBoutIT 6y agoThe monopoly Bell had made so much innovation possible - did society as a whole really benefit when Bell was broken up?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoWasn't the antitrust stuff why Bell had to license out Unix like it did, thereby kickstarting the OS family that underpins most of our infrastructure?
- msla 6y agoYes, it was. Bell was operating under a consent decree dating from 1956 which prohibited it from doing much beyond phones and telegrams. Bell didn't want to piss of the government, so it played it safe and declined to enter the software business when Unix was first developed, allowing it to spread on a more informal basis, including the source code. It did enter the software and Unix business when the consent decree expired, leading to System III and System V, which were closed-source. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-for-feds-for-the-success-of-unix/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
- drewcoo 6y agoMonopolies stamp out competition, resulting in less innovation. You might instead ask if society was better off before the invention of the teenager. That was emblematic of the shift toward short-term-profit-driven thinking we now call neoliberalism. That economic philosophy also happens to stifle innovation of the Bell Labs type by not financing long term projects. Today monopolies exist in spirit if not in technicality. Does society benefit? I'd say that looking back longingly at Bell Labs means no, it doesn't.
- walrus01 6y agoThe modern commercial Internet and non-monopoly/non-government ISPs would not have become possible without the 1984 breakup. Companies like Sprint and MCI benefited greatly from it. All of the early core ISPs like UUNet and its competitors, in the pre 1997 period.
- Aloha 6y agoIt's a very mixed bag. We lost lots of good paying jobs, we lost the rollout of ISDN, which would have spend up offering high speed network access, we lost hundreds of millions spent on basic research. We gained, a bunch of openness, mobility, and access to a wider breadth of services. It's still a mixed bag.
- maxekman 6y agoVery nice story and photos. It’s truly incredible how things have developed since then!
- 2rsf 6y ago> how things have developed since then and vice versa, how many things looks similar
- stickfigure 6y agoI'm terribly curious what all these jobs are: * Computer Operator * Computer Operations Supervisor * Tape Librarian * Data Control Supervisor From the article text, presumably these do not involve programming? I'm old by HN standards but this predates me by a couple eras. I guess "Tape Librarian" is obvious enough, but what does the day-to-day life of a Computer Operator look like?
- toast0 6y ago> Computer Operator We had a couple computer operators (one per shift, not sure if there were just two shifts or an overnight shift too) at my first job (school district), they didn't program the mainframe, they ran and supervised jobs; for us, most of the effort was around running the print jobs for things like report cards and what not. Grab the paper from the warehouse, load the paper, collate if needed etc. Run the backups, change the tapes, etc. Yell at the student interns when they run ping of death and it borks the mainframe. etc > Computer Operations Supervisor Supervises the computer operators, basically the manager. Handle shifts when a Computer Operator is out sick, presumably. Not sure we had a dedicated computer operations supervisor because we didn't have that many operators. > Tape Librarian Organizes the tapes (reel is a lot harder than the little cartridges we had). Physically deliver tapes to computer operators, or maybe load them, based on requests, etc. > Data Control Supervisor Supervising the Data Control people --- you didn't list them, so I don't have to guess what they did. :) My guess is running reports, checking consistency, that kind of thing.
- gregjor 6y agoI worked with mainframes and superminis back in the 70s. My first job was night computer operator. Computer operator: scheduling and monitoring jobs, managing the print spool (queue) printing reports, stripping (removing carbon paper) and collating, sometimes swapping disk packs, loading/unloading tapes, running backups. And making sure the computer didn’t crash or halt. The minis and mainframes I worked on generally ran one job at a time, and the jobs might have a sequence, reading from and writing to disk or tape. We kept transistor radios on top of the computer cabinets. Each job made a distinctive sound, as did runaway programs (infinite loops, for example). A halted computer did not make a sound so the radio was an early warning that something wasn’t right. Tape librarian: magnetic tapes degrade over time from use, stretching, humidity. The tape librarian cataloged the contents and sequence of tapes, how many times they were used, their age. When a tape had too many errors or got to end of life the tape librarian would schedule a duplicate job.
- function_seven 6y agoThese are all fantastic photos. One thing that stood out to me is how prevalent the AT&T/Western Electric blue is everywhere. Much of my career has been spent inside telephone company central offices, where I've seen equipment from dozens of different vendors. The 5ess is still the sharpest and cleanest looking hardware I've ever seen. Bright white with that distinctive blue accent trim.¹ It's really a timeless look, and shows just how much effort they put into "irrelevant" details like that. A lot of vendors aim for a unified style, but it's usually boring and hard to distinguish from their peers. But AT&T stuff was distinctive, and I don't think it suffered from the passage of time. In other words, it doesn't look retro-futuristic. It just looks nice. Look at the the 8th photo². You see the cabinets in the background, the keys on the console, the keys on the terminal, the platen knob, and the drawers on the desk. All matching and designed. [1] (I give Nortel some "anarchy" credit for their courageous use of brown and green. It's fugly in an endearing sort of way :) [2] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vaO-bHVmCQ4/XciOziQqrqI/AAAAAAAASjw/hyw68qKbSIUrUlXmRudkLZl4WkI80BV0QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Bell_Labs_1960s%2B%25289%2529.jpg https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vaO-bHVmCQ4/XciOziQqrqI/AAAAAAAAS...
- walrus01 6y agoI would say that some big core router manufacturers have built equally cool looking designs, for things like the Juniper T640, Cisco CRS1 and similar. Also the big Infinera DWDM platforms. The aesthetic is best when people who really care about good quality singlemode do careful cable management on the front line card side. My least favorite old telecom equipment is probably the Nortel DS3 microwave radio systems, full rack sized, which were the most ugly shade of dark brown.
- kitteh 6y agoI like the FORE ATM switches, the scrolling amber LEDs displaying the hostname I thought was pretty rad.
- WalterGR 6y agoIs this what you mean by 5ess? Or are there other components not shown? Image: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WP5z0lg6jDf3zLJZ9sMsPrvRWRSfCu8S9KoG90QVv0TAvuGLB_VYZ-hDFii99JVos01UlA5e9DHAuTs8Scl_Nz71Nd246vS2er2XiZN56va-jDehfBYnnG-tvz22 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WP5z0lg6jDf3zLJZ9sMs...
- 0ld 6y agoThis is fascinating not only because of the datacenter I wish we had the 60s fashion back
- Shared404 6y agoThen you may be interested to know that 80+% of the outfits I saw would fit right in at a high school as of 2 years ago. About 50% of that 80%, or 40% overall, would be whenever students were dressing up for some reason, whether on a game/concert day, or if they just felt like it. Edit: Formatting, because I can't do things right the first time.
- the-dude 6y agoThe colors are amazing.
- notenoughhorses 6y agoLooks like that office can't possible be as cold as modern offices. I would freeze in dresses like that in a modern workplace.
- 082349872349872 6y agoI remember raised-floor machine rooms being distinctly colder than office space. But more importantly, none of those shoes are barnyard acid resistant.
- post_break 6y agoI don't mean this to sound bad, but I don't think people are that skinny any more.
- Aloha 6y agohttp://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... Here is the original images. Also that thring they call a computer terminal, I'm pretty sure is either an TSPS, OSPS or TOPS console, basically used for telephone operators.
- jeffbee 6y agoThis has come up before here and on Twitter and nobody has ever known, but I intend to keep asking: does anyone know where this Bell Labs facility was in Oakland, CA? The only mention of it anywhere on the web lead back to this page. I can find no other contemporaneous documentation of it, and I even searched the Oakland Public Library periodicals archive.
- iamhamm 6y agoAccording to this article it was in the basement of the Bermuda Building (https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-techie-women-photos-13578683.php https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bell-labs-larry-luckham-...) which was demolished after Loma Prieta damaged it (https://localwiki.org/oakland/Bermuda_Building https://localwiki.org/oakland/Bermuda_Building).
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- observer987 6y agowhat a treasure trove of images! Thanks for the site reference!
- walrus01 6y agoTwo things stand out to me, other than the clothing/fashion... So much raised floor So many tapes.
- praveen9920 6y agoAnd the hairstyles. :)
- jakebasile 6y agoI enjoyed these photos. I often wish I had been born earlier so I could've been around for this part of the history of computing.
- reacharavindh 6y agoThe picture with the tape library makes me wonder why we only have the option of the small tape cartridges of today. It would be super cool to have a horizontal arrangement of say 20 such “tape wheels” each with their own R/W head. Imagine the capacity such a unit would achieve with today’s tape medium! Our LTO-8 tape cartridge holds 12 TB of incompressible data. Imagine a wheel that big could hold somewhere like 100 TB or so. If you put 10 of them in a horizontal row, with 10 heads, you get a PB archival machine.. I’d feel badly of our tape robot now.
- Chris2048 6y agoYou can get them, just tape needs the right conditions i.e. temp humidity, or it degrades. I think flammability might also be an issue.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoThroughput would suffer. At some point needing multiple weeks to copy the contents of one tape becomes impractical.
- jasomill 6y agoJust for fun: An LTO-8 tape is 960 m long and 5.6 µm thick. A standard-length ANSI-standard 9-track is 2,400 ft long and 0.0015 in thick. So naïvely assuming you could spool about 2,400 ft * (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) worth of LTO-8 tape on a reel, we have 145161/28000 = (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) * (2400 ft / 960 m) so your imaginary LTO-8 reel could store around five times as much data as an ordinary LTO-8 cartridge, or about 60 TB. Sounds promising until you realize that, even assuming impossibly efficient cylinder-packing and no additional overhead for automation, a single 9-track reel takes about as much space to store as five LTO cartridges…
- freakynit 6y agoThis website is gold
- d--b 6y agoGeez, there certainly were more women in tech at that time.
- loulou24 6y agoBecause computer programmers played guitar at the time.
- Qasaur 6y agoMy father used to be a programmer back in the 1960's for the IBM 700 series mainframes, writing programmes and simulations in FORTRAN 4 (and I think some assembler, too) for our now-defunct shipbuilding industry (Sweden). The stories he told me about how debugging back then included manually going through series upon series of punchcards (often by laying them out on the floor in his house and crawling while reading) humbles me somewhat to how far we've come in the industry where debugging something is as easy as pressing a button and getting instant feedback. Back then results from a compute had to be processed overnight even for relatively simple programmes. One thing we've seemed to regressed on though is the professional stature of our industry - back then private offices were the norm and the Orwellian open-office hellscape of today was no where to be found.
- bluenose69 6y agoIn the old days, the first step was think through the logic very carefully, because every mistake took a long time for the cards to get collected and run through the machine. Most people started by scratching their head and looking into space for a long time. Then they started drawing some sketches of flow (maybe with flowcharts, but often not doing that formally). Then they wrote out the code on coding sheets that had columns matching the columns on cards. Then they spent time reading the code and thinking like the machine. Only then were cards punched. And those cards were certainly checked for typos before submitting the job. This was all because the turnaround was so slow. Another fun card fact was that most people drew diagonal lines on their card decks, so you could more easily put them in order if they got scrambled. The consequence of all of this is that debugging cards was actually not all that common, because you were doing checks at all the preliminary steps. This was all quite fun, actually. Think of driving a standard-shift car, compared with an automatic.
- majewsky 6y ago> Most people started by scratching their head and looking into space for a long time. Then they started drawing some sketches of flow (maybe with flowcharts, but often not doing that formally). Then they wrote out the code on coding sheets that had columns matching the columns on cards. Then they spent time reading the code and thinking like the machine. This sounds a lot like how I work when writing new code that's not just a quick throw-away script, but built to last. If implementing a new feature takes me one week, then the first one is usually spent just reading the existing code and thinking about the other parts of the application and environment are going to interact with the new feature. It takes more time initially, but it saves me a ton of pain down the line, and luckily my managers appreciate that trade-off as much as I do.
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- nabla9 6y agoI can almost smell the formaldehyde smell coming from the 60's paints, wallpapers and furniture.
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- reedwolf 6y agoWas expecting more pictures of 60s tech rather than ladies in tight dresses.
- coldpie 6y agoMe too, but if you put yourself in the photographer's shoes, I guess you wouldn't just walk around taking pictures of random stuff in your office (it's just the equipment you work on, after all, who would ever care about that?), but rather the people you interact with every day. Reading the article's text, the photographer was clearly fond of the people he worked with. I'm also glad it turned out to be this, instead of that. I've seen plenty of photos of old equipment; it's cool to see candid shots of people actually performing the work that was done on the equipment.
- kelvin0 6y agoThe first thing that struck me in the images: so many women of all colors working in tech!
- fortran77 6y ago> The Charge-Coupled Device or CCD, now universally used in digital cameras, Not any more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor#CCD_vs._CMOS_sensors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor#CCD_vs._CMOS_sens...
- fortran77 6y agoI like the way people used to dress for work.
- jiveturkey 6y ago2nd "artist & work" photo. pencil sharpener attached to the wall. in a data center? shavings debris danger.
- RickJWagner 6y agoLots of women in IT (or 'DP' for 'data processing') back then. I started in 1990 on IBM mainframes, a lot of what is depicted looks like my first data centers. I saw the last of the punch cards, round tapes go to square tapes, and more greenbar paper than I'd care to admit. Good times.
- etoulas 6y agoIf the same kind of pictures would be taken today in the US (and most other western countries) obesity would be the rule with a few exceptions. Seems like the 60s didn’t have this problem yet.