Training Video for Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center (1973) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Training Video for Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center (1973) [video]

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80 pointsabrax314129 comments

What gets me about this video, in addition to the obvious technological progress, is the social change.

First we’ve got the very visible Raquel Welch pinup. That obviously wouldn’t fly today and I’m a little surprised it did then.

But second, and this kind of blew my mind, the speaker seemed so proud of consuming 1,000 lbs of paper each day. In 2023, that almost seems more out of place than the pinup in a training film!

In 1973 few people, even at AT&T, had an always-on, interactive connection to a computer. Indeed, a lot of those machines were batch, not interactive. Even programmers would get a printout of the last run, along with errors, and go back to their desk to debug, then book time on the card machine or (if lucky) a terminal (as in ASR-33 printing terminals; there were a few video terms, but something like the DEC VT-52 hadn't been introduced and the VT-100 wasn't on the drawing board) to do the next iteration.

A decade later, when I was spending quality time in data centers, casual misogyny was still the norm.

Misogyny? We loved Raquel! Old dinosaur here.

The Welch photo[1] seemed especially out of place to me because everything else in the video is so straight-laced. I don't see hardly any other personal items anywhere. That said, Raquel Welch held enormous cultural cache, equally admired by men and women (at least to hear it from both my parents). So if you're going to get away with any pinup of that era, she would be the one. Her obit in the times from earlier this year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/movies/raquel-welch-dead....

1. https://imgur.com/a/a0wK4sR

I'm just plain impressed someone could actually recognize who that was. It's pretty blurry!

Part 2: https://youtu.be/V9aVOIuKVUc

Recent related discussion (2 days ago, 86 points, 58 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740653

The re-did the entire campus. The main building is now called Bell Works. It's really nice. https://goo.gl/maps/w9thDue2V7C1wQuL9

And also one of the filming locations for the TV series "Severence".

The thing that strikes me most about this is how similar this offering is to AWS. You've got your batch job submissions, which are like ECS tasks; your tape storage, which is essentially S3, the mountable disk volumes, which are EBS.

It shouldn't be surprising that the building blocks of compute and storage are still fundamentally the same, but it's kind of amazing how much that service model resembles a PaaS offering.

BTW, I didn’t check every detail, but a card reader reading “up to 200 cards/min” sounded way wrong, as I recall it. And it is way wrong! The IBM 3505 could read up to 1200 cards/min.

Thanks! I thought 3 cards per second didn’t sound particularly fast, but I missed the punch card era. Not by a lot, mind you.

I can hear that 20Hz hum in my head right now!

From the ATT Archive: https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel

20,000 sq ft of space for a computer that processed only 1200 cards/min. The tone of the narrator made that sound very impressive, which it was back in 1973.

50 years from now I wonder what things we are amazed by today will sound silly to future technologists.

Security operations centres for private companies that have lots of screens in them and tiered rows of desks. Bonus points if they have a podium at the front for briefings. Additional bonus points for having glass window view plane for visitors. Final bonus points for a button that converts the graphs on screens to a world map or some other BS when actual guests do arrive. It’s like some type of Apollo 13 fever dream.

You just narrated an entire scene from War Games.

Funnily enough, you'd be hard-pressed to read cards much faster than that today. The limit was on the mechanical side, moving the cards fast enough without jamming or tearing them. The processor would have been 99% idle if reading 1200 cards/min was all it was doing. On big systems, since cards were such a bottleneck, they would often be read in with a small computer or dedicated card-to-magnetic-tape machine.

</random Hollerith trivia>

In ~1990, I was working on Xerox high volume printers that cost $100K-$1M each (AT&T bought fleets of them to print phone bills). They printed at 50-135 pages per minute on ordinary paper (not card stock). Many types of engineers worked on those printers, but I was always fascinated by the aerodynamics engineers working on the paper path, sometimes meters long, through the printer. Early prototypes of those machines would constantly have horrific paper jams because the aerodynamics weren't tuned well enough yet. Some of these jams did significant damage to internal parts.

The year is 2073. Intel announces the launch of the Core i11. Benchmarks show an incredible 7% increase.

1200 cards/min is the rate for reading cards (which in this case represent executable code) into storage for later execution. It's possible for data entry there's a different pathway for loading just stacks of data onto tape or disk for those programs to act on.

The physical 'mounting' of tapes was pretty cool. Also when they put the outputs into "user bin"s I cracked up.

When do you think "peak Bell Labs" was? In the 60s or 70s?

For basic science and engineering: The 1940s through the 1960s, during which Bell Labs created the transistor, did work that won Nobel Prizes, and built the first communications satellites.

For computers: The 1970s, the Heroic Age of Unix.

What kind of data were they processing?

Same as now. 1s and 0s. (Go ahead and say it! “You had 1s?!” :-)

You had 1s!?! :)

Music is perfect!

Yep. Anyone know where to find more music in this style?

Wendy Carlos comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsW2EDGbDqg

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