Derrick Bostrom blogs about his grandparent's crap: a set of beautiful old menus from various restaurants in Phoenix, Arizona, and fond memories of dining at Guggy's.

[Link: Menu Collection, Part Two]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Modern Mechanix shares this fascinating 1979 Popular Science article about the Cray-1 supercomputer. I used to work for Cray Research, and one of the many positions I held there involved debugging Cray-1 module assemblies at their manufacturing plant. I also worked on the Cray-2, perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing computer system ever built, and spent 11 months in Colorado building the prototype of Seymour Cray's revolutionary Cray-3 system, which used Gallium Arsenide chips instead of silicon. He went on to design the follow-on Cray-4 system, before being tragically killed in a car accident.

Oddly enough, I was looking at a couple of Cray-2 and Cray-3 photo archives this morning, so this gives me a good excuse to link to them as well.

[Link: Review of the Cray-1 Supercomputer]
[Link: CPAP Cray-2 Photo Archive]
[Link: DigiBarn Cray-3 Collection]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here's a couple of nifty retrofuture design sites that popped up on Coudal [Link] recently: Catherine Bujold Sorellarium 13 is one woman's attempt to recreate Space: 1999's Moonbase Alpha in the privacy of her own home! Fab. Hope she's got a wah-wah pedal on order so she can play the wukka-wukka guitar intro too.

[Link: Catherine Bujold Sorellarium 13]

This Italian site is chockablock with great retroimagery like the illustration above. You can run it through Babelfish if you want a hinky English translation of the text. I prefer the zen of having an unknown language accompanying my pics.

[Link: Il Futuro Visto Dal Passato]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As usual, Xeni at bOINGbOING is a bit late to the party and a little light on her research. She's apparently just discovered the swingadelic German space-opera from the 60s, Raumpatrouille (AKA Spaceship Orion), and writes: "I'd never heard of "Raumpatrouille" before this week."

Maybe you should read my pal, The Cartoonist more often? He's only been posting fab Orion links and images for the past 3 or 4 years and has been linked to bOINGbOING multiple times.

[Link: The Cartoonist's Orion Archives]
[Link: YouTube Raumpatrouille clips]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)