Tessera

Orange Avocado

@orange-avocado.bsky.social

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Erika Hall @erikahall.bsky.social · 6mo ago

As a client services person, one of my favorite artifacts from the Stanley Kubrick exhibit was a letter about how much he hated the concepts IBM was coming up with for HAL. A+ signoff

A typewritten letter with some blue ink edits and some words X'ed out.

Stanley Kubrick
July 29, 1965
Dear Roger,
The IBM Athena drawings are useless and totally irrellevant (sic) to our needs and what I must presume were Fred's discussions with IBM and most certainly irrellevant with my discussions with Fred.

I am extremely bored and depressed with all of this.

Please contact Fred, discuss this with him and assess the situation and write me a short, definite recommendation as to what your joint opinion is for further efforts with IBM.

I want detailed design concepts. But not crucial.

I want mostly equipement. I'll take the remote typewriter or anything else they'd give.

I must have soemthing definite soon and I do not want Fred to waste more time on further discussions with them which turn out to be a total and abysmal waste of time.

Fred should continue to work out his own concepts of the instrumentation and the computer inputs and outputs and control keying!!!

There is absolutely no time to waste. Even having to write this letter adds chips to what seems to me to be a completely lost hand.

I know this is not your fault or Fred's and don't take this as criticism of yourselves. It is merely a total fuckup which not only fails to give me what was hoped for but costs time.

ANNOYED AND DEPRESSED
BUT LOVINGLY
S.

a low res scan of a diagram of a computer astronauts are crawling around inside. the annotations are unreadable. sorry I don't have time to go digging for a better scan.