EYEBALL KICKS

Shots from a Revolution

“Desperation and insecurity.” That’s what Mark Richards says drove him to photograph the machines in Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers (text by John Alderman, Chronicle Books, May 2007). After a long freelance career shooting hot spots like Afghanistan in the 1980s for Time and Newsweek, Richards realized that photojournalism was dying, and went on a frantic search for something new.

He found it on a visit to the Computer History Museum in San Jose, Calif., where he was struck by the unintended beauty of early computers built in military-funded university labs. Using a digital camera wired to a laptop monitor, Richards’ complex lighting schemes and 30-second exposure times show the rest of us what he first saw in his mind’s eye.

—Mark Frauenfelder

ABOVE: Philco 212, 1962. Memory: 64K. $1.8M. BELOW: ENIAC, 1946. Memory: Ten 10-digit numbers. $500k.

84 Make: Volume 10