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A reel-to-reel tape drive from a DEC System 2020 (PDP-10) minicomputer. It's a tall rack, and wider than the usual 19-inch width, too. The interface to the computer is Massbus. UPDATE: I have now donated this drive to The National Museum Of Computing at Bletchley Park.
In this view of the Princeton University Computer Graphics Laboratory, the PDP-10 is on the right, and the LDS-1 on the left. The PDP-10 featured Dectapes, TTY terminals, 256 K of 36-bits-per-word hand-wound memory and a paper tape reader. The laboratory was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, under the direction of Professor Robert Langridge. I managed the system.
The wooden door at the rear is the entry to the main room. The large, multiple disk rotating memory unit is in the foreground. The joystick on the LDS-1 table at the right of the picture was hand made in a Princeton University machine shop. This was the era before commercial video games were available, and joysticks for computers were not inexpensive off-the-shelf items. The circular clear-plastic objects in front of the joystick are 3-D Lorgnettes, which blanked out one eye after the other as a disk rotated inside. This, when synchronized with the display, produced better headaches than 3-D images.
The two bays of the LDS-1 computer are in the background of this view. In front of the LDS-1 graphics computer is the single CRT display and a TTY terminal tied to the PDP-10. The PDP-10 ran programs that instructed the LDS-1 on what to display.
This is what the CRT screen on the LDS-1 was capable of displaying in real time. The line-drawing images could be rotated and translated via a joystick. Other pictures in this set were enhanced by a color wheel that I designed and built. We also produced a couple of short movies using the color wheel.
This is probably the best result we got while experimenting with anaglyph 3D via the color wheel on the LDS-1. The LDS-1 electronics did the translation.
The magnetic drum was faster than disks and used as a swap device so that the core memory (ram) could be shared among multiple programs.
A Calcomp drum plotter is on the table to the left. A 3-dimentional input tablet sits in front of the LDS-1 display. Invented by Todd Wipke, the 3-D input tablet consisted of three strip microphones and a spark pen.
The Computer Lab. was built in the space of a former wet laboratory inside Frick Hall of Princeton University. It was on the first floor, under another wet lab; which periodically overflowed and rained unknown liquids over our equipment.
These two molecular strands are much easier to differentiate in color, which was not possible on the black-and white LDS-1 display. This picture was generated over several seconds via the color wheel positioned between the display and still camera. In real time, differentiation was somewhat accomplished by having the LDS-1 slowly rotate the molecules around the horizontal axis.
The color wheel and multiple pseudo scan lines helped create this molecule with colorful disk-shaped atoms. The LDS-1 was incapable of producing hidden lines or surfaces, so, for instance, red and green overlapping produced yellow in this image.
In real time, the LDS-1 was only capable of producing stick-figure images. This image was created over several seconds, one pseudo scan line at a time, in front of the color wheel.
The computer programs allowed scientists to "fly" molecules into each other in real time. They would twist and turn one molecule in relation to another, as they tried to fit them together.
Interlocking molecules displayed on LDS-1 computer in the Princeton University Computer Graphics Laboratory.
90304698 :Piction ID--Room with Computer Machines 1973---Please tag these photos so information can be recorded.---- Digitization of this image made possible by a generous grant from the NHPRC: NHPRC and the San Diego Air and Space Museum