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A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards

(clui.org)

151 points

by 1970-01-012 days ago |
37 comments
upvoteby gricardo991 hours ago|
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Incredible. I was curious to see what I could find for one of the business card:

Dr. Ronald Moskowitz, FerroFluidics (cool name).

Took me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Turns out the guy was a bit of a fraudster and was sentenced to 8 years in prison for securities fraud[1]

1 - https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

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upvoteby jjwiseman6 hours ago|
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The Winter 2016 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's newsletter, "The Lay of the Land", has more information on the cards: https://clui.org/newsletter/winter-2016/los-alamos-rolodex

There's also a book: https://clui-shop.square.site/product/los-alamos-rolodex/292...

I saw the exhibit in person back when it was on display. If you're ever in LA you should try to stop in to the CLUI's Culver City location, they always have something interesting.

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upvoteby hellisothers14 hours ago|
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Love the logos, colors, and at the same time simplicity. These are so much more memorable than what you see today which I find to be bland or over the top “grafix”.
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upvoteby tanseydavid12 hours ago|
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"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark."
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upvoteby walrus012 hours ago|
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Very nice, now let's see Paul Allen's high explosive spherical compression lens.
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upvoteby dylan60411 hours ago|
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I love that scene and its commentary. Right up there with the Ikea catalog scene in Fight Club
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upvoteby shmeeed11 hours ago|
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Somebody had to say it.
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upvoteby retired11 hours ago|
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I'm starting to see ChatGPT generated business promotions along the side of the road more and more often and it saddens me.

I'd rather have something your daughter doodled on a piece of paper + the title of your company over some obvious AI slop.

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upvoteby ishtanbul8 hours ago|
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A lot of cheaper restaurants and bodegas in nyc use AI images to show what food they serve and a lot of them have this slightly grotesque quality thats very unappetizing. Almost like a nightmare/ acid trip filter.
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upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
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Wow. Talk about the worst uses of AI -- the actual representative pictures of product you're selling. If false advertising law ever got an update, a ban on an AI depiction of one's product itself in an ad or other pre-sale imagery should be added.
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upvoteby csh02 hours ago|
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Food companies have used glue or other substances in things like cereal ads (in place of milk) for decades. Unfortunate.
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upvoteby world2vec13 hours ago|
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Seems some of them would get the key contact details "clipped" by the rolodex itself. Maybe a good design would put the phone number and address at the top.
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upvoteby mopsi12 hours ago|
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Indeed! Interesting that leaving a bottom margin for Rolodex didn't become a design standard.
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upvoteby ahmedfromtunis9 hours ago|
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"Did you know that there _is_ actually a reason behind the blank space at the bottom of every business card? To get the full picture, we need to go back way before the smartphone age, when a bizarre device, known as the rolodex, ruled office desks" — some blogger in a parallel universe, probably.
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upvoteby wxw14 hours ago|
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> The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole.

Too good.

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upvoteby paradox46013 hours ago|
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Many of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place
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upvoteby Bluestein13 hours ago|
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> occasionally hot

Am I understanding correctly?

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upvoteby paradox4605 hours ago|
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Radioactive in this case, but knowing the black hole, other definitions likely apply as well
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upvoteby ErroneousBosh12 hours ago|
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It depends on the exact definition of the word "hot" you mean.

No, wait, it doesn't, you'll find any kind of hot you like.

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upvoteby Bluestein12 hours ago|
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Quite ... the place.-

PS. I would like the record to show, excuse me for stating the obvious, that this was an actual place (!):

https://losalamosreporter.com/2025/06/29/black-hole-museum-a...

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upvoteby kjs310 hours ago|
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That place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies.

Good times.

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upvoteby ksd4821 hours ago|
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So these business cards are from 1940s ? I ask this because on one of the cards the phone number was 10 digits. I would have thought the phone numbers would be shorter.

Anyway, pretty cool to see them in high definition and realize they aren't any different than today's business cards.

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upvoteby cjkaminski14 hours ago|
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A bunch of those names sound fake, like they should be from Fallout instead of Los Alamos.

But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies.

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upvoteby defen12 hours ago|
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If the "Zero Blast-N-Peen" company operating out of "Hooker Circle" with the robot logo showed up in a Fallout game, it would be criticized as too over the top - breaks the immersion too much since it's so absurd.
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upvoteby jjkaczor12 hours ago|
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I wonder how many of these were essentially 1-person consulting LLC's - which meant a probably higher degree of "whimsy", "sarcasm", or "whit" when naming... (and/or a little counter-culture rebelliousness thrown in where possible)
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upvoteby sk5t7 hours ago|
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The Dunwich Building could use some fun business cards to lighten the mood.
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upvoteby wildzzz10 hours ago|
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Most of these companies were probably a couple of guys in a garage or rented office suite. Labs buy high tech, low volume items and don't mind if it looks like a science fair experiment either. For every IBM supercomputer with some printed graphics on it, there's thousands of weird dohickies that look homemade.
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upvoteby dcrazy13 hours ago|
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“Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake.
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upvoteby SoftTalker13 hours ago|
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I always liked "General Atomics" (though it wasn't among the cards listed). Still opertating today under that name.

If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see.

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upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
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I really appreciate the lack of flashiness that naming your company "General ____" puts out there. 20th century brought us General Electric, General Dynamics, General Motors, General Mills, General Dynamics, General Foods. The founders of those companies said "What do we call our company? Well, we make electrical things. In general. Anything electric is on the table. So let's just call it... 'General Electric.'" Today companies get names like Altria or Kenvue. Empty vessels of pure vibes to be filled with Branding Juice.

I don't think we'll ever see such sincerity in naming again. We did get General Magic in 1990, which seems kind of like a wink and a nod at that old naming trend.

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upvoteby hans0l07412 hours ago|
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Came here to see if anyone mentioned Fallout and I'm pleased to see someone else made the reference. I presume it is notes and texts like this that inspired the narrative designers of the Fallout series. So cool!
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upvoteby creeble9 hours ago|
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Explosive Technology, wow:

https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-colu...

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upvoteby buildsjets9 hours ago|
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They're still in business today and manufacture the explosive squibs that are used inside some brands of permanently installed aircraft fire existing systems. But it's really a pretty small, contained explosion. I think they also do airbag inflators.

I had a chance to be onsite at a different facility when they set of the SEMTEX in their 25 acre blasting site. It was impressive. A true earth-shattering kaboom. They were welding a plate of titanium to a plate of aluminum for us. http://highenergymetals.com/

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upvoteby fumeux_fume12 hours ago|
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"Blast-N-Peen" got a good chuckle out of me. On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Riddle at Electronic Memories was unsettlingly spare, a little bit sinister in its lack of graphic expression of any kind.
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upvoteby wildzzz9 hours ago|
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They do sound sinister. They mostly made stuff like core memory devices

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

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upvoteby BoingBoomTschak7 hours ago|
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Love the Plasmadyne logo! And that Xenon card gives me strong TriOptimum vibes.
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