Obligs:
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You never saw WWII films? Soldiers in hot climates routinely wore short pants, but they always had long socks. I assume to look presentable. If they just wore short pants here, they wouldn’t look like they were professionals at work, they’d look like they were watching TV at home.
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wrapping one’s legs in cotton up to the knees defeats the purpose of wearing shorts
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I didn’t say there was logic. Look at women’s uniforms from the past. They often don’t look practical, especially for cops and armed services. But “presentation” came first.
I suspect one does get a level of cooling from short pants and long socks, a bit more air higher up.
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What would this sturdy hand cranked device be that needs to be at ready access to his terminal? It looks like it is geared to spin that lighter blue disc behind it
A rewinder for punched paper tape? Looks like the box on the right is a tape reader or writer.
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Once again I find myself forced to remind readers that this is a sexy post not a shamy post
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The last couple of jobs I’ve had, the men who worked office jobs usually wore some kind of shorts (usually khaki shorts or whatever) in the summer. The exception is lab personnel, for safety reasons.
It’s good not being stuck in the Mad Men era.
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it’s funny, I grew up in the 80s and I still feel like those little ankle socks that everyone wears now look ridiculous. Fashion is in the eye of the beholder I guess
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That would be the CDC-6600; the only one I recognized. A really interesting design, one of Seymour Cray’s early successes. Thanks for the tip on the DEC LA36.
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In the time, even in the US, I wore over-the-calf socks with shorts. It was kind of expected. Mine always wound up falling down and bunching around my ankles, like the ones on the guy in the fourth picture. It looks as if the third guy is wearing a knee brace rather than high socks, and I don’t know why he has his laundry basket under his desk.
Yeah. I have no idea what that black ‘MDU’ box is - external storage, perhaps? (Multiple Disk Unit, maybe?)
Yeah, that’s a CDC mainframe, all right. I recall programming one at university.
They made special-purpose computers, certainly, but that terminal isn’t one. Those switches were for power, half-duplex/full-duplex, parity/no-parity, even/odd, and something else (RS-232/current loop, maybe?) I think that model is Harris’s rebranding of a unit from Incoterm, but I’m not positive.
Yeah, that’s a DECwriter, all right. One of the very early dot-matrix terminals. The big box is an Autologic phototypesetter, so this was a publishing shop. (And it looks as if I’m the first in the thread to identify that one, so, yay, me.)
If it’s paper tape handling equipment, it’s definitely a reader and not a punch. A punch would need a chad box, which that doesn’t have.
I remember liking the paper tape units from DEC. They worked with fan-folded tape, and the tape was neatly laid down back into fan folds, so there was no respooling involved.
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Here we go…
Some of them are clearly ads, besides I think that in the 60s going to work in miniskirt was not “square”.
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Yay you indeed 
I was wondering about that alright, 'cos it didn’t look like the PDP-family stuff I would normally expect to find lurking around around a DECwriter.
Knee high socks forever!!!
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We had both a low-speed punch and a high speed reader on our PDP-8/s. The high speed reader was hypnotic to watch, as the fanfold tape lifted from one side and settled on the other.
Every bit of mechanical human interface on those machines, from the tape devices to the oversized spring-loaded front toggles to the arrangement of the lights, was a work of art.
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I’m not sure that qualifies as “mini”. It’s not “maxi” which returned in the seventies, and it’s not “micro”, but sems like an ordinary skirt, maybe a tad shorter than some standards would require.
<pedant>Looks more like a dress to me.</pedant>
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To quote Ogden Nash
Maxi, midi, mini,
How the ladies whinny!
Mini, maxi, midi,’
Gentlemen grow giddy.
Mini, midi, maxi,
I’m off to Cotopaxi! TAXI!
<pedant> Are not the skirt and the bodice parts of a dress? </pedant>
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