Extraordinary pictures that make you go WTAF and want to know more.

I happened to have just used this in another thread but it gave me an idea.

This is the American military testing the B52’s electronics ability to survive an EMP blast caused by a nuke. It’s pretty extraordinary imo. Wiki has some great info on it and it involved some extraordinary engineering, not least of which is how all that woodwork was held together! ;-)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, it can shatter glass and cause small earthquakes within a 2km radius.

Hopefully this Flickr link works:

#IBM loading a 5MB hard drive for shipment in 1956.

This is IBM loading a 5MB hard disk for transportation back in the 1950s.

It’s a well-known image, what’s less well known perhaps is that for decades storage didn’t really increase, it just got physically smaller (and considerably cheaper).  We were well into the 1980s before we started seeing 10MB drives as anything approaching normal.

^^ Lol, that’s pretty impressive mattyfez.

Back to the Future missed a trick there! :-D

It’s a well-known image, what’s less well known perhaps is that for decades storage didn’t really increase, it just got physically smaller (and considerably cheaper). We were well into the 1980s before we started seeing 10MB drives as anything approaching normal.

Excellent pic that, not one I’ve ever seen.

I think the first HDD I ever had, one I fitted into an Amiga 1200, was a mere 50MB. I still remember how amazing it was to click on an icon and have the installed game start in mere seconds as opposed to, well, a lot more seconds from floppy.

This is part of painting from 1350 which hangs above the altar at the Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo. Is it a medeival UFO?

It’s pretty crazy, I’ve got a 128 GB disk on my keyring, it’s basically empty aside from a windows image and a few linux images, and a bunch of utilities, in case of armageddon, I know I’ve got a fresh OS, lol!

@poopscoop with regards to the subwoofers, I think several countries were developing them as sonic weapons, but then they very quickly realised that ULF sound is not directional!

I think the first HDD I ever had, one I fitted into an Amiga 1200, was a mere 50MB.

The first computer I actually used for graphics at work was a little PC, with, IIRC, 8mb of RAM, and 8Kb of storage. I used to redraw logos using CorelDraw, to produce vector files for the plate-making system. I used to do a bit, then save the file, and sit drinking a coffee watching it spend ten minutes refreshing the screen!

Those were the days…

phillipe petit tightrope walking between the twin towers.

This is a photo of chicago, or whats left of it, in 1906 after the earthquake. The negative is 4 foot wide. It was taken with a camera designed by George Lawrence, dangled from a rope system designed by george lawrence from kites. It is possible to find hi res scans that show the detail captured, it extraordinary.

That sub woofer speaker just being casually rolled down the steps :-)

Same photographer different brief. “Take the largest photo with the worlds largest camera of the worlds handsomest train”

£5000 in the first decade of the 1900s

1 photo

The train… 8foot long negative

He then went in to invent quite a bit of aviation stuff.

On the subject of the 5Mb HD…. I used to work for IBM before my retirement and can remember back in the 60/70’s some of our customers computer halls, Lloyds Bank for example. Absolutely vast and packed with cabinets with all sorts of devices. These sort of storage devices – https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/mss.html

Very complex and taking up a lot of floor space.

I also worked in IBM Hursley Labs and, again, the machine halls (more than one) were massive.

Or USAF Upper Heyford with all the punch card devices.    Then I look at my phone….  what a change to have lived through.

@andrewh

Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo

Spooky and makes you think, hard.

Not Hiroshima. Not Nagasaki. Tokyo after Operation Meetinghouse – the most destructive single military action in history. The result of the US strategy of shifting from precision bombing to widespread targeting of civilians using Napalm that had been specifically formulated to burn Japanese buildings. 1 raid – 90,000 civilian dead, 120,000 casualties and over 1 million left homeless. 1/4 of all the buildings in Tokyo destroyed in one night. The firestorm was so intense windows were liquified and it was raining liquid glass on the fleeing civilians.

@andrewh – an early prototype of Sputnik? Or the idea that created Sputnik?

Looking at the destruction man can reap on others – we really are a selfishly irresponsible creature, aren’t we?

However, some of the other pictures are awe-inspiring…

Another aviation one. Lots of people think its faked. The story behind the photo is almost as absurd as the image. The photographer is neighbour and friends with a BAC test pilot who invites him along to watch him fly the plane. There’s only two exposures left in the camera when this image was taken, the tractor driver is reacting to the bang of the ejector seat. Turns out it’s not even the photographer’s neighbour flying the plane, it’s a different pilot. (who survived)

@joshvegas – that’s San Francisco after the infamous earthquake!!

Chicago does have a low seismic risk due to background seismicity but nothing like active areas of California

This always makes me do a double take, I mean Arnie is not exactly small

Spooky and makes you think, hard.

Pseudo archaeologists have been creating fakery with these images and ancient ruins for decades now, some of them are no better than a form of racism. If you were into ‘x-files’ type stuff in the 1980’s then Erik Von Daniken’s Chariot of the Gods was compulsory reading. The very famous picture of Pakal’s sarcophagus was the cover image. Does it depict a man ascending to heaven under the cruciform image of the world tree, or is he a Mayan astronaut?

Hint: He’s not a spaceman any more than the image of the resurrection of Christ in the Kosovan monastery is.

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, it can shatter glass and cause small earthquakes within a 2km radius.

Pretty sure there’s one fitted to a Renault Clio round the corner from us…

I love these kind of pics – the Internet is full of them, sadly too many show the damage we have done to each other without anyone learning from them.

that’s San Francisco after the infamous earthquake!!

Was it “San Francisco” printed on the picture that gave it away?

A bloke with a bike and a shovel woke up with an idea one morning. A short time later, this appeared in the local sports centre.

On the old computers topic – My first PC had a 40MB hard disk but you could only use 32MB because that was all the OS supported. It also had a ‘turbo’ button that upped the speed from 8Mhz(?) to 12 but this was too fast for some programs so it was mostly not switched on.

“This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, it can shatter glass and cause small earthquakes within a 2km radius”

I want that subwoofer. Imagine listening to LFO from that!

@johnners – no the topography and that 1906 quake is very famous.

This always makes me do a double take, I mean Arnie is not exactly small

The guy on the right is Andre the Giant.  Aside from the obvious, he was famous for a heroic appetite for alcohol and equally heroic flatulence.

 he was famous for a heroic appetite for alcohol

Great article about his capacity for both life and alcohol.

A very green rookie wrestler named Hulk Hogan toured Japan several times with Andre and witnessed the Giant’s alcohol consumption first hand. According to Hogan, Andre drank, at a minimum, a case of tall boys during each bus ride. When he finished a can Andre would belch, crush the can in his dinner-platter-sized hand, and bounce the empty off the back of Hogan’s head. Hogan learned to count each thunk, so he could anticipate when Andre was running low. Whenever the bus stopped, it was Hogan’s job to scamper off to the nearest store, buy as many cases of beer as he could carry, and make it back before the bus departed, a sight that never failed to make Andre roar his bassoon-like laugh.

Ok, an image i looked up for something mind boggling, not a mind boggling picture:

hand woven memory, from the Apollo launch module. The data on the computers in the module was stored on those minute iron rings, as 1s and 0s written and read by the matrix of copper passing through them. The mesh was hand woven, exclusively by women. 3000 tonnes of American might and a couple of blokes, riding on their crochet skills

On that ^ this is lead dev Margaret Hamilton standing next to the printout of the source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer.

The guy on the right is Andre the Giant. Aside from the obvious, he was famous for a heroic appetite for alcohol and equally heroic flatulence.

And the guy on the left is basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. An insanely gifted athelete and by all (his) accounts, very prolific lover.

Lots of people think its faked.

Not to be That Guy (again), but it does LOOK faked – the depth of field is huge and suspiciously crisp… I’d be surprised if a pilot still above his ‘chute at that low height would survive, and I wouldn’t expect him to appear to be falling faster than the plane! Tractor man has amazing reflexes if he’s responded to the sound of the ejector seat…

Sorry, this doesn’t feel like the thread for cynicism…. :(

ElShalimo

Full Member

@joshvegas – that’s San Francisco after the infamous earthquake!!

In my defence i was on a bus at 5.25 ?

The pilot is below the parachute, if you zoom in you can see the pilot chute at the top. And the tractor driver could have been watching before the pilot ejected.

But the plane does appear to be a lot closer to the camera, and better defined, than the pilot. And if it was on that trajectory you wouldn’t wait until it was that close to the ground to eject!

Still, probably a bit more convincing than the flying machine I posted…

Just read that back, pilot, parachute, and pilot chute in the same sentence is not at all confusing.

Tractor man has amazing reflexes if he’s responded to the sound of the ejector seat…

I have no opinion either way on the photo’s legitimacy, but to give the benefit of the doubt I’d think it unlikely that an experimental jet aircraft would be plummeting towards the ground in complete silence.  And in any case, if the photographer was stood there to photograph the plane, it’s not implausible that the driver was in the same place watching it.

There was a thread on here 10 or more years ago with a photo of  lion as a passenger on the Wall-of Death.  So many questions!

Love the NASA woven memory!

It was absolutely audacious that they thought there was the slightest chance of getting men to the moon and back without a catastrophic failure.

It really was an incredible achievement.

Wall of Death with a Lion in the Side Car Photo..