‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.
My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!
They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.
Shaggy Rogers is a young adult human man that eats dog treats and his friends don't even care. They act like it's normal. Not only do they know he loves eating dog treats, but they know he'll do scary dangerous shit just to eat dog treats, and they use that to their advantage. "Oh you don't wanna get asbestos poisoning in the scary abandoned building? What if we fed you a dog treat?" And he says yes and he does it and eats it and they act like that's a normal thing for a human guy to do. But then again, he also eats 10 feet tall sandwiches in one bite, so maybe he's not even human. Still fucked up that they manipulate him like that though. But whatever. Forget I said anything.
Winter's Heart of Gold - Wilf Perreault , 2025 .
Canadian , b. 1947 -
Acrylic on aluminum , 122 x 91 cm.
I thought this was clickbait but no turns out a looted Olmec artifact depicting the mouth of Tepeyollotlicuhti, and symbolically marking an entrance to the underworld, was recovered in Denver and returned to Mexico.
Its called "Portal al Inframundo" look how cool this thing is.