Marcin WicharyThis is a thread of beautiful or interesting computer-y things I scanned at the Museum of Printing this weekend.
(Eventually all of this will be processed and deposited at Internet Archive!)
1. You don’t see a lot of yellow in computing.
10. You could have a 1,000 tries, and you would never guess how VariTyper named its Helvetica knock-off.
14. I associate compact cassettes with cheap home computers, but that hasn’t always been the case.
15. This cool drawing of a keyboard for a manual, with a lot of corrections and whiteouts (if you look closely).
24. This keyboard is yet another entry in the classic Return/Enter story!
The main paragraph break (Enter) is a ¶ pilcrow, which is amazing. Above it is QC (Quad Center, or Enter + Align Center) and QR (Enter + Align Right), and even QM (Quad Middle? Not sure what that means).
And you can see New Line, or today’s Return, in the vicinity.
St. Chris
N__B
J. Peterson@mwichary CAN EDIT - the distinction between "can" (able to do something) and "can" (short for 'cancel') is pretty stark.
ideaPDish
Irenes (many)@mwichary oh whoa. very interesting glyphs on some of those keys, we kinda want to dig up a manual and find out what they do
@mwichary "preview", possibly?
europlus 
Endless Screaming@europlus AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH
Niki Tonsky@mwichary When you need to scream during workday but don’t want to disturb your colleagues
joo
Kvn W
Amy Worrall
Dan Bornstein@mwichary Big Sweethearts candy vibes on this one!
William Smith@mwichary My eye twitches a little seeing “Left” spelled out but “Right” abbreviated. I get there's limited space, but I’d twitch less with “Flush L” and “Flush R”.
Janne Moren@mwichary
...it deletes both the character before and the one after the cursor?
...it deletes both the character before and the one after the cursor?
Glenn Fleishman@mwichary Devil in your ear says it’s not too late for that.
@mwichary Devil in your ear, it's not too late
John Faulkenbury@mwichary the first image has a very Avant Garde 'A' but none of the rest do. Was it maybe falling off the front of the machine??
B Zotto 💪🤪🤳🏼
dr 🛠️🛰️📡🎧
Christopher Evans@mwichary this NCIS scene dealing with double keyboardists comes to mind.
erin sparling@mwichary illustrations like this (and, in particular, Transformers transformation instruction sheets) are what lead me to learn technical illustration so many decades ago. Love this, and the whiteout.
Ian K Tindale@mwichary my first go on a phototypesetter was on an Itek Quadritek thing, which my art college got in and I was allowed to try some absurdly experimental typesetting (each alternate line a slab-serif vs a serif, or something like that, which of course doesn’t work if any edits are made and you’ve already cast it off).
Bill Ricker@mwichary
Wang Labs had specially engineered cassettes for the 2200 series desktops. Including read/write tabs that were resettable, but most importantly, controlled tension, andnhigher quality magnetic film. Some folks managed to get them for use with home computers especially ones put into commercial use.
Wang Labs had specially engineered cassettes for the 2200 series desktops. Including read/write tabs that were resettable, but most importantly, controlled tension, andnhigher quality magnetic film. Some folks managed to get them for use with home computers especially ones put into commercial use.
@mwichary This was probably a digital cassette. The form factor (compact cassette) was the same, but unlike the home computers with the audio signals and consumer grade tape decks, more serious systems stored data not as audio but more similar to how a floppy disk saved data. More expensive/complex mechanism and sometimes different tape media too. That stuff was super reliable and good but too $$ for home computers.
@bzotto What! I have never heard of this.
@mwichary Yeah! The distinction often seems elided when you read about this. But basically, the first uses of compact cassettes for data storage were for minicomputers where it didn't make sense to buy the massive reel to reel systems that mainframes used. It was a mini version of that. Allow me to send you some brief historic material I snapshotted at CHM archives. Will email.
@bzotto Thanks!
@mwichary What’s the black tape thing at bottom left of last photo? Did they use ticker tape for sneakernet transfer?
Marcus Müller
Grant Hutchinson@mwichary Love all the rackmount reel-to-reel decks.
Ω 🌍 Gus Posey
БРОНЗЫ БИТЬ@mwichary a thing of absolute beauty
Den of Earth