mainframe[ mān′frām′ ]
noun Computers.
1. A large, often powerful computer, usually dedicated to lengthy, complex calculations or set up for use by many people simultaneously. Compare personal computer.
This project is a digital collection of archival media that focuses on the computing devices in the workplace before the advent of personal computers. Through that process, we hope to defamiliarize some of common assumptions about computing informed by contemporary culture, and think through how the social context around computing may have evolved differently given the set of perceptions about computing from the 1950 - 1970s. Specifically, this project will probe the underlying assumptions of human computer interaction from that time period, and also the gender politics of computing in the business place before the personalization of computing.