Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Caption competition time!

"Hello, I'm Jason Parkes, and I'd like to tell you about this amazing new gadget, the IBM Processor of Donds, or iPod for short. It can store thousands of songs in just this one room, and calculate the best fit of songs to any particular theme, ready to submit to the Guardian newspaper each week. Under my hand here are the recommendations for this week, running to just a few hundred tracks. Incredible, yes
"Here I am, with my colleagues ejaydee (L), blimpy (R) and darceysdad on the keyboard. We are interrogating the iPod for suggested tracks, which Blimpy lists in order of relevance on the flipchart"

"We don't always agree, of course. Take Frogprincess behind me here. She's like the eurovision song contest, always squabbling with her colleague steenbeck, a heavy rap fan. But our resident referee, nilpferd, usually settles things, as he's The Jazz Policeman. 
We are developing a smaller version of the iPod for NASA, but the sheer cost means it will always remain the province of a few experts, like my colleagues here."



These photos are from an 1975 IBM presentation, extolling the virtues of "virtual storage" and "online" stuff. If you want to see more, follow the Square America link in the sidebar links section.

Please caption away!!
Winner gets the computer in the picture, but not a new house big enough to store it in!!

**edit** ghe wins! captions added accordingly!! very funny stuff all round 'spillers. and many thanks to sourpus for inventing Brian Speng, who now seems to have taken on a life of his own....

27 comments:

sourpus said...

How about a surreal new Viz Character: Brian Speng, the 70's office inadequate ("He's had everyone (har har har")

Episode One: 'Doreen wasnt interested'

Picture One: "Hello there! Believe it or not, I'm the office Lothario round these parts...yes, that's right, the Don Juan of IT, the Cassanova of Computer Tech. Ive had everyone in this office already. Including (he he) these two lovelies behind me (chortle)"

Picture Two: "Ive had all of these people for example - and their wives!! (chuckle)"

Picture Three: "Mind you, nothing can compete with the office bike over there!"

Anonymous said...

i was kinda thinking along the same lines, tee hee

Anonymous said...

top picture:

"These punch cards hold the equivalent of one jazzy publication. Ideal for the modern workplace!"

glasshalfempty said...

1st frame - "Hello, I'm Jason Parkes, and I'd like to tell you about this amazing new gadget, the IBM Processor of Donds, or iPod for short. It can store thousands of songs in just this one room, and calculate the best fit of songs to any particular theme, ready to submit to the Guardian newspaper each week. Under my hand here are the recommendations for this week, running to just a few hundred tracks. Incredible, yes?"

2nd Frame - "Here I am, with my colleagues ejaydee (L), blimpy (R) and darceysdad on the keyboard. We are interrogating the iPod for suggested tracks, which Blimpy lists in order of relevance on the flipchart"

3rd Frame - "We don't always agree, of course. Take Frogprincess behind me here. She's like the eurovision song contest, always squabbling with her colleague steenbeck, a heavy rap fan. But our resident referee, nilpferd, usually settles things, as he's a Jazz Policeman.

We are developing a smaller version of the iPod for NASA, but the sheer cost means it will always remain the province of a few experts, like my colleagues here."

nilpferd said...

It looks like an advertisment for the new photocopier: spice up your office environment with the IBM Transgenital.. sorry, liquid lunch..

Anonymous said...

@ghe - too funny!! love it

Mnemonic said...

ghe - brilliant! Just as well no coffee was near the keyboard or there would have been irrevocable damage.

nilpferd said...

Jazz policeman? I'm hip to that..

goneforeign said...

Correction; He's not a Jazz Policeman, he's The Jazz Policeman!

ToffeeBoy said...

@ghe - the 'flipchart' is presumably the list of favourite B-sides...

Anonymous said...

Bill, John and Arnold, can you all carry in the USB key please?

Anonymous said...

GHE - if I had a glass of something (and boy could I do with one after my sh1tty day), I'd raise it to you.

But a minor correction: I think you'll find that I'm the one standing on the right ... I was never skinny enough to be the one at the keyboard, even in 1975!

;o)

And is that woman at the back of pic2 sitting on one of those ergonomic kneeling chairs?

Did anyone ever have one of those?

steenbeck said...

Who are you calling heavy? just jokin'
Tee hee, ghe

I don't have a caption to add, but I was trying to find a clip from one of my fav movies, which is about the very earliest IBM computer. This is the best I could come up with...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2fVJTO8Pr0&feature=related
Ignore the wacky titles, I have no idea what they're going on about

Blimpy said...

middle pic:

"no, no loser has two os in it!"

Anonymous said...

Trust me, I've had all these people too.

Best rgds

(the real) Brian Speng

Anonymous said...

"Hallo. Fancy a Spenging?"

Carole said...

Caption 1

Here at Capitol Records, we employ the latest technology to bring you the very best in popular music by way out beat combos.

Caption 2

Our crack team of song writers, media analysts and R&R men have analysed all the current trens and what gets to the top of the Hit Parade

Caption 3

Behind me the massive processing power of our super computer will shortly produce our next chart topping masterpiece.....and here it is now. Ladeez an Jennulmen, I give you Coldplay with "Viva la Vida"

Carole said...

BTW - when I first started working in IT, or Data Processing as it was called in those days, this was exactly what IBM mainframes looked like.

I may appear geeky here but I reckon that is a IBM 370 series mainframe, possibly a 135 or a 148, with what look like 3350 disk drives and a 3203 printer.

Blimpy said...

@carole - wow! just wow!

glasshalfempty said...

@carole - brilliant (and had the picture been one of a ZX Spectrum, the answer would have been Oasis' 'Dig out your soul')

I never worked in DP, but have always been rather pleased to have stopped my firm buying a 20 MIPs IBM water cooled mainframe in circa 1985(a series 9000 I think) for several million quid, by persuading the Board that desktop PC use would grow to such an extent that the projected need for mainframe power was a huge overestimate. (An IBM PC was 0.8 MIPs). The DP people hated PCs, and then me!

Anonymous said...

Love the Brian Speng - the office inadequate. VIZ should buy that off you....

glasshalfempty said...

Thanks for the star billing, Blimp (blushes)

I once bought a cassette in Oxfam by the Brian Speng Experience. The only song on it I can remember was a cover of Adge Cutler & the Wurzels' "Oi 'ad 'er away"

Anonymous said...

Great little combo 'The Experience' - and obviously, it goes without saying that I had all of them.

B. Speng (Mr.)

Anonymous said...

Good day, I am the real actual Brian Speng and discovered this internet site through a search engine internet site.

I find the use of my likeness and name most disturbing, especially the slurs upon my character.

Be warned that you will be hearing from my lawyers in a timely fashion.

Carole said...

@glasshalfempty - the mainframe is still around today though and has even made a comeback in recent years.

Even with the internet, blade servers, distributed systems etc, mainframes are still massively important in the IT universe.

Modern mainframes are not just ivory tower systems, they are behind pretty much all of the big banks, oil companies, retailers etc.

Mainframes are also excellent internet servers, the architecture and processing power is ideal for very large online applications that can handle thousands of concurrent transactions while offering security and data concurrency.

Costwise, the capital outlay may be massive but the TCO is actually lower in most cases than a huge server farm with the staff overheads etc that go along with distributed systems.

The mature environment of the mainframe is inherently more stable, easier to administer and provides more power too.

BTW - I don't work for IBM.

I'll stop now ..........................

glasshalfempty said...

@carole - I wasn't knocking mainframes, or IBM, just DP crazies who wanted more power than was really needed. I used to love the mainframe rooms, all cool efficiency and winking lights, like 2001:a space odessey...

bethnoir said...

may I just say that Jason A Parkes looks much cooler than that and to Mr Speng I say, you can't have me.