AT&T Tech Channel
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2024
8:26 · 59K views · Nov 28, 2012
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.
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.
5 comments from Hacker News
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.
These two training videos from the Bell Labs Computing Centre are a very interesting insight into what it was like. Part 1 this video Part 2 [LINK]
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]
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.