Core Memory | Mark Richards & John Alderman | Talks at Google

This is John Alderman and I'm Mark Richards, the author and the writer. I mean, the photographer. And we're gonna have a little conversational style.

Yeah. Because rather than a little bit of feedback to go.

Yeah, exactly.

So, first of all, Mark was really the driver behind the whole project. He's been at it for four years trying to get the book actually created. So I'm going to start off with just, well, why Happiness is a warm Gun.

It was short and sweet. No, but I guess your bigger question is, why did I do the book? What started me on the path of this?

What was the trigger?

What was the trigger? Ah. Oi. Like many things, it's complicated, but I mean, it's a mixture of timing. Something just caught my brain. You know how it is. Something catches your brain and you don't know why and you're in that, you're just sucked into it. And when you come out of it, you go, well, what was that about? So, I mean, I just happened to be down there and at the Computer History Museum. I work primarily historically as a magazine photographer. So I was seeing there was like a geek festival and there were the Vintage Computer Festival and they were having all these people showing their old machines, but I was unaware of the museum. And so when I went to the museum, on a lark while I was there, it just struck me that these, this is art and it's beyond what it was designed for, which was primarily engineering, computing a piece of metal to do a mathematical calculation. It was also art and nobody or not many people had decided to look at it that way. And it just hit me, my God, there's just so much beauty here. And so after that I was kind of like possessed about. I had to do this and it really had to be possessed because if you go to the museum, it's just presented in a, you know, certain straightforward fashion, but anyone can see this. It's just really, really, at least it's really apparent to me.

Do you remember which machines those were that you were looking at?

Well, one of the ones in particular was called the iliac, and that was one of the last ones up there, the red and blue. And it looks very anatomical, like we're looking inside of a human body. The veins and the arteries very much like 14 century illustrations of some of the first autopsies. And it just harkened back to all sorts of other art things to me. And I thought, wow, this is just really beautiful. And then I started to see other machines and other different parts that reflected the humanity of the designers and the era and what they had to work with the tools. And then all of a sudden I saw the framework. Well, this is like a whole period of our human history that I just wanted, like, delve into. And it took a while to convince people, but here we are.

So why did you think that a book was a good idea rather than an exhibit or a magazine article?

Because it really could encapsulate. I mean, this had to be something that was a package. You know what I mean? I mean, I really saw this as. This is like part one of many packages, but we're living in a very historical time. It's hard to see that it's history in some vantage points, at least. I'm just addressing the computer aspect, but it's very historical and it's going to move on at some point. It already is moving on. These machines are already in a museum and what we're doing now is going to move on. And it's just a book encapsulates and makes it a portable piece of history. I guess you could say it that way.

And I think that's the interesting part about it, is that is it looking at it as history rather than, you know, we're usually presented computers as something very, very new. Like, you know, it's the latest and greatest. And it kind of carries this idea that this is the future and it's looking right at you. But then when you step back and see them in historical context, what you don't. You don't see the future staring at you. You see guys battling with physical objects, trying to get them to do something and hacking it together.

Women, too?

Yeah, well, guys in a broad sense.

So, John, what did you think about doing a book about computing? History of computing?

Well, it was daunting because. I had to learn about these 40 different machines enough to write something pithy, enough to fit on a little chewing gum wrapper, basically. And I knew that the people that would be interested in that brand of chewing gum are going to be pretty picky chewers. So, yeah, that was a little daunting. But it was exciting for me because like I said, taking a fresh look at it really was exciting. And then learning about the stories behind them, and as a journalist, the stories that really pull me through. So that was.

Yeah, I was going to, you know, go. Tell me a little bit more about that because I'm sure that maybe you could think of a few stories because I'm sure, you know, you can only write so many words about CPU speed, ram, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. Well, that's the thing. Once you start digging into this, you just, you know, so much of our history is caught up in it. And you know, like World War II was really like this traumatic event for the world, but it was also a very energetic event because everyone was sort of out trying in this race to outdo each other with technological innovation. And even if it was the innovation of killing people. But see, like the original word computers is probably, people know there were actual people who were computing field artillery handbooks so that they could quickly look at a trajectory and say, okay, I have to aim this artillery this far. And when you're in a race to develop new and greater and more deadlier artillery, and the bottleneck is the ability of people to compute these trajectories, then they have the idea, well, let's make machines to build them.

There was a machine that you talked to me about before that really kind of really interesting history. People probably don't know about this Sage, right?

So the Sage is one of the, I think one of my favorite stories. And it really embodies this, it really kind of epitomizes the military industrial complex boondoggle because it was this vast project driven by the fear that the country would be invaded by, by Soviet bombers. And so what they did was this incredibly large project. They built these machines. They were about four, you know, some installations were four stories in buildings, four stories tall, half a football field. And there were about 27 of those. And there was, I think, I think from 7 to 10,000 programmers involved in writing the code. This just enormous project. And it pulled together not only the data from all of these installations, but radar installations and data from planes that were flying around to put on one screen a sort of graphic impression of the state of the country's skies. Well, so by the time they built this machine, the DANGER had been superseded by the intercontinental ballistic missile because they were afraid of bombers originally. But those are a much slower moving target. So was it a failure? Well, possibly. But on the other hand, salvageable from that was this incredible networked graphic user interface. It wasn't a light pen, it was a light gun. But it transformed the light pen, which is arguably a sort of oblique predecessor of the mouse. So, you know, incredible stuff. And finally the core system itself got. Well, IBM was very involved in it and learned a lot. But also it became the basis of American Airlines Sabre airline reservation system. So it kind of embodied this military driven journey into something that's much more human friendly.

And wasn't that the last little Fact was about the, the tubes themselves. It required enormous amount of tubes.

Yeah.

And at the end nobody made these tubes. I guess in case of one exception that was Eastern Europeans, AKA the Russians.

Right, exactly.

So they bought their tubes from the people they were trying to work against.

Yep. But, but there's also something about the spirit of the people that were doing it. And you can see that now if you go to the Computer History museum, they're working on rebuilding system 360 IBM machine and they have the original guys who worked on it in there and it says something about how these things are put together. The museum asked them to do this and they said, well, we can reconstruct it. I mean, we can't reconstruct it exactly. What we can. We hacked it together originally and we can hack it together again. It might not be exactly historically accurate, but the process is accurate. So in the book you can see this real hacker spirit that's driving it and you see a point where it starts to diverge. Well, I mean, one trajectory keeps on going, which is that of the large military, corporate driven computing. And some of that's quite beautiful, interesting stuff. But you also see these people who are just driven by the notion of having something personal that they could. How would it work if I had computing power available to me personally, anytime I wanted it? And so they formed networks of hobbyists and then they started to hack out their own. So seeing those two paths diverge and sometimes coming together is very interesting. For instance, I think the final book, which is the Google production server. I mean not the final book, the final computer in the book is the Google first production server. And that's really a very hacked together looking piece of machinery.

And it worked.

And it worked. Yeah. So yeah. Okay, I have a question for you, in fact, which is you mentioned your background a little bit as a photojournalist. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Well, I come from a fairly conventional photojournalism background in that I was young, male and stupid. So of course I went and covered wars. And that was back in 19. Oh my God, 83. I went off and covered a couple of wars in the Khmer Rouge and in Burma, and then I went to Afghanistan. So that was a period. You know, you only do that so long and then you burn out or you get killed or you get really good. And I just burned out. So I came back and started working for magazines stateside and that market changed and somewhat because of, you know, everybody here. Google has changed the way photography has been looked upon and how publications. So photojournalism became less important or it became more available, depending upon how you want to look upon it. You cannot make really a living at photojournalism these days. It's much different than when I started vis a vis how I started in 83. So like I said about timing, that's kind of when I was looking, I was like, photojournalism wasn't really happening for me at that point. So, like anything, you tend to look, okay, what's the. The next open door? And so here I am. Because this, if you look at my other work, it's all about people and everything. Nothing to do with dead machines. But on the other hand, I mean, they're not dead. I mean, I tried to make them alive. That's the whole point. I mean, I tried to make these things beautiful and instill the passion into them. I want them to people who know nothing about the computers, I want them to look at them and go, wow, what the hell is that? And I have some large pieces. You can start to see it over here. And I love the one piece that's actually backwards, but it doesn't matter. To me, it's upside down and backwards. It's just positioned wrong. But it doesn't matter because it's so beautiful. And in fact, when you scale up some of these pieces, even bigger. One of the pieces up there was a navigation system from the moon. And when you take it apart and take just pieces of it and then take that small piece and scale it up here, huge. I mean, it becomes this other piece. It's almost a departure from what it began to be. You know, it becomes like this piece of weaving, much like the core memory over there. It's like, what is. Has a place in the universe. It did something, but now it's got this own separate life. It's like almost like a good book that works on different levels. Anyway, round trip. That's kind of how I got here. How did you get here, John?

Oh, well, so I. My whole career has been kind of involved in. My first job was at a magazine called Mondo 2000, which was one of the first magazines to kind of present the computer as a lifestyle good. Or, you know, it wasn't. You know, it was like, yeah, the fun. And it was kind of a precursor of Wired magazine, which I then went to work at at the time that they launched Hotwired, which was the first. The first commercial or first advertising supported website. So I was editing the arts and entertainment sections there. So, you know, part of this has been that. Part of the interest for me was that, you know, I've been covering the cultural effects of computing for a long time, and then looking at the roots of how this all took shape has been very, very fascinating for me.

And.

And the next question is looking historically at these items, What's your historical sense of it? Okay, wait a minute. In a way, you've described a transition of creating art that's sort of like someone involved in portraiture moving into still lives.

Yeah, kind of. I mean, like one of the pieces I really love, I described it before. I'll describe it again. Was the. Was part of the navigation system to the moon, which in its own way, just say that term and it's like, amazing. That's beautiful, whatever it is. And then you look at the piece and it's beautiful on a whole other level. It's just this piece of artwork that once you remove it from its historical basis, it looks like, oh, it's a piece of jewelry that came from pre Mayan Central America. And then you look at it again another way. You look at the crudeness of its wiring of the individual solders. This thing went to the moon, and you could just see it all there, and it's just like, oh, my God. So that, to me, is. If I'm hitting all cylinders, I hit it three different levels. You know, I have the piece that's historical, I've separated it out artistically, and yet you can see the detail of what that was. I mean, it's like that piece over there, that's a card reader from an IBM German card reader. But you know what, it's less relevant to some people that it's a car wheel, then it's just this amazing compilation of gears. And you don't care what it did. I mean, maybe you do if you designed it, but I just love that we can work on different levels on these pieces and you can reimagine it. And the people that have nothing to do with computers can start to get inside your heads. And I mean, you are the people that work with computers day in and day out. I want to bring other people into this fold because. Because you have passion. I want to bring that passion to more places.

And in a way, that passion is something that when I said I'm generally a journalist and those stories are what really do it for me, really, and tapping into the passion of the people that were building this. Well, I also work as a user experience consultant. I work at Avenue a Razorfish, and. And so there's a Kind of, for me, it was really interesting to sort of position myself within this timeline in that, like, a lot of times we're doing social networking development and we're trying to imagine equations that can map to social interactions. But then looking back further, seeing this kind of tension as these guys are working on how to kind of forge the ability to engage with equations out of this raw machinery and then how to build interface on top of that. There's a lot of talk now about the physical Internet. Well, this is about as physical as you get trying to rip in. And a lot of. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that, okay, so originally the operating system is there as a layer so that someone can interact meaningfully and consistently with thousands and thousands of transistors. Stepping back and looking forward a little bit, you know, what exists as the operating system in the desktop now as it's all becoming networked, just as they had to interact meaningfully with a million transistors, now you have to allow people to interact meaningfully with 100 million other people. And that. That's all tied together with a computer is, I think, an amazing story that's going on right now.

What do you think about this being a little bit on the American centric side?

Well, yeah, I think one person in Amazon reviews maybe alluded to that, but we were working with computers that were in the Computer History Museum. And so that it starts off with a German book has some other strict. I mean, you know, we were limited in our range, plus, you know, you. You can only work with what you've got available.

Exactly, exactly.

What are you thinking of doing next?

Well, I mean, I'd like to. I really enjoyed. What I enjoyed about this project is that I got to try to step back and in this case it was easier because we have the museum there to kind of filter it for us. But what is. I want to continue to step back and try to see what is important now that will be important 200 years from now. That's the hardest thing because it's all here. All the history that's going to be seen 200 years from now is here, is just that it's going to be filtered down. I mean, in a way, we're living in the 1450s. The 1450s is when Gutenberg came out with his printing press. And oddly enough, the first thing he made money was, I just found that out printing indulgences for the church. So not well known, but it's just interesting to me. I mean, if we had had the chance to go back to 1450. Just imagine all the beautiful, all those objects of the press that we could have taken pictures of and just to have that relevant today. In fact, we didn't even have direct relevancy that Gutenberg actually did it. A lot of the ideas about him were printed much later, so they had to be rediscovered. But we have this ability because as you all know, the computing age is just beginning and with Moore's Law, it's changing so rapidly and we're throwing away things so quickly as much as we're going toward the future that I would just, I'm still trying to step back and figure out what is the next thing because it's just moving so rapidly. But it's so wonderful because there is so much to work with.

Well, how do you do that as a photographer? Like think like what's going to be visually relevant in the future?

Oh, drink a lot, man, just drink a lot. I have no clue. I mean, I mean, I think it's like anything else. You can think about it, you can have massive meetings or you can just kind of plunge forward. I mean, you can theorize all you want, but I'm an individual and I'm going to have to, you know, you're going to have to make guesses. That's what it came down to. I mean, that's what a lot of people do, you just make guesses.

So what happened when your excitement about these computers as art forms kind of hit into the brick wall of the bureaucracy of. I don't know if it's a brick wall because it happened, but met the resistance of the bureaucracy that exists in museums and the slow world of book publishing. How did you deal with that?

I thought of paying for my daughter's.

College education.

And I kept going forward. No, it was just a long term thing where it's like all of you have to go through something you really want. In this case, I'm personally identifiable, it's my project. If I don't get it done, no one else is going to do. Was breaking new ground in the sense that I had to convince a lot of people to see this as art. I think it's. To me it was like it was no big deal. But to convince a lot of the people, it just took a lot of God awful long meetings, you know, saying the same thing over and over again. But it's probably nothing anyone else hasn't done, just that it's all, I'm the driving force behind it. And then once you see you can convince A few people, you kind of get that momentum and you go, okay, I can do this. And it just, you know, kind of kept going.

Weren't you in a position where it was kind of catch 22, where you. You had to assure the museum that you had a publisher, and you had.

To assure never underestimate insecurity. Never underestimate insecurity. And I was. I was convincing two ends the museum. I had to convince them. At the same time I had to convince the publisher. I had neither agreeing. So, you know, a lot of success in life is schmoozing. Never underestimate.

But isn't that different than, like, in a way that's kind of process art versus, like, photojournalism, which is just, like, on the spot.

Yeah. It's how you have to switch to a different part of your brain. Yeah, I totally mean. Yeah, that photojournalism is a react. Is reactive. This is more, you know, planning, thinking. Oh, my God. It's just different. Really different.

Yeah, you're right.

Totally get into depth in a different part of brain. What about you? What do you want to do next?

So, as a writer, my work generally kind of covers the intersection of culture and technology, and. And this is an endless source of stories because it's like there's this sort of serial collision that happens that's happening, and where basically every form of human activity starts to be mediated through a computer. And what we expect from the computer we can superimpose on these activities. So it's this giant mash up of stuff. People are familiar with a spreadsheet, and now they're doing. They're having their conversations in the same interface that they're using for a spreadsheet. Well, can they use that as the social spreadsheet? I don't know. So there's just a million ideas that just seem to be springing up and millions of stories behind them. And so that's what I intend to follow. That's what I do follow.

Okay, so I think we'd like to open it up to questions, if anybody has any.

For the duration of the Q and A. Can you put more pictures up?

Can I put more pictures up? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Do you want to see more pictures? Yeah, pictures. Good. All right, good.

Does that first slide show all the pictures?

No, no, no, no. You know, I'd like to keep it. That's like, not even probably 10%. You haven't seen the books? Isn't there books here? I haven't seen them. Okay.

You had a question. Could you talk A little bit about how your photo techniques for this book differed or were similar to previous techniques that you used.

It's very, very, very different. In this case, it was very much photography. Can you see me type this in? Photography is sort of a feedback mechanism, right? You do something, you see how it happened and then you do it again or change that, modify that. So in this case, this is totally shot digitally. So this is again about the whole time of thing of timing, right. And the, sorry, I'm not processing this well, so I can't do this and that. So what I was doing was shooting connected to a laptop and that helped me refine things and just see, because, you know, you're taking a three dimensional object and you put it into two dimensions and it doesn't always translate well. Sometimes you can see it, sometimes it doesn't. So by shooting directly into the computer, I could just go, oh, refine it and look at it. And it's very typically, it would shoot 30 seconds to 45 seconds. And then I just look at it. I just go, hmm, in the room it's in. How many people have been to the Computer History Museum? Okay. You know, it's pretty dry. And I felt so proud of myself. I went there after the book. I just was like the proudest moment ever. It was like going back to elementary school and you realize the school was way smaller than you thought and way more boring because I felt like I had been through this lust with computing to now was an old lover. And it's like, who are you? And to me, I don't know your name, but I, you know, it's just like I got inspired, you know, it's like, I don't know why, I just like channeled something and then it was gone. I mean, not that I, if any editors were listening, couldn't do that again, but it was, yeah, it was. I had to channel this whole different thing. And the process helped, you know, because I could see it if I had shot film, much slower process. And I don't know if I'm patient enough to do, do that, you know, film would have been nearly impossible from an economic standpoint. And also the film couldn't see as well. Are you guys familiar with the parlance of raw, of using raw? It's all shot in raw. So you have. I used a post production thing to get a certain look, you know, I didn't like change reality, but I just like a look to give it a feel so I can, you know, express my emotion. I only have that much. It's only a little two dimensional space I get to express. I know you get to use those things like words. So anyway, so what kind of change do you make to. I ain't telling you. I ain't telling you. Suffice to say that you like them. It's like, it's like. It'd be like recapping a date after you've had it. Well, what do you like about me? They'll ruin the whole date thing. Not going to get it from me. Questions for John. Let me do this.

Questions from John. Everyone asks about your lighting technique.

Not telling. Not telling. No, it's special.

What kind of camera do you use?

One with a shutter. You know, It's a Canon 1DS. I think that's. It's just one of the better canons. But it's amazing, you know, I mean this is how photography's changed so much. I mean traditionally that's a 35 millimeter format. But what you get out of it, it's like I have pictures at the museum. One of them is like six by eight feet, I think six by nine, something like that. So that's kind of getting outside the realm of 35 millimeter. Yes. So were you amused by the fact that your camera had more computational horsepower.

Than pretty much everything you take in the pictures of?

No, because you know, I mean it's just like. I think in the terms of Moore's law and it's just like it doesn't. I mean I'm like, I've totally. It's like I was born for this era, you know what I mean? I mean it's like when I was a kid I dreamed of this shit and here we are. And so like, you know, to me it seems pretty crude at this point. Actually the whole computing thing seems very crude to what I can imagine. It seems like we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg.

But we did. It was ironic that we covered some predecessors of Photoshop such as Super Paint.

So that is actually I was telling you about. That's part of the thing navigation system that went to the moon. And I don't know if this thing does. You could just see how. I mean just imagine that thing being vibrated as it's being set up on the Saturn V. It's like they had three computers. They always had three backups. Well, three total. So it's just like how did they work? How did it work? Any other questions for.

Yes.

So John, what were your sources to write about them? Did you talk to some of the people that made.

I didn't actually get a chance to do that. And it's too bad. I mean, but in a way, it would have been also very painful too, because I'm sure I would have gotten incredible quotes and I had a very small space to work with, so I would have had to painfully throw, you know, leave things off. But amazingly, for most of the. Most of the latter part of the book, the people who made them are alive and active and they have their websites, however idiosyncratic those websites look, they're full of rich information. And so that was a major source. There's some really good books that are narratives of how computers arose. Also, the computer History museum itself is a wealth of information, and so that was available too. But really, I mean, the thing is also that you can't get three people to agree on the facts. It's really like the Rashomon effect. Like, how did this come about? Well, one person says this, another person says another. No one's lying. They saw things differently. And so dealing with that and trying to compress it into a few paragraphs of concise summation, it was kind of a challenge. Did you have to do a lot of focal shootings with focal length in order to get things to fit?

Well, I mean, some of it was. Again, I go back to the. The museum, which has been more than welcoming to me, but at the time, they didn't want to put a lot of resources, so I had to work within their parameters. If I had this, lived in a perfect world, I would have been able to move things around. So I couldn't move anything. There were poles in my way. So if you have poles in your way, then you have to work with wide angles. Wide angles and like straight line objects are not friends. They hate each other. So because of Photoshop, then I could basically take a wide angle and then change it back. So I didn't change anything. I just put the angles back to where they were. But otherwise I just had this big pole, and no one's going to buy pictures of poles. So in some cases I had great access. In other cases, it was just phenomenal. But, you know, it just, you know, it's like anything. It's like any project. Sometimes you get what you want, other times you get what you need. Wait, that's a song.

So how many people here? Oh, I'm sorry.

So you say you're trying to capture the passion of the people making the system. I know that this is near, not always the case, but would you consider moving to A project and do you some video to show these things actually moving or doing something? Oh, I'm, you know, yes, I would consider anything because I think the one thing I've learned is never say no, because I've had my mind opened up in so many ways. Yeah, sure. I mean, I've done little videos of this and that. So, yeah, it really seems like people built these things to do things, and that really helps. I'd love to fund me. I'll pay you write the funding statement. So here's like, here's part of that navigation system and you can see if you just isolate it. Look at these little solders and everything. And it's just like, you know, it's just amazing to me. It's just amazing to me. And I think not being an engineer helped me because I didn't. I mean, I understand I'm a minor geek with the emphasis on really minor, but knowing too much, I think would have hindered me. And as my wife will tell you, I don't know that much.

Have you guys thought of real old computers, mechanical computers? Does that interest you?

Yeah, actually, they have them there, but it was just like we had to cut it off somewhere. And some of them were very beautiful. There's a lot of computers that were there that were not in the book. You know, you just have to. It was hard enough trying to put this all in a book anyway, because the line is like all over the place. And I tried to drive it visually, which, you know, led to some things that you would change a little bit if you weren't driving it visually, but because I just, you know, it's beautiful. So this is. This is actually. This is a. Was a research computer, Amdahl's research computer at University of Wisconsin. And you just mean just changing the tubes in that puppy.

How would you photograph software?

Very poorly. Very poorly? Well, no, I mean, you know, photographers live in this really, like, dimensional world. It's just like, is it pretty? We, like, if it's not pretty, not so good.

They said actually in the computer museum that they were only showing about 10% of the museum.

Oh, easily. I mean, I've been in the back and there's just like, so much more I could have done. I mean, we. We have at least two, maybe three books. Like to see it like Star wars, you know.

But that's an interesting question. Like, how do you photograph something like software, which is like this. How do you photograph the people in action when they've passed away because they're not visible any longer? But what's visible are the marks that they've made. So the effects of software, the effects of the people that made these computers, I think it's a similar question.

Software's boring. It photographs.

I'm sorry, what it does is not boring.

No, no. I love. Listen me in Photoshop, if I could marry that sucker, I'd be all over it, man.

But it's kind of. Yeah, that's similar to saying, you know, life is boring. Well, maybe life is, in essence, it's boring, but you know what life accomplishes.

That's why God gave us alcohol, so we could have like Friday nights. It would be interesting. Sorry, anyone that can't drink alcohol, I'm sorry. There's still a reason to live. Don't worry.

So did you get any feedback from the museum after the book was finished?

Oh, oh, they love me. No, they do, actually. I think they, they appreciated. They got to see, you know, like I said, they have, you know, and rightly so. They come from a background of engineering and now they see it the other way. They're completely. They love it. They really appreciate it and I appreciate them. And you know, it's like any long term relationship. But you both learn. I've learned a lot. Don't want to say what I've learned. And they've, you know, they really appreciate the art and they've really been supporting. I mean, I can't. They would do a lot. I really appreciate them. Oh, I really want to. I really want to. Actually, I am. I would love to do some of these bigger machines because one of the things was, because of the way the museums think in like terms of decades, when I first approached them, they said, oh, we want to do a book and we'll get to it about 2011. So that mean that. But that's their thinking and they have to think funding and this and that. That's what their goals are. So where they are right now is just barely where they want to be. So they don't have the space to show the big machines. And they have a lot of big machines actually. And some of them are like, if I had complete access, I could just do like way better. We're talking five, six books.

But they're in beta release kind of as a means.

Yeah, yeah, they're really in beta. There's not really open yet. At some time when it became an appliance, a consumer appliance, computers started having.

A designer pay attention to them. Like that compact luggler you showed just there.

Did you find any difference in the artistic merit of things that had a designer versus. Versus things that were reversed. You know, actually it was reversed. Was true. Because I'd like the. So this is the sage system he was talking about.

That's part of the. And it had a unique object or unique inclusion, which was an ashtray built into it. Maybe a predecessor of the coffee holder built into many early MacIntoffers.

Exactly, exactly. I'm sorry, now, what was the question? Oh, you know what? It actually was reversed in a way because in a strange sort of way, the crudeness of the old ones were much more beautiful to me as they became more design oriented. It just felt too polished. It felt too like, I'm supposed to like this. And I felt like I like the other ones where it was more like discovery. Like, oh, my God, there's this piece. I've never seen this part. The newer machines are much more difficult to keep. Get the, you know, the beauty quote unquote out of them. To me, anyway, take the skins off. It's all the same inside. Are you talking about a museum that takes a work order? We'll get back to you. We have to have a person looking at that person who's looking at you. No, you know, I'd love to. Yeah. I mean, I think there's other worlds, but no, they're not as good as these things. Not really.

But the scale is there.

It's just smaller. That's the problem. It's really shrunk. The beauty is.

But a lot of those designs are very much based on, of the moment, what they think will impress people. And that's a question of cultural context at a very specific point in time. And a lot of that ages very quickly. So you see a beige box and it doesn't do it for you like it did in 1980. So.

Wow. Like this one. I love this machine. Like this is a box. It's so of its era. I mean, you look at that and most people go, oh, it's 70s. Just the color, everything, typeface. It really is of the era.

But you also like one of the things, one of the machines in the book, which was like a perfect example of similarity to the hype of the dot com era, when anything that was web was worth millions of dollars was like this Neiman Marcus kitchen computer. And not one was sold actually. But it didn't work well as a table. It didn't work well as a. Well, I mean, it presumably worked well as a computer, but you couldn't really enter in in recipes. But it was sold for housewives. And there was an Advertisement that was very 70s back to nature ish housewife scene, but with this massive computer in the kitchen and a two week programming course that came with it.

Yeah, really, I have to re. I love to cook the dinner, but I have to reboot. So did you hear from any of the lead designers of these machines saying, oh, wow, I never expected my machine to sort of have this wide exposure again.

We've heard from people that have worked on them, but not the lead designers at all, as far as I know. You know, be nice.

But yeah, wait, I'll show this one picture I heard from this person.

Hold on.

I wasn't planning to show this like this. So I'm a little bit.

But we do get, you know, email. Like, you know, I worked on the PDP 8 or, you know, something like that. Or in my case, I got an email. My name's John Alderman too.

So this machine, this is part of a CDC 6600. And this is what they call binary dead start switch. So I get an occasional email that says, oh, by the way, there's one of those switches that's off. So all I can think of when I hear that is like, okay, you missed your kid's birthday, you missed your dad's death. You don't know little Susie's friend's name, but you remember that. Sweet. Switch.

Is on.

Okay, moving on. One in every crowd kind of a test.

Oh, that's the kitchen computer. Yeah.

Oh, this one. Now this. I mean, this is something Steve Jobs could have sold you. If Steve Jobs had been around, he could have started these guys. Because, I mean, I love the guy. He's the marketing parlance. I mean, he just can sell it.

Except it really didn't.

No, I didn't do anything. But I'm just saying that was just like, I just would like, you know, it'd be like, you know, living in this alternative world where Steve Jobs is actually selling this. I would pay to see that.

Well, it is a beautiful object and.

It doesn't have any wires hanging off the back, so he's for it. Any other questions? What's that? Yeah, me too, basically. So wait, I have to show you the first porn machine? We're old enough, we can deal. Yeah, aren't they all? Well, little secrets are being revealed here. Okay.

What is the keyboard, by the way?

Yeah, this is the French. This was a French system that was developed to replace the phone book. And I actually used this when I was in France back in the early 80s. And they had basically the whole thing there for the workable Internet. But they kind of didn't know what to do with it. And it became used for pornography and making dates. Kind of early Craigslist and train reservations.

And what's interesting is that they were able to achieve a meaningful scale by giving them all away. Like anybody who wanted one could get one. And so instantly they had this proto Internet that was very valuable. Yeah.

And they did that instead of printing out phone books. And it was very successful. But then they just never moved on. Yeah. Okay. Pretty pictures. So this is a great machine. This is called the.

You can see.

I don't know if you can see it in this typeface. It says the Johnny Act. It's unfortunately in the books. You can see it really clearly. It'd be like calling the Apple the Steve acknowledge. I want a Steve act too. And yes, some of these big ones are just like so wonderful just to be around. I highly advise going to the museum and it's just going to get. They have. Like I said, they have so many machines in the back there. You can't believe. This is actually early memory. They have sound waves go through mercury and measure the timing. Because early memory systems were, you know, that was a really hard thing to figure out, how to record.

And it was an idea that they didn't. Storing programs was something they had to come up with. You know, at first they would have to flip the switches every time they wanted to do something different.

Like me remembering a shopping list. I love this compact now. I actually had a clone of this. And I just remember. And there was no hard drives and you had to load up the. Oh, wait, I'm old. Never mind. The oldest machine in here, it's probably The German.

The Z3 adder.

Z3 adder.

But it's a reconstruction of it that exists in the museum. So it's not.

It got bombed to obliteration.

But yeah, it was a German machine developed in World War II. It used film, like optical film as its programming.

Way to get in stuff. More Enigmas. Actually, there is an Enigma there. And I took pictures of it, but as you could see, it just didn't make the cut. So even if you're special, sometimes you don't make the cut. I mean, those were when hard drives were hard drives, you know, these little things. So actually, you know what? I have other pictures I can bring out too, but I think we're just about at the end here. Not that I know of. I don't think so. Wow. It'd be news to me. I was just there, like, five minutes ago.

Huh? So go now.

Exactly. Leave work today. Go.

Yeah, it's true. It's your neighbor.

Really? Exactly. It's just, like, right around the corner. Look at that. It's the DDP116. Who could forget that? Kind of rolls off the tongue.

We do have books in the back.

You have books in the back. And I'll bring out some more artwork. And you've been a really wonderful audience.

Yes, thank you very much.