Your beloved editor (that’s me, in case you didn’t realize) was apparently taken in by an Internet hoax. The image of the “computer of the future” envisioned by Rand scientists in 1954 is in fact a cleverly edited photograph from a Navy website which shoes a full scale mockup of a nuclear submarine’s maneuvering room. I smelled a rat when I blogged it: I should have known better. There were certainly lots of clues to suggest that it was a photoshop job. I remember questioning the odd scale differences between the foreground teletype and the human.
Increment my shame counter.
It was really cool though. To the original creators: kudos!