Who remembers these things back in the day ?...come and add your own memories..

Is anyone here old enough to remember this ? We never had this in the UK... and altho' I've heard of the discrimination in the USA..I've never actuallt really seen it like this, and I have to tell you this shocked me.. .. No discussion, not blaming anyone at all.. just wondered if anyone here is old enough to remember it.. a simple yes or no will do we don;t want to get into Blame, or politics..

usa-vintage-50s-color-photography-9-5a82fedd07b0b-700.jpg
 

hollydolly said:
Did you have a typewriter desk like this...

QET004d.jpg
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No, nothing nearly that fancy. In class, there were probably 30 students and the room wasn't big enough to fit all those kids and all that furniture. There was a flat surface for the typewriter and a small horizontal surface on which we'd put the text we were supposed to type in a stand of sorts. I remember a metal desk about half the size of the wooden one shown here and I want to say there was an attached chair, but I might be mistaken.
 
Eupher said:
No, nothing nearly that fancy. In class, there were probably 30 students and the room wasn't big enough to fit all those kids and all that furniture. There was a flat surface for the typewriter and a small horizontal surface on which we'd put the text we were supposed to type in a stand of sorts. I remember a metal desk about half the size of the wooden one shown here and I want to say there was an attached chair, but I might be mistaken.
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We had 35 in our Commercial class.. and we all had desks like that... the typewriter was under a hinged top.. and we could just open up the top and the typewriter rose up...
 
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hollydolly said:
Is anyone here old enough to remember this ? We never had this in the UK... and altho' I've heard of the discrimination in the USA..I've never actuallt really seen it like this, and I have to tell you this shocked me.. .. No discussion, not blaming anyone at all.. just wondered if anyone here is old enough to remember it.. a simple yes or no will do we don;t want to get into Blame, or politics..

usa-vintage-50s-color-photography-9-5a82fedd07b0b-700.jpg
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Jim Crow laws that bred that kind of thing were pretty much confined to the South. I grew up in Michigan and I never saw anything like that, though there were certainly many blacks in the area.
 
Eupher said:
Jim Crow laws that bred that kind of thing were pretty much confined to the South. I grew up in Michigan and I never saw anything like that, though there were certainly many blacks in the area.
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Very sad.. and these 2 are so beautifully dressed they'd put people to shame today.... but I don't want to turn his into a thread about Racism.. but that's very interesting to me that it didn't happen all over the USA.. I've learned sometihing new today, thanks
 
Long before the Civil War there was an ongoing tussle over slavery as new Territories and then States were brought into the Union.

The original Michigan Militia (which later became the Michigan National Guard and Michigan State Police) was charged by Thomas Jefferson with suppressing slavery within the Michigan Territory, especially the recalcitrant Iowa County (now the State of Iowa).

Iowa had a nasty history. Frenchman Julian Dubuque (for whom Iowa's capital city is now named) was a French colonial who had his men hidden upstream setting off fireworks to prove the power of his God and used it to enslave native Indian tribes to work in his lead mines. Later Southerners streamed North into Iowa bringing slavery and lynching even though Iowa was supposed to be part of the free Territory.

While Iowa today teaches a quite revisionist version of this ("Dubuque, friend to the Red Man") we still know the score here, since we were caught in the middle and charged with correcting it by a Federal government that couldn't be bothered. They make out Black Hawk as a hero as well.

At one point the Michigan Militia regiment was keeping an entire battalion resident in Iowa County to suppress slavery and defend settlers against Black Hawk and the Kickapoo who had been armed and set upon the settlers and supporting pro-slavery Southerners by King George III working through his Ontario forces.

Canada's hands are far from clean in the story of slavery and aggression in North America. Both French colonists and the British government were pro-slavery in those times.

I once worked in an office that shared a wall with the Michigan State Police Colonel's in the old East Lansing State Headquarters. There was a small museum containing documents and artifacts of those times. We knew the story very well.
 
Thanks for that @dilettante ..very interesting, but I really don't want to turn this little thread into anything politcl or racist.. I just posted the picture because it was the fuirst time I'd seen such an obvious segregation
 
I was just saying that there was a struggle over this kind of thing for a very long time. Signs saying things like "Whites Only" were not a thing everywhere. In parts of the North though there was a time where work sites displayed signs saying things like "No Irish Need Apply" as well.
 
Anyone remember the IBM 1620?

In a sense, this was the first "personal computer." Many had a card reader-punch rather than paper tape, and later many had an early hard disk drive, almost the size of a washing machine!

ibm1620b.jpg

The console typewriter was a modified IBM B2, one of IBM's pre-Selectric electric typewriters.

Late 1620s did use a Selectric.
 
dilettante said:
I was just saying that there was a struggle over this kind of thing for a very long time. Signs saying things like "Whites Only" were not a thing everywhere. In parts of the North though there was a time where work sites displayed signs saying things like "No Irish Need Apply" as well.
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yes we had that here.. apparently in the 40's.. there was no segregation Per se.. in that there was no seperate entrances or seperate areas on a bus for example.. but if people were looking for lodgings they'd often find notices saying NO Coloureds ( which was actually aimed at Indians) , No irish, No beggars , No Soldiers.... but it went down in history as No Blacks No irish No dogs... In fact there was no prejudice aagainst Irish in the UK...

Was there anti-Irish racism in postwar Britain?
 
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dilettante said:
Anyone remember the IBM 1620?

In a sense, this was the first "personal computer." Many had a card reader-punch rather than paper tape, and later many had an early hard disk drive, almost the size of a washing machine!

View attachment 372709

The console typewriter was a modified IBM B2, one of IBM's pre-Selectric electric typewriters.

Late 1620s did use a Selectric.
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I don't remember that despite my first office job as a 15 year old being in an IBM office asn aoffice junior.., where the Punch Tape pool was a large room of girls typing out punch taoe all day long , and the Computer was the size of a small room, and only the men were allowed to operate it..
 
hollydolly said:
I don't remember that despite my first office job as a 15 year old being in an IBM office asn aoffice junior.., where the Punch Tape pool was a large room of girls typing out punch taoe all day long , and the Computer was the size of a small room, and only the men were allowed to operate it..
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Well those dated from 1959 and a little later.

You might have been working around an IBM 1410 or something instead, but those are darned old too. More likely some model of System 360.
 
Certainly by the 1980s we had almost as many female computer operators as male.

I used to get trouble calls at all hours of the night, but a guy would almost always make the call to me. Probably worried about my wife. :ROFLMAO:

Well, except Jane. But she was a notorious troublemaker and in any case they had at least met through Tupperware Parties and such.
 
hollydolly said:
Is anyone here old enough to remember this ? We never had this in the UK... and altho' I've heard of the discrimination in the USA..I've never actuallt really seen it like this, and I have to tell you this shocked me.. .. No discussion, not blaming anyone at all.. just wondered if anyone here is old enough to remember it.. a simple yes or no will do we don;t want to get into Blame, or politics..

usa-vintage-50s-color-photography-9-5a82fedd07b0b-700.jpg
Click to expand...
I remember that there also was the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama.
Montgomery bus boycott - Wikipedia

The black GIs in Germany after WWII were surprised that there were no prejudices against them. It was more some astonishment, since most of the Germans hadn't seen many black people before.
 
hollydolly said:
Very sad.. and these 2 are so beautifully dressed they'd put people to shame today.... but I don't want to turn his into a thread about Racism.. but that's very interesting to me that it didn't happen all over the USA.. I've learned sometihing new today, thanks
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Agreed. Not America's finest hour, I'm afraid, but the last of the Jim Crow laws was overturned in 1965.

I won't vouch for this link in terms of bias, but this timeline goes into some detail about Jim Crow laws, how they got started, and the effects of them.

In this article, the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi is mentioned as having been founded an all-black community in 1887. From 2015-2017, I lived in nearby Merigold, which is about 5 miles from Mound Bayou. According to Wiki, blacks comprise 96.8% of Mound Bayou's population today.

Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts & Timeline | HISTORY
 

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