We’ll Never Know Why (or How) There’s A TV Hooked Up To A Mid 60s Univac 1108. I’m So Sad.

No trespassing signs are optional actually

That’s a 1970 Buick Electra hiding behind the fence.

Apparently in Japan they had access to this link cable that allowed the PSone to use a cell phone as a modem, turning the console into an E-Machine, doing basic E-Mail, web browsing, etc. A few games supported it as well. A lot of online sites call it the i-Mode adapter or say that i-mode is a PlayStation service, but i-Mode is just an ISP from Japan. Some sources mention that it was only compatible with the PSone and not the PlayStation, but I can’t find why that would be.

Edge Magazine UK August 2000 issue featuring Sony PSone w/ LCD screen peripheral 2000

A 1965 Ford Falcon taking cover in the rain.

Some days I feel like I’m teetering on a fine white line where one event, or misstep, could send me tumbling into a Stephen King esque scenario. Maybe I’m already there.

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.

I mean, yeah, kind of

Yey, I love finding photos of mainframes in use from the archives of colleges. This is an IBM System/360 model 30. Their lower end of the System/360 range. Introduced in 1964 and shipped in 1965.

Initially this entire machine had the maximum memory of 64k. In the early ‘70s 3rd party manufacturers started to realize it was built to accommodate more (up to 128k, though just 32k upgrades cost near $40,000), so IBM offered options to upgrade the memory to 96k.

The 360 was created with the intent to be used with shops that had an IBM 1401 (introduced 1958). It could be configured with an optional emulator to run their existing software. Short sighted business then bought the machine configured with 16k as that was the 1401s maximum memory capacity, why would you need more, when the machine could be much much more capable at 64k. You could load DOS/360 to “partition” the machine for 2-3 concurrent jobs.

Computers in an accounting class at Ball State University, 1974.

I was carrying around a camera and 2 teens asked me to photograph them. I was like ok but how do you want to get the file from me. And they were like “?” “It doesn’t print?”

It’s a Canon Rebel T6i it doesn’t remotely resemble any printing or instant development film camera I’ve ever seen.