It’s the Univac II. Says the 1969 headline: “Modern computers are replacing the Univac II – but they don’t have character." In what sense, exactly? Have the new compters been caught stealing from the office coffee fund?

Here’s the rather confusing story, appended to the back of the photo:

“When someone says there are ‘several lethal doses’ of electricity flowing through the wires, Univac II commands even more respect.”

How many doses do you need? Even the most sociopathic programmer doesn't want to kill everyone in the IT department. Just that fargin' icehole manager who wants him to reprogram the machine so it talks like the one in "The Forbin Project." The article continues:

“It is difficult to believe that anything meaningful could come out of such a collection of hardware.”

Spoken like an old journalist, who will be down at the Little Red Wagon bar in a few hours, raising a toast to the human spirit, which cannot be folded, spindled, or mutilated. After which he will throw up on his shoes.

“But then an engineer punches a few buttons and Univac II goes into action – it plays Christmas carols, wins at its own version of a match game, and is held to a stalemate at tick-tack-toe.” And finds Sarah Conner, to use the Fark cliché.

“Now this benevolent monster attains class.”

And there the excerpt ends. Apparently the machine was programmed to produce a dot-matrix drawing of a top hat and sing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Note the size of the monitor. Looks like a travel cage for Kenny Baker.