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.
gricardo99 1 days ago [-]
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]
I did EXACTLY the same thing when I saw that name and that card. What a cool name. I wanted to see if it was still around!
hellisothers 2 days ago [-]
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”.
tanseydavid 2 days ago [-]
"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark."
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
Very nice, now let's see Paul Allen's high explosive spherical compression lens.
I love that scene and its commentary. Right up there with the Ikea catalog scene in Fight Club
retired 1 days ago [-]
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.
ishtanbul 1 days ago [-]
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.
xp84 1 days ago [-]
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.
It’s wild because of how shockingly easy basic food photography is.
Make a plate, set it in front of a window, snap a picture.
I think AI is amazing, but equally amazing is people’s laziness and lack of taste when it comes to applying it.
smoe 19 hours ago [-]
I think there are already laws in a lot of places requiring food images whether photographs, illustrations, AI generated images, etc. not to materially mislead consumers about what they’re buying.
So people using AI for this might soon run into issues with hallucinated extra ingredients or exaggerated portion sizes.
csh0 1 days ago [-]
Food companies have used glue or other substances in things like cereal ads (in place of milk) for decades. Unfortunate.
nom 20 hours ago [-]
yeah they do it to make it look more appetizing in the photos
Quite the opposite of what is happening here.. they are going the cheap route and use AI instead of a human who knows how to make an appetizing menu.
kotaKat 21 hours ago [-]
It's been all over rural America now. Every single roadside sign I've seen now has been either fully AI-generated, or the logos are all following the same damn 'logo in a shield' that one of the services loves making everything it generates be.
sneak 19 hours ago [-]
It’s only obvious slop to you. Most people have never used gen AI and have no experience or skills detecting it.
wxw 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
paradox460 2 days ago [-]
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
Bluestein 2 days ago [-]
> occasionally hot
Am I understanding correctly?
paradox460 1 days ago [-]
Radioactive in this case, but knowing the black hole, other definitions likely apply as well
ErroneousBosh 2 days ago [-]
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.
Bluestein 2 days ago [-]
Quite ... the place.-
PS. I would like the record to show, excuse me for stating the obvious, that this was an actual place (!):
Somewhere around 2004 I had an experience at the black hole that still amuses me.
I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.
I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…
kjs3 1 days ago [-]
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.
world2vec 2 days ago [-]
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.
mopsi 2 days ago [-]
Indeed! Interesting that leaving a bottom margin for Rolodex didn't become a design standard.
ahmedfromtunis 1 days ago [-]
"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.
cjkaminski 2 days ago [-]
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.
defen 2 days ago [-]
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.
jjkaczor 2 days ago [-]
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)
sk5t 1 days ago [-]
The Dunwich Building could use some fun business cards to lighten the mood.
wildzzz 1 days ago [-]
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.
dcrazy 2 days ago [-]
“Universal Voltronics” sounds the most made-up to me. But “Nuclear Defense Research Corporation of New Mexico, Inc.” takes the cake.
SoftTalker 2 days ago [-]
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.
xp84 1 days ago [-]
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.
tancop 23 hours ago [-]
SGI had a descriptive name. Bethesda Softworks is named after the city, SpaceX is short for "Space Exploration Technologies", IGN is literally a description of their site (they don't use the full name today but it's International Gaming Network). Epic Games and Tesla are less literal but still relate to their business.
The empty corporate sounding names are usually for conglomerates that need a neutral name so they don't put one of their brands over others, and B2B suppliers who need something unique for trademark purposes but don't really do the kind of marketing where they would need emotional impact.
creamyhorror 16 hours ago [-]
If anything, I think General ___ is now a means of sounding established and technically advanced (implying "we're already covering everything in this area"). "General Assembly" got some visibility in the 2010s, and I've seen at least one recent YC startup use this naming pattern.
skrunch 20 hours ago [-]
Glad I'm not the only one, I was half expecting cards from "Aperture Science" or "Black Mesa" to show up in there.
hans0l074 2 days ago [-]
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!
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/
fumeux_fume 2 days ago [-]
"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.
wildzzz 1 days ago [-]
They do sound sinister. They mostly made stuff like core memory devices
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.
gadders 21 hours ago [-]
I miss not having business cards any more.
xtiansimon 17 hours ago [-]
Graphic design time capsule.
BoingBoomTschak 1 days ago [-]
Love the Plasmadyne logo! And that Xenon card gives me strong TriOptimum vibes.
10 hours ago [-]
rootsudo 23 hours ago [-]
Now I know why there's a margin on older business cards. TIL I alwways thought it was a slip in thing, not they'd actually mutate the cards.
pizzaballs 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 05:33:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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...
https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/american-psycho/quote_16...
I'd rather have something your daughter doodled on a piece of paper + the title of your company over some obvious AI slop.
Make a plate, set it in front of a window, snap a picture.
I think AI is amazing, but equally amazing is people’s laziness and lack of taste when it comes to applying it.
So people using AI for this might soon run into issues with hallucinated extra ingredients or exaggerated portion sizes.
Quite the opposite of what is happening here.. they are going the cheap route and use AI instead of a human who knows how to make an appetizing menu.
Too good.
Am I understanding correctly?
No, wait, it doesn't, you'll find any kind of hot you like.
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...
I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.
I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…
Good times.
But then I remember that I know someone who worked at one of those companies.
If there were a Harbor Freight of nuclear techonlogy, that sounds like a name I'd expect to see.
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.
The empty corporate sounding names are usually for conglomerates that need a neutral name so they don't put one of their brands over others, and B2B suppliers who need something unique for trademark purposes but don't really do the kind of marketing where they would need emotional impact.
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-colu...
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/
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Anyway, pretty cool to see them in high definition and realize they aren't any different than today's business cards.