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Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by mox@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] stoly@lemmy.world 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Apparently the team making the first scanner needed a good test photo and that was the best they had on hand at that moment in terms of color variation and intensity.

[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 47 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California ... along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. ... Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don't even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that's probably the strongest reason to retire it: it's unprofessional.

[–] dankm@lemmy.ca 40 points 7 months ago

And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession?

Probably a random grad student. They were just coming out of the "sexual revolution" of the 60s at that point. It'd be a lot weirder ten years earlier or ten years later.

That a similar thing did happen ten years earlier is the weird part, I think.

[–] million@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Keep in mind that Playboy had a reputation as more than just porn. A lot of really respected authors had work published in Playboy.

I not sure of its culture status when the event in question happened, but it would have been different then say, Penthouse.