In light of recent events, I’ve been work­ing on & off try­ing to write some­thing about sex­ism in the com­puter indus­try. But it’s hard to do the topic jus­tice in a sin­gle post. Instead, I’d like to look the industry’s omnipresent love affair with the female form. In other words, let’s start by talk­ing about an immensly pop­u­lar, trans­for­ma­tive, and iconic com­puter from the 1960s, and the old­est exam­ple of com­puter pornog­ra­phy I know.

IBM’s 1401 was one of the first com­put­ers to be built entirely using tran­sis­tors instead of vac­uum tubes. The new solid state tech­nol­ogy made the 1401 smaller and more afford­able than its pre­de­ces­sors. It was also much eas­ier to pro­gram. Those attrib­utes made it incred­i­bly attrac­tive to busi­nesses in the early 1960s.

Read IBM’s trib­ute to the iconic 1401 family

The machine’s pop­u­lar­ity was a bless­ing and a curse. Devel­op­ers loved work­ing with the 1401 and its periph­er­als, espe­cially the 1403 printer. Cor­po­rate lead­ers and bureau­crats wanted to see what the futur­is­tic new machine was could do, owing to both pro­fes­sional due dili­gence and human curi­ousity. This com­bi­na­tion of pro­gram­mers eager to show off and stake­hold­ers hun­gry for a demon­stra­tion they could under­stand led to the birth of a nacent demoscene.

IBM 1401 Family

It wasn’t long before pro­gram­mers noticed a “cel­lolike hum” when an AM radio was brought close to the 1401’s mem­ory, and the 1403’s new “chain printer” tech­nol­ogy was capa­ble of belt­ing out mechan­i­cal red­i­tions of clas­si­cal tunes and stan­dards. These early dig­i­tal artis­tic endeav­ours still cap­tive audi­ences today:

That […] is why IBM staff, who had come to regard the 1401 as a musi­cal friend over the years, held a “funeral” for the com­puter when it was decommissioned.

“I think the engi­neers formed an attach­ment to this machine above oth­ers they worked with pre­cisely because they gave it these ‘human’ qual­i­ties — the abil­ity to make music,” he said. “They felt they couldn’t just throw it away […]”

Music wasn’t the only artis­tic out­let for 1401 pro­gram­mers. The 1403 printer offered a new dimen­sion of con­trol over the computer’s out­put. And in the hands of less aca­d­e­mic users than pre­vi­ous machines, it was put to rather pruri­ent use:

[…] some clever oper­a­tors fig­ured out that it was pos­si­ble to “do rudi­men­tary ‘graph­ics’ using only the char­ac­ters avail­able on the print chain and dif­fer­ent degrees of over­strik­ing to get darker and lighter areas.” This graph­ics tech­nique was mainly utilised to print pic­tures of Play­boy mod­els, Mona Lisa and the moon (this being the Space Age).

- Humans Think­ing Like Machines (empha­sis mine)

EDITH was another pop­u­lar graph­i­cal pro­gram for the 1401. Some sources claim, but I can’t con­firm, that EDITH was avail­able from IBM itself. Regard­less, this pro­gram was immensly pop­u­lar and traded openly among pro­gram­mers, who still remem­ber it fondly.

IBM 1401 sense switches

The EDITH pro­gram relied on the “sense switches” on the 1401’s operator’s panel:

It would print a pic­ture of a woman in evening dress accom­pa­nied with the text: THIS IS EDITH, ANOTHER OPTIONAL FEATURE OF YOUR IBM 1401. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HER RE-​RUN THE DECK WITH SS A. The pro­gram then pro­ceeded through selec­tions made by flip­ping the printer “sense switches” A, B, C, D and E, con­trol­ling EDITH’s dif­fer­ent states of cloth­ing. The B switch would pro­duce EDITH in skimpier cloth­ing with a top and short-​skirt, fol­lowed in C by a tiny bikini. If the oper­a­tor should be so dar­ing as to pro­ceed to D after the warn­ing, “WARNING: FURTHER SWITCHING OF SS D IS NOT RECOMMENDED!” he would be treated with the anti-​climax of an EDITH hold­ing up a “mod­esty” sign say­ing “SORRY, YOU CAN’T DO EVERYTHING WITH A 1401. (NO MATTER WHAT OUR SALES FORCE MIGHT SAY.)” Although rumours tell of how run­ning the pro­gram with the E switch would actu­ally show a totally nude EDITH with a cap­tion like “WELL, MAYBE YOU CAN DO ANYTHING WITH A 1401.”

- Humans Think­ing Like Machines

For more infor­ma­tion on the IBM 1401, please see the trib­ute site and blog from the Com­puter His­tory Muse­ums 1401 restora­tion project at ibm-1401.info.

The Com­puter His­tory Museum also held a trib­ute to the 1401 in honor of its 50^th anniversary.

And no, I don’t have any pic­tures of EDITH to share. Sorry!