2 HN users recommended this documentary2 months2018–2024score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters share it as a rare, atmospheric look at what working at an early computing center was actually like, including how code was submitted and processed.
A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.
“This is one of my favorites, about people submitting their code to get processed at their computing center” (HN, 2024)
ATT has a bunch of Bell Labs stuff on their Youtube channel, it's all a pro watch. This is one of my favorites, about people submitting their code to get processed at their computing center: [this video] Watching it made me realize a lot of batch-esque things like Hadoop and Spark aren't too far off, just more automated.
How code was submitted and processed at the computing center.
The funny thing is that early on in this interview the host tells Nelson that he's the only one saying anything about using computers to store and retrieve text. But that's simply not true, certainly not in 1979. For example, John McCarthy had been describing what largely came to be our digital literary future as early as 1970: [link] Even within the contemporary environment a significant fraction of computer use was not 'number crunching', but the sorting, retrieval, and printing of essentially textual information. (i.e, records) Records are tiny documents, which to me makes this early portion where Ted accepts the point without argument a large missed opportunity to get the point across. [this video]
Fascinating to see a couple recent photos and find out what happened to this place. The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex is something that I find myself unexpectedly stumbling over on the Internet every few years or so. First time some circa 10 years ago, when they uploaded a 1973 era training video for the computing services to `AT&T tech channel`: [this video] [link]
1973 training video for Holmdel computing services.
Raquel Welch taped up on the System 370: [this video] I think it's this photo: [link] Her photo is the only personal item I see anywhere in the two videos.
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