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A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards
- rootsudo 24d agoNow I know why there's a margin on older business cards. TIL I alwways thought it was a slip in thing, not they'd actually mutate the cards.
- hellisothers 25d agoLove the logos, colors, and at the same time simplicity. These are so much more memorable than what you see today which I find to be bland or over the top “grafix”.
- tanseydavid 25d ago"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark."
- dylan604 25d agoI love that scene and its commentary. Right up there with the Ikea catalog scene in Fight Club
- shmeeed 25d agoSomebody had to say it.
- maroonblazer 24d agoFrom "American Psycho". https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/american-psycho/quote_1679.html https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/american-psycho/quote_16...
- walrus01 24d agoVery nice, now let's see Paul Allen's high explosive spherical compression lens.
- retired 25d agoI'm starting to see ChatGPT generated business promotions along the side of the road more and more often and it saddens me. I'd rather have something your daughter doodled on a piece of paper + the title of your company over some obvious AI slop.
- ishtanbul 25d agoA lot of cheaper restaurants and bodegas in nyc use AI images to show what food they serve and a lot of them have this slightly grotesque quality thats very unappetizing. Almost like a nightmare/ acid trip filter.
- xp84 25d agoWow. Talk about the worst uses of AI -- the actual representative pictures of product you're selling. If false advertising law ever got an update, a ban on an AI depiction of one's product itself in an ad or other pre-sale imagery should be added.
- csh0 24d agoFood companies have used glue or other substances in things like cereal ads (in place of milk) for decades. Unfortunate.
- nom 24d agoyeah they do it to make it look more appetizing in the photos Quite the opposite of what is happening here.. they are going the cheap route and use AI instead of a human who knows how to make an appetizing menu.
- jen729w 24d agoDiscussed here last month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005973
- alex43578 24d ago
- wxw 25d ago> The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole. Too good.
- paradox460 25d agoMany of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place
- Bluestein 25d ago> occasionally hot Am I understanding correctly?
- ErroneousBosh 25d agoIt depends on the exact definition of the word "hot" you mean. No, wait, it doesn't, you'll find any kind of hot you like.
- Bluestein 25d agoQuite ... the place.- PS. I would like the record to show, excuse me for stating the obvious, that this was an actual place (!): https://losalamosreporter.com/2025/06/29/black-hole-museum-a-new-idea-for-the-los-alamos-community/ https://losalamosreporter.com/2025/06/29/black-hole-museum-a...
- paradox460 25d agoRadioactive in this case, but knowing the black hole, other definitions likely apply as well
- kjs3 25d agoThat place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies. Good times.
- cjkaminski 25d agoA bunch of those names sound fake, like they should be from Fallout instead of Los Alamos. But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies.
- dcrazy 25d ago“Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake.
- SoftTalker 25d agoI always liked "General Atomics" (though it wasn't among the cards listed). Still opertating today under that name. If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see.
- xp84 24d agoI really appreciate the lack of flashiness that naming your company "General ____" puts out there. 20th century brought us General Electric, General Dynamics, General Motors, General Mills, General Dynamics, General Foods. The founders of those companies said "What do we call our company? Well, we make electrical things. In general. Anything electric is on the table. So let's just call it... 'General Electric.'" Today companies get names like Altria or Kenvue. Empty vessels of pure vibes to be filled with Branding Juice. I don't think we'll ever see such sincerity in naming again. We did get General Magic in 1990, which seems kind of like a wink and a nod at that old naming trend.
- tancop 24d agoSGI had a descriptive name. Bethesda Softworks is named after the city, SpaceX is short for "Space Exploration Technologies", IGN is literally a description of their site (they don't use the full name today but it's International Gaming Network). Epic Games and Tesla are less literal but still relate to their business. The empty corporate sounding names are usually for conglomerates that need a neutral name so they don't put one of their brands over others, and B2B suppliers who need something unique for trademark purposes but don't really do the kind of marketing where they would need emotional impact.
- world2vec 25d agoSeems some of them would get the key contact details "clipped" by the rolodex itself. Maybe a good design would put the phone number and address at the top.
- mopsi 25d agoIndeed! Interesting that leaving a bottom margin for Rolodex didn't become a design standard.
- ahmedfromtunis 25d ago"Did you know that there _is_ actually a reason behind the blank space at the bottom of every business card? To get the full picture, we need to go back way before the smartphone age, when a bizarre device, known as the rolodex, ruled office desks" — some blogger in a parallel universe, probably.
- fumeux_fume 25d ago"Blast-N-Peen" got a good chuckle out of me. On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Riddle at Electronic Memories was unsettlingly spare, a little bit sinister in its lack of graphic expression of any kind.
- wildzzz 25d agoThey do sound sinister. They mostly made stuff like core memory devices https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/03/102646620-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
- creeble 25d agoExplosive Technology, wow: https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-columnists/back-in-the-day-explosive-technology-debuts-in-1965-later-takes-fairfield-to-the-moon/article_b1238c2b-1b5f-50b9-9e5a-ccb672e50519.html https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-colu...
- buildsjets 25d agoThey're still in business today and manufacture the explosive squibs that are used inside some brands of permanently installed aircraft fire existing systems. But it's really a pretty small, contained explosion. I think they also do airbag inflators. I had a chance to be onsite at a different facility when they set of the SEMTEX in their 25 acre blasting site. It was impressive. A true earth-shattering kaboom. They were welding a plate of titanium to a plate of aluminum for us. http://highenergymetals.com/ http://highenergymetals.com/
- BoingBoomTschak 25d agoLove the Plasmadyne logo! And that Xenon card gives me strong TriOptimum vibes.
- yobananaboy 22d agoI found a neat NASA report from 1970 that Plasmadyne was part of, looks like this one was a legit company! https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700013448/downloads/19700013448.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700013448/downloads/19...
- jjwiseman 25d agoThe Winter 2016 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's newsletter, "The Lay of the Land", has more information on the cards: https://clui.org/newsletter/winter-2016/los-alamos-rolodex https://clui.org/newsletter/winter-2016/los-alamos-rolodex There's also a book: https://clui-shop.square.site/product/los-alamos-rolodex/292?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false https://clui-shop.square.site/product/los-alamos-rolodex/292... I saw the exhibit in person back when it was on display. If you're ever in LA you should try to stop in to the CLUI's Culver City location, they always have something interesting.
- gricardo99 24d agoIncredible. I was curious to see what I could find for one of the business card: Dr. Ronald Moskowitz, FerroFluidics (cool name). Took me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Turns out the guy was a bit of a fraudster and was sentenced to 8 years in prison for securities fraud[1] 1 - https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-16584 https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
- johng 24d agoI did EXACTLY the same thing when I saw that name and that card. What a cool name. I wanted to see if it was still around!
- ksd482 24d agoSo these business cards are from 1940s ? I ask this because on one of the cards the phone number was 10 digits. I would have thought the phone numbers would be shorter. Anyway, pretty cool to see them in high definition and realize they aren't any different than today's business cards.
- gadders 24d agoI miss not having business cards any more.
- pizzaballs 24d ago[dead]
- xtiansimon 24d agoGraphic design time capsule.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]