Photo gallery: Engineering's strangest offices

2/29/2012 3:30 PM EST

The photo above and to the left of the large platter shows an assortment of platters, down to 5.25". This platter is the same as the second to the largest in that image. The largest in that image is from a Control Data 6603.

To the right of the large platter are an assortment of platters, drives and heads. The stack of drives, from bottom to top are: CDC Wren IV SCSI 5.25" full-height drive (~300 MB), Fujitsu 3.5" SCSI half-height drive (unknown capacity), Seagate Cheetah 3.5" third-height Ultra SCSI 15k drive (18 GB), IBM 2.5" SCSI (240MB), Seagate ST1 1" (4GB)

• IBM PC XT Technical Reference
• Intel 286 Programmer's Reference Manual
• Control Data Cyber 73 4kx12 core module, (with the orange label hanging on its front)
• In front of that a 7600 core module
• In front of that the core stack (1k x 12 I think) from within the 7600 module;The large black box in the center holds a Cray X-MP module
• With a board from the Illiac II holding up the cover on the left
• With another Illiac board holding up the cover on the right
• To the right of that a module from a Control Data 720 (blue front)
• To the right of that is a module from a Control Data Cyber 73
• Right rear is a memory module from an air-cooled ETA machine
• In front of that is a single 4k-bit core plane as found within the Cyber 73 module
• In front of that is a 3Com Ethernet transceiver
• The front row of modules are an assortment of old Control Data logic modules. The one directly in front of the Cray module is from a Control Data 1604 that has 6 (count 'em, 6) germanium transistors.