Vernacular, 'Here's Your Plotting' UNIVAC 1108 Separator Sheet (Run RAL25), 1973
Pen plotter, ink on paper (IGS / UNIVAC 1108)
11 × 8.5 in
Collection of Bre Pettis
PION.2026.101
Description
Plot-room separator sheet from the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio — the Air Force intelligence unit charged with analyzing foreign aerospace technology. Snoopy delivers a "HERE'S YOUR PLOTTING" sign to a glum Charlie Brown ("GOOD GRIEF!"), drawn by the Integrated Graphics Software System (IGS) on the UNIVAC 1108 mainframe to separate one operator's job from the next as output came off the plotter, stamped with each run's date, run number and bin.
Peanuts characters were the folk art of the mainframe era — line-printer Snoopy calendars and banner pages hung in computer rooms throughout the 1960s and 70s — and here an unknown Air Force programmer digitized them for the pen plotter, cross-hatched fills and all. This is vernacular computer art in the wild: institutional machines built for Cold War intelligence work, making Peanuts fan art between their official jobs.
This sheet: run RAL25, bin 25, plotted 7 March 1973 at 08:22:57.
