This was emailed to me by my co-workers yesterday. I thought it was quite funny but at the sametime I'm amazed how fast technology has progressed in the past 52 years. Someone told me the picture was scanned from a 2004 issue of Time magazine. The picture was taken in 1954 trying to show what computers would look like in 2004.
The oddest piece in the picture is a steering wheel, wtf is that for?
It's from either a Fark or Something Awful photoshop contest, I forget which. Everything except the console with the teletext machine is from a submarine.
rolins wrote:The oddest piece in the picture is a steering wheel, wtf is that for?
nZero is close. You're looking at the panels that submarine reactor operators use. The "steering wheel" is really a throttle used to apply steam to a submarine's shaft. There is an ahead throttle (the big wheel) and the astern throttle (the small wheel). It makes a sub go either forward or backward. Looking at that picture brings back memories. It is very similar to the panels I trained on about a year ago for my job in the nuclear field in the Navy. Many of the dials, controls, and indications I worked with are there in the picture, which is an older version of the system I trained on. Don't know if that picture is classified or not, though. I know what a lot of what's on those panels do, but I was told it was classified.