Filling Stuff In, Part VII: MIT Computer Summer School and Junior G-Men

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  [Part of a series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.]

There's something captivating about found bits of ephemera that ask you to fill something out--it can be a questionnaire, or an application for being a floor salesperson or a radio technician, or a form for a watchman on a destroyer, or a sign-up for joining the Hitler Youth or the Women's section of the K.K.K. They can be amusing, benign, and even potentially deadly. The one I found today is much more mundane and in that way offers more subtle challenges and provocations--it is a simple form for attending a MIT 1953 computer conference on the applications of the digital computer. 

Of course 1953 is pretty early in the history of modern digital computers, sort of like post-incunabula to the opening years of the 1940s--till, there's not much to fill out on the form.

 There's actually more to be filled out (and with more exacting  questions) to join the "Junior G-Men of America" ("a Juvenile Police Organization") club. This  1936 document was meant for kids, or advanced kids, and asked some pretty creepy and too-detail questions of its potential members, including whether or not the applicant would expect to be paid if injured in the line of duty.  (The Junior G-Men organization became very popular, with all manner of toys and badges and guns and so on, with radio series and movie spin-offs, though it seems not have made it much into the 1950s.)

There's something captivating about found bits of ephemera that ask you to fill something out--it can be a questionnaire, or an application for being a floor salesperson or a radio technician, or a form for a watchman on a destroyer, or a sign-up for joining the Hitler Youth or the Women's section of the K.K.K. They can be amusing, benign, and even potentially deadly. The one I found today is much more mundane and in that way offers more subtle challenges and provocations--it is a simple form for attending a MIT 1953 computer conference on the applications of the digital computer. 

Of course 1953 is pretty early in the history of modern digital computers, sort of like post-incunabula to the opening years of the 1940s--till, there's not much to fill out on the form.

 There's actually more to be filled out (and with more exacting  questions) to join the "Junior G-Men of America" ("a Juvenile Police Organization") club. This  1936 document was meant for kids, or advanced kids, and asked some pretty creepy and too-detail questions of its potential members, including whether or not the applicant would expect to be paid if injured in the line of duty.  (The Junior G-Men organization became very popular, with all manner of toys and badges and guns and so on, with radio series and movie spin-offs, though it seems not have made it much into the 1950s.)

There's something captivating about found bits of ephemera that ask you to fill something out--it can be a questionnaire, or an application for being a floor salesperson or a radio technician, or a form for a watchman on a destroyer, or a sign-up for joining the Hitler Youth or the Women's section of the K.K.K. They can be amusing, benign, and even potentially deadly. The one I found today is much more mundane and in that way offers more subtle challenges and provocations--it is a simple form for attending a MIT 1953 computer conference on the applications of the digital computer. 

Of course 1953 is pretty early in the history of modern digital computers, sort of like post-incunabula to the opening years of the 1940s--till, there's not much to fill out on the form.

 There's actually more to be filled out (and with more exacting  questions) to join the "Junior G-Men of America" ("a Juvenile Police Organization") club. This  1936 document was meant for kids, or advanced kids, and asked some pretty creepy and too-detail questions of its potential members, including whether or not the applicant would expect to be paid if injured in the line of duty.  (The Junior G-Men organization became very popular, with all manner of toys and badges and guns and so on, with radio series and movie spin-offs, though it seems not have made it much into the 1950s.)

 There's actually more to be filled out (and with more exacting  questions) to join the "Junior G-Men of America" ("a Juvenile Police Organization") club. This  1936 document was meant for kids, or advanced kids, and asked some pretty creepy and too-detail questions of its potential members, including whether or not the applicant would expect to be paid if injured in the line of duty.  (The Junior G-Men organization became very popular, with all manner of toys and badges and guns and so on, with radio series and movie spin-offs, though it seems not have made it much into the 1950s.)

 

  

Note:

1. Digital Computers and their Applications, Special Summer Program. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Business Operations, Scientific Computations, Business Control. August 24-September 4, 1953. 10”x8” , 6pp, printed on one sheet, tri-folded. With: detached single sheet “Application for Admission to the Special Summer Program”.