Dinosaur's Pen

letsbeadult:

Components.jpg

Operator June McNeil at the console of an IBM 1620 computer. In the foreground you can see the opened case of an IBM 1301 disk drive, an early ancestor of today’s hard disk drives. (University of Saint Andrews, 1966.)

ihackedmypc:

Who says big blue isn’t stylish? 

Operator at a System/360 console, circa 1969

Anybody remember the IBM computer punch card?

johnclaudielectronics:

IBM System/360 computer brochure - 1964 

(par r.p.nix.mn)

prostheticknowledge:

Visualing Poetry with 1960s Computer Graphics 

Experimental collection of films made in late 1960’s using a computer has surprising digital and glitch aesthetic - video embedded below:

[PK Note - I’m not going to lie, the film isn’t going to be for everyone, and it does feature some abstract jazz which may hurt your ears if you are listening via headphone. As you’ll see in the excerpt below, a computer was used to create the composition but not the colours, which was added later. Still, I do see it as a possible precursor to glitch we are more familiar with today]

From 1964 through around 1969, artist Stan VanDerBeek worked with computer scientist Ken Knowlton on a series of films:

… Each film was constructed using Knowlton’s BEFLIX computer language, which was based on FORTRAN. The films were programmed on a IBM 7094 computer. The films were created in black and white, with color added later by Brown and Olvey. This particular version is taken from a film with some color decay.

VanDerBeek passed away in 1984. He is also part of the film Incredible Machine, made in 1968. VanDerBeek was part of a unique program at Bell Labs that allowed artists to work with computer scientists in order to explore and advance the technology in the fields of computer graphics and music.

Source Here

vintageblackglamour:

Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.

(via boryaaa)

xcaru:

IBM2 by thisispauljonesphotos on Flickr.