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Data tape storage at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), 1979.

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State of Technology…

   IBM 729 Magnetic Tape Units, 1971

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The MOnSter 6502 - Eric Schlaepfer

VCF West XVIII

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AlphaSyntauri synthesizer with Apple II, 1981. (via)

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What do you think would surprise a person from the 1950s most about modern computers?

How disposable they've become. We toss away computers like old socks.

How we got away from the model of timesharing for so long, only to go right back to cloud computing. People were so eager to personalize the experience, it's why things like the PDP-1 came into existance in the late 50s.

How much software went from this thing that was freely, openly shared as just a point of fact to a world where people pay for software regularly.

How much people trust a computer to think for them. A computer cannot think, it can only do math really fast, *you* have to think about how to make use of that platform to make your workload easier. People using computers in the 50s understood this implicitly, and now some people want shitty autocomplete to do the hard part for them. The human tasks that are worth doing, but that's a whole rant in itself.

How much computers just get powered off, or just run without doing anything, because of how plentiful and commonplace they are. In the 50s, no computer time was wasted, it was too expensive. If the machine was operational back then, it was busy.

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being material - mit press (2019)

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Here's some paintings I've done of people looking at screens. These are all available as prints on Inprnt: Art Prints by Ollie Jones - INPRNT I'm also selling a limited edition print of my piece 'Producer' at Black Dragon Press: Producer – Black Dragon Press

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You can watch a movie on your Atari 2600 now. Yes really.

MovieCart is an Atari 2600 cartridge developed by Lodef Mode that allows you to load custom movies to it and play them on your real-life, honest-to-goodness Atari 2600 console.

Even if you don't want to go through the trouble of converting and loading your own movie onto the cart via SD card, the SD card bundled with MovieCart comes with Night of the Living Dead preloaded!

Check out a demo here

They're sold out for now but keep an eye on Lodef's Tindie shop for future sales.

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Eternally upset I missed the public access Multics installation that apparently existed a few years ago before blipping off the face of the internet... who wants to start a new one with me?

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IBM 360 mainframe in Germany, 1965. Photo by Rolf Herkner.

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An array of Control Data 844 disk storage units at NASA’s Ames Research Center, California, 1980.

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The KFKI TPA-1001 , a Hungarian PDP-8 clone (circa 1968). Built entirely with transistors and other discrete components, as even SSI ICs were not available at the time in Hungary.

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