A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards | Hacker News Reader

A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards

clui.org

207 points1970-01-0154 comments

The Winter 2016 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's newsletter, "The Lay of the Land", has more information on the cards: https://clui.org/newsletter/winter-2016/los-alamos-rolodex

There's also a book: https://clui-shop.square.site/product/los-alamos-rolodex/292...

I saw the exhibit in person back when it was on display. If you're ever in LA you should try to stop in to the CLUI's Culver City location, they always have something interesting.

Love the logos, colors, and at the same time simplicity. These are so much more memorable than what you see today which I find to be bland or over the top “grafix”.

"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark."

I love that scene and its commentary. Right up there with the Ikea catalog scene in Fight Club

Somebody had to say it.

From "American Psycho".

https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/american-psycho/quote_16...

Very nice, now let's see Paul Allen's high explosive spherical compression lens.

I'm starting to see ChatGPT generated business promotions along the side of the road more and more often and it saddens me.

I'd rather have something your daughter doodled on a piece of paper + the title of your company over some obvious AI slop.

A lot of cheaper restaurants and bodegas in nyc use AI images to show what food they serve and a lot of them have this slightly grotesque quality thats very unappetizing. Almost like a nightmare/ acid trip filter.

Wow. Talk about the worst uses of AI -- the actual representative pictures of product you're selling. If false advertising law ever got an update, a ban on an AI depiction of one's product itself in an ad or other pre-sale imagery should be added.

Food companies have used glue or other substances in things like cereal ads (in place of milk) for decades. Unfortunate.

yeah they do it to make it look more appetizing in the photos

Quite the opposite of what is happening here.. they are going the cheap route and use AI instead of a human who knows how to make an appetizing menu.

Discussed here last month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005973

It’s wild because of how shockingly easy basic food photography is.

Make a plate, set it in front of a window, snap a picture.

I think AI is amazing, but equally amazing is people’s laziness and lack of taste when it comes to applying it.

I think there are already laws in a lot of places requiring food images whether photographs, illustrations, AI generated images, etc. not to materially mislead consumers about what they’re buying.

So people using AI for this might soon run into issues with hallucinated extra ingredients or exaggerated portion sizes.

It's been all over rural America now. Every single roadside sign I've seen now has been either fully AI-generated, or the logos are all following the same damn 'logo in a shield' that one of the services loves making everything it generates be.

It’s only obvious slop to you. Most people have never used gen AI and have no experience or skills detecting it.

Incredible. I was curious to see what I could find for one of the business card:

Dr. Ronald Moskowitz, FerroFluidics (cool name).

Took me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Turns out the guy was a bit of a fraudster and was sentenced to 8 years in prison for securities fraud[1]

1 - https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

I did EXACTLY the same thing when I saw that name and that card. What a cool name. I wanted to see if it was still around!

> The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole.

Too good.

Many of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place

> occasionally hot

Am I understanding correctly?

It depends on the exact definition of the word "hot" you mean.

No, wait, it doesn't, you'll find any kind of hot you like.

Quite ... the place.-

PS. I would like the record to show, excuse me for stating the obvious, that this was an actual place (!):

https://losalamosreporter.com/2025/06/29/black-hole-museum-a...

Radioactive in this case, but knowing the black hole, other definitions likely apply as well

That place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies.

Good times.

Somewhere around 2004 I had an experience at the black hole that still amuses me.

I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.

I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…

Seems some of them would get the key contact details "clipped" by the rolodex itself. Maybe a good design would put the phone number and address at the top.

Indeed! Interesting that leaving a bottom margin for Rolodex didn't become a design standard.

"Did you know that there _is_ actually a reason behind the blank space at the bottom of every business card? To get the full picture, we need to go back way before the smartphone age, when a bizarre device, known as the rolodex, ruled office desks" — some blogger in a parallel universe, probably.

A bunch of those names sound fake, like they should be from Fallout instead of Los Alamos.

But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies.

“Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake.

I always liked "General Atomics" (though it wasn't among the cards listed). Still opertating today under that name.

If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see.

I really appreciate the lack of flashiness that naming your company "General ____" puts out there. 20th century brought us General Electric, General Dynamics, General Motors, General Mills, General Dynamics, General Foods. The founders of those companies said "What do we call our company? Well, we make electrical things. In general. Anything electric is on the table. So let's just call it... 'General Electric.'" Today companies get names like Altria or Kenvue. Empty vessels of pure vibes to be filled with Branding Juice.

I don't think we'll ever see such sincerity in naming again. We did get General Magic in 1990, which seems kind of like a wink and a nod at that old naming trend.

SGI had a descriptive name. Bethesda Softworks is named after the city, SpaceX is short for "Space Exploration Technologies", IGN is literally a description of their site (they don't use the full name today but it's International Gaming Network). Epic Games and Tesla are less literal but still relate to their business.

The empty corporate sounding names are usually for conglomerates that need a neutral name so they don't put one of their brands over others, and B2B suppliers who need something unique for trademark purposes but don't really do the kind of marketing where they would need emotional impact.

If anything, I think General ___ is now a means of sounding established and technically advanced (implying "we're already covering everything in this area"). "General Assembly" got some visibility in the 2010s, and I've seen at least one recent YC startup use this naming pattern.

They still exist today, and provide tons of logistics to the dod. Boring stuff, like toilet paper, and then more exciting stuff too

If the "Zero Blast-N-Peen" company operating out of "Hooker Circle" with the robot logo showed up in a Fallout game, it would be criticized as too over the top - breaks the immersion too much since it's so absurd.

I wonder how many of these were essentially 1-person consulting LLC's - which meant a probably higher degree of "whimsy", "sarcasm", or "whit" when naming... (and/or a little counter-culture rebelliousness thrown in where possible)

The Dunwich Building could use some fun business cards to lighten the mood.

Came here to see if anyone mentioned Fallout and I'm pleased to see someone else made the reference. I presume it is notes and texts like this that inspired the narrative designers of the Fallout series. So cool!

Most of these companies were probably a couple of guys in a garage or rented office suite. Labs buy high tech, low volume items and don't mind if it looks like a science fair experiment either. For every IBM supercomputer with some printed graphics on it, there's thousands of weird dohickies that look homemade.

Glad I'm not the only one, I was half expecting cards from "Aperture Science" or "Black Mesa" to show up in there.

Amusingly, the Black Mesa itself is on the road from Los Alamos to Santa Fe and Española. Fairly important site in New Mexico Pueblo history

Explosive Technology, wow:

https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-colu...

They're still in business today and manufacture the explosive squibs that are used inside some brands of permanently installed aircraft fire existing systems. But it's really a pretty small, contained explosion. I think they also do airbag inflators.

I had a chance to be onsite at a different facility when they set of the SEMTEX in their 25 acre blasting site. It was impressive. A true earth-shattering kaboom. They were welding a plate of titanium to a plate of aluminum for us. http://highenergymetals.com/

"Blast-N-Peen" got a good chuckle out of me. On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Riddle at Electronic Memories was unsettlingly spare, a little bit sinister in its lack of graphic expression of any kind.

They do sound sinister. They mostly made stuff like core memory devices

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

So these business cards are from 1940s ? I ask this because on one of the cards the phone number was 10 digits. I would have thought the phone numbers would be shorter.

Anyway, pretty cool to see them in high definition and realize they aren't any different than today's business cards.

Love the Plasmadyne logo! And that Xenon card gives me strong TriOptimum vibes.

I found a neat NASA report from 1970 that Plasmadyne was part of, looks like this one was a legit company! https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700013448/downloads/19...

I miss not having business cards any more.

Graphic design time capsule.

Now I know why there's a margin on older business cards. TIL I alwways thought it was a slip in thing, not they'd actually mutate the cards.

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