[SIGCIS-Members] Help on Coffee and Computing

[Brian Randell]

Hi Gerard:

Your comment about collecting emphemera reminds me of the time I was involved with the (Boston) Computer Museum.

Gordon Bell, in

Out of a Closet: The Early Years of  The Computer [x]* Museum

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267569839_Bell_Gordon_Out_of_a_Closet_The_Early_Years_of_The_Computer_Museum_Dedicated_to_Brian_Randell_on_the_Occasion_of_his_75th_Birthday

very kindly recalled: "As its first Chairman of the Collections and Exhibits Committee, Brian first argued to preserve and display advertisements and ephemera as a significant source for historical understanding and audience recollection”. 

This was probably one of the, no doubt several, causes of two of the Museum's exhibits being in fact very well-done recreations of an office and a teenager’s bedroom featuring, respectively, a single PC and a single Mac! :-)

Cheers

Brian Randell


> On 21 Jul 2020, at 15:09, Gerard Alberts <G.Alberts at uva.nl> wrote:
> 
> Dear Jim,
> Allow me to chip in my tiny story of ephemera and turn it into a challenge to you.
> On the edge of my bookshelf was for years a champaign glass, until it fell off into a dozen pieces --as do things in precarious positions. The glass had been engraved with the IBM logo and reminded the date of the opening of some new data center or computing center. I collected it from the flea market.
> I picked it up, because to me it represented the lore of emblems, decorations, fountain pens. It is a culture not uncommon in the world of computing, but IBM was particularly good at it, mixing --often macho tainted-- company  pride with celebration of technical progress. There was a high culture of walking well suited, of not riding a motercycle when visiting clients, of not spoiling coffee but finishing a job on ephedrine.
> Jim, the lore of the coffee mug is all around and, judging from the response, we all have access to this low hanging fruit --I reckon the same would be true of printed T-shirts as ephemera of hacker culture. But few would have access like you have to the high culture of computing, of human struggling with computing --still tacit knowledge but visible to your exquisite ethnographical perception. Help us by collecting the ephemera and anecdotes on the further branches of the tree.
> Surprise me with things I would not even have recognized as ephemera of computing culture.
> Cheers,
> Gerard
> Van: Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> namens James Cortada <jcortada at umn.edu>
> Verzonden: maandag 20 juli 2020 21:41
> Aan: members at sigcis.org
> Onderwerp: [SIGCIS-Members] Help on Coffee and Computing
>  
> 
> The IT community of users, programmers, vendors, etc have for decades had a reputation for being extensive consumers of coffee. In some parts of the IT ecosystem, especially among those who work odd hours, such as programmers, computer operators, and vendor field engineers.  I am studying the corporate ephemera of this industry and its cultural attachments, such as coffee cups and what they tell us about computing.  Do any of you have any information, ephemera, or sources and citations on this specific issue of coffee and computing?  I can get many industry folks, such as IBM retirees, to wax eloquently on the subject in their private FB accounts, but that is not enough.  Corporate culture is tough to study.  Thanks in advance for your help.  Jim 
> -- 
> James W. Cortada
> Senior Research Fellow
> Charles Babbage Institute
> University of Minnesota
> jcortada at umn.edu
> 608-274-6382
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