Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers

An unprecedented combination of computer history and striking images, Core Memory reveals modern technology's evolution through the world's most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in the Silicon Valley. Vivid photos capture these historically important machines including the Eniac, Crays 1 3, Apple I and II while authoritative text profiles each, telling the stories of their innovations and peculiarities. Thirty-five machines are profiled in over 100 extraordinary color photographs, making Core Memory a surprising addition to the library of photography collectors and the ultimate geek-chic gift

FROM WIRED   July 2007Photographer Mark Richards elevates dusty computer artifacts to stunning objets d'art in his detailed new book, Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers.Don't let the academic title fool you -- this five-decade romp reads less like a history lesson and more like an ode to an old friend.Writer John Alderman captures the excitement of the book's 35 computers -- from the room-filling ENIAC to the Commodore 64 -- and reveals some of their quirks (the SAGE came with a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray; the retired WISC was inadvertently hit by bullets). Alderman also revisits the early careers of several industry pioneers, including Bill Gates, who in 1975 wrote the programming language Altair BASIC with Paul Allen, and Steve Wozniak, who a year later failed to convince Hewlett-Packard to build a personal computer. In the end, the book -- with its crude yet beautiful images -- is a pleasing reminder of how far we've come and how far we have to go.

NEW YORK TIMES  July 2007                                                                             The best coffee table book I've seen this year may well be "Core Memory: AVisual Survey of Vintage Computers," with text by John Alderman and photos fromMark Richards.The images are, by and large, mind-blowing.Take the one above, of the guts of a UNIVAC I computer, put on the market byRemington-Rand in 1951. It may look like a "Monty Python"-esque torture device.But this thing was, Alderman points out, the first commercial computer sold in theUnited States.I'll let Alderman explain what we're looking at, though - warning - the geekfactor is moderately high:For memory the UNIVAC used a huge mercury delay line - picturedhere - and tape drives were used to store programs and data. To processinformation, the mercury delay line used sound waves to send pulsesthrough a tube of mercury, then detect and return them. This memory tankwould hold 18 such tubes. The use of tape, rather than punch cards, to storeinformation was a significant innovation and one that was met withsignificant resistance from customers who would no longer see and holddata in hand, as they had with punch cards. Adding to the anxiety, salesmenfrom competitor IBM were said to have suggested that the spinning metaltape posed a safety hazard.The UNIVAC muscled its way into United States political history; it liked Ike.The UNIVAC garnered a lot of publicity when it was used to predictelection results in 1952 from a small sample of voters in key states. Itaccurately predicted Eisenhower's landslide victory over Adlai Stevensonand helped further solidify the hopes and fears that the general public hadabout these wondrous but scary machines.

SMITHSONIAN July 2007Not long after photographer Mark Richards walked into the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, he was smitten with the vintage adding machines, supercomputers and PCs. In this high-technology museum--home to Google's first production server and a 1951 Univac 1, America's first commercial computer--Richards saw more than engineering brilliance. He saw beauty.Richards' resulting still lifes have just been published in Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers, 150 strikingly warm pictures of machines, parts and paraphernalia. Richards, a 51-year-old photojournalist who has worked for Time, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, spent three months shooting at the Silicon Valley museum. "I've lived with these machines for so long," he says, "they're like relatives that you love-hate."Such familiarity has not traditionally characterized art photographs of machines and industry. In the 1920s and '30s, Margaret Bourke-White's stark photographs of a looming dam and towering smokestacks, or Charles Sheeler's clinical photographs of a vast Ford Motor plant, established a certain distance between viewers and technology. But in Richards' images we are at times almost inside the machinery, and instead of being alienated we are drawn to the shapes and textures. The yellow wires of the IBM 7030 (below) look like a plant's hanging roots. Richards says a 1975 ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) IV has wiring--bundles of red and blue veins--that looks like anatomical illustrations from Leonardo's time. He was impressed by such "organic" forms, he says, but also by creature-like machines that seem straight out of science fiction.Richards' photographs demystify technology to a certain extent--we see the hard drives, tape reels, memory boards, bulbs and vacuum tubes--but they also rely on an element of mystery, exalting form over utility. The spiky screw-studded mercury delay line of the Univac 1 could just as easily be a helmet for a cyber charioteer as a memory tank for a computer used to process census data. Richards zooms in on the circa 1965 magnetic core plane: a gold frame woven with a bright fabric of red wires, strung from rows of metallic pins. That the core "is a magnetic force that drives the ability of rings and wires to store information," as the accompanying text by John Alderman labors to explain, hardly adds to the photograph's power.Richards, a self-proclaimed geek, admits that there are computer parts and hard drives lying around his house, in Marin County, California, where he sometimes actually builds computers. Indeed, he seems to revel in the technology of his photography project, particularly the fact that he used a computer to process his digital photographs of computers. Even so, his intimate portraits reveal the unmistakable mark of a human hand.