Photographing computers to show the art inside the black box

[Editor's note: I was utterly taken with the gorgeous photos in the new edition of Core Memory, photographer Mark Richards's lavish survey of the vintage computing hardware in Silicon Valley's gem, the Computer History Museum; below is senior curator Dag Spicer's introduction to the book, along with some photos, which the publisher was kind enough to supply -Cory]

What computers mean to us depends largely on what we bring to them. Our expectations, our past experience, the dreams and myths that surround them, their physical characteristicsall these aspects resonate on multiple, often overlapping levels.

One level is aesthetic. Many nonspecialists in the computer arts enjoy these machines for their visual appeal and curiosity. Nearly everyone, regardless of technical background, can appreciate the intricacies of a computers mechanical design, its rows of switches and blinking lights, its often ungainly proportions, and the personal con- nection they feel when they recognize the first computer they used.

A second level is important for specialists. People trained in computer science or electrical engineering bring the additional dimension of how these objects illuminate abstract principles of computer architecture and the ideas immanent in their designideas that give us insight into the minds of their designers and the challenges they faced.

A third level is the historical trajectory of these objects: how they were financed and why, what problems they were trying to solve, and the mistakes made and dead ends encountered by their designers. We learn a lot by understanding these human elements and how they shaped historical and technical factors into stable artifacts, in turn stitching together the fabric of todays information-based society. Read the rest