| ▲ | A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards(clui.org) |
| 121 points by 1970-01-01 2 days ago | 26 comments |
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| ▲ | world2vec 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Seems some of them would get the key contact details "clipped" by the rolodex itself. Maybe a good design would put the phone number and address at the top. |
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| ▲ | mopsi 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed! Interesting that leaving a bottom margin for Rolodex didn't become a design standard. | | |
| ▲ | ahmedfromtunis 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Did you know that there _is_ actually a reason behind the blank space at the bottom of every business card? To get the full picture, we need to go back way before the smartphone age, when a bizarre device, known as the rolodex, ruled office desks" — some blogger in a parallel universe, probably. |
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| ▲ | hellisothers 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Love the logos, colors, and at the same time simplicity. These are so much more memorable than what you see today which I find to be bland or over the top “grafix”. |
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| ▲ | tanseydavid 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark." | | |
| ▲ | shmeeed 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Somebody had to say it. | |
| ▲ | dylan604 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I love that scene and its commentary. Right up there with the Ikea catalog scene in Fight Club |
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| ▲ | retired 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm starting to see ChatGPT generated business promotions along the side of the road more and more often and it saddens me. I'd rather have something your daughter doodled on a piece of paper + the title of your company over some obvious AI slop. | | |
| ▲ | ishtanbul an hour ago | parent [-] | | A lot of cheaper restaurants and bodegas in nyc use AI images to show what food they serve and a lot of them have this slightly grotesque quality thats very unappetizing. Almost like a nightmare/ acid trip filter. |
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| ▲ | wxw 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole. Too good. |
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| ▲ | paradox460 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Many of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place | | |
| ▲ | Bluestein 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > occasionally hot Am I understanding correctly? | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It depends on the exact definition of the word "hot" you mean. No, wait, it doesn't, you'll find any kind of hot you like. | | |
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| ▲ | kjs3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies. Good times. |
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| ▲ | cjkaminski 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A bunch of those names sound fake, like they should be from Fallout instead of Los Alamos. But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies. |
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| ▲ | defen 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If the "Zero Blast-N-Peen" company operating out of "Hooker Circle" with the robot logo showed up in a Fallout game, it would be criticized as too over the top - breaks the immersion too much since it's so absurd. | | |
| ▲ | jjkaczor 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wonder how many of these were essentially 1-person consulting LLC's - which meant a probably higher degree of "whimsy", "sarcasm", or "whit" when naming... (and/or a little counter-culture rebelliousness thrown in where possible) |
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| ▲ | dcrazy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I always liked "General Atomics" (though it wasn't among the cards listed). Still opertating today under that name. If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see. |
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| ▲ | wildzzz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most of these companies were probably a couple of guys in a garage or rented office suite. Labs buy high tech, low volume items and don't mind if it looks like a science fair experiment either. For every IBM supercomputer with some printed graphics on it, there's thousands of weird dohickies that look homemade. | |
| ▲ | hans0l074 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Came here to see if anyone mentioned Fallout and I'm pleased to see someone else made the reference. I presume it is notes and texts like this that inspired the narrative designers of the Fallout series. So cool! |
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| ▲ | creeble 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Explosive Technology, wow: https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-colu... |
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| ▲ | buildsjets 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | They're still in business today and manufacture the explosive squibs that are used inside some brands of permanently installed aircraft fire existing systems. But it's really a pretty small, contained explosion. I think they also do airbag inflators. I had a chance to be onsite at a different facility when they set of the SEMTEX in their 25 acre blasting site. It was impressive. A true earth-shattering kaboom. They were welding a plate of titanium to a plate of aluminum for us. http://highenergymetals.com/ |
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| ▲ | fumeux_fume 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| "Blast-N-Peen" got a good chuckle out of me. On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Riddle at Electronic Memories was unsettlingly spare, a little bit sinister in its lack of graphic expression of any kind. |
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