Some fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
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Fun arrangement of ports on an IBM computer + a secret inventory # Gorton.
@mwichary sorry for the fan mail, but, oh holy wah, I am so excited by every one of these photos; nice work; thank you; etc.!
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Not-so-fun instructions from an accounting computer that was used at a funeral home.
@mwichary so many great usernames in that list
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Loved this guarded (and hyphenated) RESTART key.
@mwichary is that blood or rust on the key?
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This is a rare space-saving variant of the famous DEC keyboard that established the inverse T arrow key standard.
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This Dasher line famously inspired Severance set design…
@mwichary I loved my D100 - wish I had never given it away.
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All the classic colors of CRTs: amber, white, green, and burn-in.
@mwichary That one twigged some nostalgia: My father worked for Control Data, and some of my earliest clear memories are of him taking me to work, and seeing an animated Snoopy in flying ace gear flying his doghouse across the screen — in ASCII art no less, at first.
Long time ago. <sigh>
(As a bonus, the amber brought to mind my old Hyperion mostly-PC-compatible “portable”, which I still have)
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In my next life, I want to come back as a Nixie tube.
@mwichary My dad had an old electronic calculator — an enormous thing that must have weighed 20 kg — with a row of 10 or 12 Nixies for the display.
It was fascinating to watch in use, because it was *just* slow enough to see the digits flicker back and forth while it was calculating the answer.
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@michaelgemar @mwichary
“infant set up”
whew -
More of the photos I took are here: https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990
@mwichary Thank you! Some beautiful examples. Always love the vibrancy of some of those old machines. And of course some good clunky switches!
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…but I have never seen a screen-less printer-terminal like this one!
Well generally I have seen those tractor feed terminals with keyboards, just not with such striking design and colors.
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I miss the old terminal proofreading-inspired icons for INSERT and DELETE.
@mwichary wow ive never seen this. Why would you ever replace this, it's DEL with a *flourish*
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…and some very good regular switches, too.
(I liked the whole hierarchy of toggles in that last photo.)
@mwichary oh those are some niiiiiiice switches
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Some fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
@mwichary The terminal on top of the short-stack PDP-11s in the first picture is one of the most perfectly futuristic things I've ever seen. Any chance you remember what it is? [edit: Oop, nevermind, found it. DEC VT05 (or possibly VT8-E)!]
(Also I've never noticed the proofreading-style insert/delete keys before, but I love them)
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Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
@mwichary Postmodernism.
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Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
@mwichary Why? Because they are great for some people. The ball inside is round and it feels right to grab round things. Why do most companies go out of their way to make mice look like this odd shape that is like nothing you touch in normal life?
If today’s UI wasn‘t that hostile to single-button-no-scroll-thingie I‘d be rocking the puck every single day.
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