Beautiful photos of beautiful vintage computers

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/12/beautiful-photos-of-beautiful.html

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Interesting that some of these are analog computers, which are nothing like what people think of today when they use the word “computer.”

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There’s just something reassuring about reel-to-reels.

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Just needs a teletype for the UI.

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Oh YES!  

Seeing that beauty at the top makes me think of this, a sad loss to us all.

Plus, all those analogue computers? Look like synths. Yes. More of them.

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Where’s the card reader?

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They pretty much are synths.

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Like “the Glooper” :wink:

https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Glooper

Or, modular synthesizers are the only area where analogue computing has survived.

I would love some solid historical research on how during the Cold war, the Eastern block put an emphasis on analogue computing and -automation, like in “cybernetics”, and were very good at it, but fell behind in the digital world. Besides not having a free market to correct things, a vague guess of mine is that they had a very academic approach, and “real mathematicians” had to formulate their problems exclusively in terms of differential equations…?

Also, I’d love to see those photographs in a resolution where you can actually read the labels on the buttons dials and thingies … :drooling_face:

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Fun fact: this is what computer operators looked like in the 1960ies.

Wanda Ventham, actually.

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