We need to have everything packed up by the end of the day Thursday. Movers are scheduled to come by on Friday morning to transport everything the one block to our new offices at 230 East Ohio in Chicago. For those who don’t know, our building is being torn down to make room for a Ronald McDonald House — a comfortable place where families whose children are in the hospital can stay. So it’s honestly for a good cause, at least.
The building we’re leaving was built in the early 1900’s and has housed several post facilities over the years. As a result, the downstairs is filled with old equipment — and environment which is dark, damp, and musky. But there’s some amazing old gear down there, including an RCA 2″ machine…something I haven’t seen since leaving Indiana University’s TV station WTIU after college.
Before they tear the building down, I spent some time in the dark recesses with my 7D my sigma 30mm f1.4 lens. Enjoy the look at some cool old technology — the buttons are amazing. Wonder if I can take that quad machine home? Oh…and that’s Mark, but he’s not packing our gear…just looking through old manuals and confidential documents from companies that shuttered years ago. Check out the photos at my flickr feed.
November 19th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Man that looks like boxes of fun! In some of the picks there are a few boxes of reels … would be fun to go through them and find a reel belonging to someone big now and see what they had sent out way back when
November 19th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
That looks great. I have such a fondness for the old machinery. Wish I could get my hands on those scraps, make for great art projects!
November 20th, 2009 at 1:26 am
The first thing that struck me about the pics were “They looked great and were presented very nicely”
encore.
b
November 20th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Who does that stuff belongs to now? You seriously need to take that machine if you can.
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:56 am
Yeah!..
I like it. I’ve remembered my first steps into computer graphics.
It was old russian replicas of IBM’s and VAX’s middleframe computers. I was 5 years old )
John, thank you for that staff
November 22nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
OMG! I used to work at WTIU as well! I remember those old quad machines in the tape room – they sounded like vacuum cleaners when they started up (and if I recall, you had to give them a 4 second pre-roll to come up to speed).