One-to-Many, Many-to-Many

Originally posted to Scintillating Bullshit Version Two in August 2006.

Figure 1. New portable computer conveniently goes where you go.Figure 1. New portable computer conveniently goes where you go.

When I get done with school, I am going to start a design firm. I am going to get a small business loan and rent out a bunch of space in one of those midtown office buildings, with the shitty Hermann Miller gray carpet and the drop ceilings. I will then hire a bunch of youthful unknowns from RISD, CalArts, MCAD, Van Eyck Academy, RCA, and whatever the fuck. The deal is going to be as follows: if you work for me, you can use a computer, but it has to be THE MAINFRAME. Cuz, see, I will buy a mainframe1 and install it, and as for computers, that will be it, in terms of what is allowed in the office. Powerbooks (or rather, excuse me, “Mac Book Pros”) will get checked at the door, much like the bag-check arrangement at The Strand and other such commercial outlets. So if you are a guy, you will invariably look like this:

Figure 2. Guy using computer.Figure 2. Guy using computer.

… and if you’re a girl, you’ll look like this:

Figure 3. Girl using computer.Figure 3. Girl using computer.

… I should mention at this point that these images are not at all intended to suggest gender-normative role designations; sometimes, if you’re a guy, you’ll change the tapes, and sometimes girls will use the light pen to draw shit. The pursuit of such activities will be a product of what needs to get done in the workplace, rather than whether you have a dick or a pussy, essentially. Just so you know. Yes.

Anyway. By enforcing such constraints, I will conjure the eternal spirit of Paul Rand,2 who will fuse his undead powers with my own mortal body in exchange for avenging his disgrace and slaying the dickfaces responsible for the perversion of the UPS logo. After this, I will be unstoppable, and I will rule the design world with an iron fist, sitting atop my humming mainframe, cackling to myself in the dark.

Anyway that’s one career option, I might go to law school instead, who knows.

Figure 6. Mainframe innards, with user-serviceable vacuum tubes <a href="http://www.lileks.com/institute/compupromo/1.html">(source)</a>Figure 6. Mainframe innards, with user-serviceable vacuum tubes (source)


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This is «One-to-Many, Many-to-Many» and it was posted to «OST» on August 6, 2011, at around 12:00 AM, by Fish, who tagged it design, gendernormativeimagery, mainframe, paulrand, shittyhermanmillercarpet, smallbusinessloan, undead, work, and youthfulunknowns.

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1
Ideally, we are talking about something like an IBM 3090 system:
Figure 4. An IBM 3090 someone photographed with a fisheye lens <a href="http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/mainframes/overview.htm">(source)</a>Figure 4. An IBM 3090 someone photographed with a fisheye lens (source)
... They were, like, the Toyota Prius of the classic 1960s and 1970s mainframes, w/r/t their ubiquity and the smug sense of superiority they conferred upon their operators.
2
Originally this was a link to an amusing anecdote on John Maeda's "SIMPLICITY" blog, about how Maeda got yelled at by Paul Rand and was then given his peach pit, back-in-the-day, and how now Maeda keeps the peach pit permanently on his desk, as an enduring (but probably gross) personal memento. But so Maeda's blog has grown more complex in the years intervening — if this WaybackMachine link doesn't work, try Thoughts on Paul Rand, also by Maeda, excerpted from IDEA magazine's completely untrackdownable Paul Rand Special Retrospective Issue, allegedly published around 1999.
Figure 5. Cover art detail from an earlier, completely unrelated Rand-centric issue of IDEA <a href="http://www.thisisdisplay.org/collection/large/idea_magazine_special_issue_paul_rand_cover/">(source)</a>Figure 5. Cover art detail from an earlier, completely unrelated Rand-centric issue of IDEA (source)
Blech. What can I say? The fucking internet could srsly use some librarians.