Web Zen: geeknerd zen

star trek camelot

sims torture

all your snakes

compupromo

mac system 7

rsg-tac compression

nada

unicode chart

ipod war

dance voldo dance

And image above: "found" 1960s computer photos, discovered by BoingBoing reader Aria who works in the same site where beehived she-nerds once swept unplunged data center floors decades before. Here's her post about finding the images, and this post show that specific part of the datacenter. Says Aria, "It seems the she-nerd has been replaced by a storagetek silo!"

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comment: Super-observant BoingBoing reader Ranjit Bhatnagar says,

Look more closely at the photo of the beehived she-nerd. She's not
sweeping the floor – she's going at it with a rubber plunger. Clearly
her primitive internet has clogged tubes!

Don Bruey says,

The person in the picture is lifting panels which comprise a "fake floor" (sort of like a false bottom of a suitcase) under which power and network cables can be run without being tripped over by visitors to the room. It's a common data center feature.

Christian "CJ" Jacobsen says,

In one of the Web Zen: geeknerd zen photos you posted, the woman in the computer server room (as someone has already said) is using a special tool to pull up the floor tiles. This allows access to the computer network and power wiring, which ran under the floor in old server rooms.

What I have to add is that this photo is one of many that were hanging in the big server rooms at NASA – Ames Research Center in Palo Alto, California. (Most of the photos on the walls at NASA were from NASA, not from outside sources, so I expect the woman in the photo is working in the same room I used to work in. But I have no evidence of that.) I used to be a system admin there in the late 80's, and there were a bunch of groovy photos like this one, poster-sized and mounted, on the walls of the tech building. There was also an old Cray (with built-in bench seating) in a plexiglass display, and a really old 3' x 3' transistor array from a very early computer also on display.

Charles Lai says,

Nasa Ames has its own "city" of Moffett Field. Check it out at: Link.

And Nasa Ames and Moffett Field are usually identified with Mountain View, not Palo Alto – just ask everyone working at the Mountain View companies like Mercury Interactive, Symantec and Verisign across 101 from Moffett Field.