These are all the random header images you’ll see if you click long enough. Rather than abuse your mouse, we present them here in an easy-to-view format with annotations. Enjoy. (click for full-size images)
Fashion means hair. Hair means styling. Styling leads to… hair-raising adventures. The things we do to make us look ‘better.’
Another find from the web – illustration from the Worlds Fair. Ford’s pavillion had us living in geodesic domes. Damn. Another lost dream. Hat tip to BibliOdyssey.
Spotted this old illustration of the Seattle space needle online and loved it to death. I grew up on industrial art like this – the future looked so real…! I’ve actually eaten in the restaurant and been on the observation tower. Well worth a visit! Hat tip (again!) to BibliOdyssey.
DJ and I are both old enough not only to remember these… but how to use them. They were such deliciously elegant things – and still are.
When it comes to gear, DJ is the man. A bit of an homage to a man that could not only survive a direct nuclear hit, but have enough personal accessories to jump-start the economy single-handed.
Faces of sumo wrestlers from a wrestling match program. DJ is an intellectual heavyweight – a sumo you might say. But cuddly too.
DJ came up with this one, I just made it shiny. I take no responsibility for whatever it might say.
Even a throwaway consumer product from 1980 (this address organizer for instance) has a fairly elaborate PCB. Instead of using nice resin packages with rigid legs, it has ‘glob-top‘ components where a dollop of liquid resin is used to insulate AND secure the device.
Panoramic image taken by Mark Berenson and assembled by Doug Wray. Mark rode a bicycle to this viewpoint. Mark es muy macho. UNH.
2Gb hard drive – mutation performed with Kai Power Tools Fractal Tiling. Photo by Doug Wray.
Circuit diagram from long ago. Drew a lot of these while at IBM’s Printing Systems Division back in the Salad Days. Graphic by Doug Wray.
Science Fiction robots! Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, Robot B9 from Lost in Space, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dalek from Dr. Who and the Tin Man from Wizard of OZ. (thanks to Fred Barton, the B9 Builders Club, Jeff’s Robots, The Daleks and Beyond the Rainbow to OZ)
Audio signature – you’re seeing the words: “DJ Cline, for future reference” – a twist on ‘words made visible’ (Graphic by D. Wray)
Balclutha rigging – looking up the main mast of the schooner Balclutha, moored at the Maritime Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. A visual pun on the web/backbone/platforms. (Photo by D. Wray)
Bay Bridge Full Span – no joke, just love that bridge. (Photo by D. Wray)
Brain Drain – from some old sci-fi film, forget where I grabbed it, but it fits the whole ‘information’ theme of the site and it made DJ laugh out loud when he saw it.
Cameras – from the Brownie to the digicam. Note the Polaroid SX-70 in there – Edwin Land’s brainchild. I own one and can testify to its outstanding image quality. When Polaroid stopped making film for this wonderful tool I cried like a little girl.
Ah, the joy of Hollerith Fields. Found a site out there that lets you make replica images of punch cards. The K&E quadrille graph paper no doubt brings back memories for all you savage geeks. Group hug.
What’s really going on in your hard disk. Seriously. If you look reeeeeaaally close… (Thanks to Wilhei66 at stock.xchng)
DNA molecule. Tons of other great molecular imagery at that site!
Progress of Electronics – both Deej and I have lived long enough to see all these innovations. Now here comes Nanotechnology. Things never seem to slow down. Strap in, goggles on.
Glass train station roof – pretty sure I got this from stock.xchng, but I can’t relocate it.
The Proteus from Fantastic Voyage, a quintessential science-fiction submarine.
A fractal generated by a great Mac screen saver: Fractures by Stick Software!
A galaxy seen edge-on. I’m sure ours looked this way as DJ approached.
A panarama of the Golden Gate Bridge – taken during a crossing I made with DJ. You simply cannot appreciate this magnificent structure until you walk across it. Takes a hour at a brisk walk. Dress warmly, the wind is relentless! (Photo by D. Wray)
A long shot of the Bridge from near the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum – which I recommend highly!! (Photo by D. Wray)
Concrete arches in a parking structure, Anthem building, 7th and Lincoln, Denver. (Photo by D. Wray)
Integrated circuit component. I forget what it’s for, but it looked so darned spiffy.
Train diagram – I’m sick for mechanical drawings. It’s an illness.
The evolution of the Macintosh. DJ and I have both owned most of these. From 8MHz to 2GHz. From 128K RAM to 8Gb RAM. From 10Mb hard disks to 500Gb hard disks. The numbers beggar the imagination and they’re still climbing.
Audio formats. Records, reel-to-reel tape, eight track cartridges, cassettes, VHS cartridges… the ‘wave of the future’ just keeps cresting. Don’t stop paddling, these are all fading away. Keep shifting formats or lose your music forever!
8-inch floppy disks and reader, 3.5-inch floppy, the 128K Macintosh, Optical Disks, holographic crystal memory. Smaller, denser, faster, where will it stop? Etching grooves on molecules? Atoms? Future reference is a race with obsolescence!
To the Moon! I read Jules Verne in school, then grew up to watch the first astronauts land on the Moon. I grew up in a town named ‘Apollo’ – of course, the astronauts visited us. Lots of DJ’s work involves the Moon, seemed logical.
Mosque ceiling – complexity is at the heart of DJ’s stories, so this was a natural choice.
One of the original science-fiction buildings, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Perched high on a mesa in Boulder, CO it’s been used as a locale for the Woody Allen film “Sleeper”
Closeup of a Nixie tube. This came out of an electronic scale that I ultimately scrapped. I have video of it cycling through it’s number sequence – the Wiki frames just don’t do it justice. The mechanism was subtle and magical. Ah, hardware had real romance then! *sigh*
“Nuclear Family” – frames from a government atomic-bomb test. No point in hiding in the basement if several tons of debris was going to fall on you! No point in hiding, period. People still believe you could live through this. Right.
Spring-driven wind-up movie camera. Before motors and batteries were small enough and cheap enough for consumers. 8mm, Super-8 and more. These went through a whole cycle of evolution, to be replaced by videocameras that weighed only 20 lbs! Future reference always seems to involve buying new equipment.
Hydraulic piston – something we’ve come to need: for crushing all the garbage these ‘future’ technologies generate! Good thing is, we can use heavy equipment built from these to dig up the precious metals again in a hundred years!
Punched paper tape from a teletype terminal. This tape image was simulated at a website: http://www.kloth.net/services/ttypunch.php – special thanks to Ralf D. Kloth. He also created the punched-card emulator seen above. This tape spells out the text on the homepage of the site.
That’s me, your webmaster, M. Douglas Wray, in a pensive mood. Or I had gas. Looks about the same. I’m really that shade of blue too.
Details matter. Some architectural details in San Francisco. The truck is a fixture on Alcatraz Island, the other items can be found in the downtown area.
Lodging in the High Frontier. First we had cartoons, then simple space stations, now collaborations. Time waits for no one! Suit up!
Stroboscopic photo of a water droplet splash. It’s about your ‘reference frame’ – something DJ just loves to mess with. Keep your brain inside the story until the plot comes to a full and complete stop.
One of the Match Heads by David Mach. He did a whole series of these. They’re not mentioned on his current site, but do appear in the background and also a portfolio book he offers. Amazing work, not to mention a bit dangerous to assemble!
Feeling tired? Run down? Treading on thin ice? Sick of these puns yet? Rubber tires will one day fade into history and these marks will be only reminders of the days of gasoline.
Two media formats that are totally obsolete. If you have a lot of material in this format, your investment is becoming more valuable and less usable by the second. Some terribly clever methods of converting vinyl records to digital audio have been devised, but magnetic media is fading away.
One of the oldest mass-media devices, the typewriter. Remember the days of inked ribbons? Carbon ribbons? Correction fluid? Correction tape? Daisywheels? Thimbles? Selectric balls? (no, that’s not a medical condition)
Screenshot of the Flux OpenGL screensaver for Mac OS X. Flux is the name of the game with Future Reference.
Above are two panoramas of twentieth century American cars. Can you identify them?
Cutaway view of an atomic reactor, courtesy of BibliOdyssey. Originally published in Nuclear Engineering International as insert posters.
