The Ultimate Time Capsule: Geeks from the 1960s

I am totally a product of the 70s and mostly the 80s; however, I have often told friends of mine that I wish I had grown up the 60s. There is just something about that time that seems so happy and free. It’s the whole psychedelic, love everyone, peace, flowers and rockin music that I’m attracted to. Although, I’m not much into smoking pot, so I probably wouldn’t have fit in very well in that decade.

Every now and then someone with no claim to fame publishes something on the Internet that catches on like wildfire. That’s what Larry Luckham is experiencing. He published some old pictures that he took at his office back in the 60s, and they are being shared everywhere!

I find some of the comments he made about these so interesting. First of all, he points out that all the computer programmers back then were men. So funny! Included in the pictures below is a large IBM mainframe computer from 1967. Larry says that it had one meg of memory, 648 meg of hard drives and no video. The crazy thing is that back then, that computer cost millions of dollars. How did people do backups in the 60s? According to Larry, with 9-track magnetic tape. Also, check out the Honeywell minicomputer. The terminals you see below were “the first displays in which the data was first written to memory then displayed.” Wow, talk about a time capsule! Larry, thank you for sharing a little sliver of your life from so long ago. You can view his complete collection of images here.