Interesting photos of a computer graphics lab from 1968

Mike Begley spam at hell.org
Thu Jun 24 12:37:40 CDT 2021


A friend of mine collects old photos, and sent me a link to this set he just recovered from film.  He doesn't know much about the provenance, but it might be interesting to figure out what we can about them.

The link is here:

https://www.espressobuzz.net/Found/GeorgeClark/GraphicsLab/

The film roll was dated June 1968, which was a month before I was born.

The most interesting (to me) is the photo of the Adage Graphics Terminal.  I'd never heard of the company before, but it looks like they were one of the many tech companies that sprang up in the MIT & Harvard orbit in the 60s and 70s.  There's a small amount of info about the company on Wikipedia: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adage,_Inc.

Also in the same photo, to the right of the terminal is a silver box that might be an early joystick.  It's hard to say.

The pictures of the graphics terminal output is pretty cool, given that it's probably really pushing state of the art at the time.  Also, they're in color, which was still not terribly common at the time.  The only few photos I was able to find of Adage terminals are all black and white.

Other recognizable hardware are a couple of ASR33 teletypes (one of which was rebadged as Adage), and some tape drives, the manufacture I don't recognize.  Everything else, I pretty much can't make out what any of it is, but perhaps someone recognizes the particular layout of the blinkinlights?

He was told that the pictures were taken "somewhere in the northeast".  I suspect Boston, and therefore probably MIT or maybe Harvard.  On the same roll were some pictures of "a colonial ship with lots of cannons", which I suspect was the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor, but I haven't seen those pics yet.  I wonder if the tile pattern on the floor is distinct enough or recognizable?

Anyway, it's an interesting set of archival photos, and I figured someone here might find them interesting or might recognize more than I do.

-mike



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