Part 2: https://youtu.be/V9aVOIuKVUc
Recent related discussion (2 days ago, 86 points, 58 comments):
The re-did the entire campus. The main building is now called Bell Works. It's really nice. https://goo.gl/maps/w9thDue2V7C1wQuL9
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.
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.
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?
What kind of data were they processing?
Music is perfect!
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!