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An actual triumph of modernist architecture (i think that's what this was called) mid 70's it was build to represent the modern future, this is one of the only buildings I've seen that almost fits

I love the symmetry, if your wondering what happened on the right, the company who once owned this building (and it's massive, I'm this far away at 18mm) out grew it, and needed to expand. in fact they even had to buy a second site 10 miles up the road to fit everyone they needed in. Sad really, this is my dad's former employer, a casualty of marketing (more below).

_{1/1600 . ISO 100 . F3.5 . 18mm . spent a bit of time in photoshop}
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this is the geeky rant bit.
<geek> It's just a few miles up the road from me in an industrial estate built just before the dawn of the PC, it was once occupied by digital equipment corporation. DEC built the systems that revolutionised how computers were used, in fact there are products sold today by IBM that were a direct result of competition to the systems DEC developed in the 70's (I'm referring to the PDP series of mini computers, a mainframe in a system the size of a couple of washing machines, as opposed to a small house, most notably the PDP 11) They brought computing to the masses in a business sense as much as windows 95 brought it to the common consumer, they enabled company's smaller than a bank to have computing power at their finger tips. Through into the late 80's (the Development of VAX, the PDP-11's successor) they developed the DEC Alpha in 1992. This is a piece of hardware so fundamentally superior, the bus technology it runs on (and yes, you still get them today, even under the new hp/Compaq front) is used in the most state of the art domestic processor we have now, the Athlon 64 (and soon to be the X2, dual core cpu). This was the heart of the legal dispute with Intel, and the reason the itanium is far from all it's cracked up to be. (i could go on about this for days, Intel basically stole architecture designs from the alpha to build it's own 64bit CPUs, the courts told them to take it out of the design and the itanium was set back, probably the main reason the A64 is king today, a bus born from a 32-bit (PRISM) CPU and thus allowing it to naively execute 32 bit instructions within the 64bit cpu. Alpha also threw design ideas for the time (the up coming mmx technology and CISC computing) to the wind and built a pure RISC cpu. RISC (reduced instruction set computing) is very simple in principle, why support multiplication, when all multiplication is is adding numbers together, and what if we could add those numbers, really fucking fast. (if you've read this far, well done) so, you've got something that basically crushes the competition in processing power, it's cleverly designed (the proof is in the A64 pudding) but there is one flaw, you don't market it, it cost a load to develop, and it was hard to get high yield production (a problem that still plagues silicon manufacturers today, see ATI's recent product delays). They had the technology, and no one bought it. save a few cad pros and a handful of people building massive clusters (rumours of extensive military use are easily believed, what do they care at a price tag!) and hence the Death of DEC corp, into corporate obscurity. I hope they are never forgotten, they deserve to ride high with IBM, they built some special machines (ebay, here i come!) Got a special place for this company, it's the reason i do what i do today, why we got a PC at home and how i got really interested (1991 was when i was taking my first steps into computing) to discover that the 386DX 40 in my house was so puny (tho, on a side note, more powerful than mission control for apollo) and that all this power could be had, a really vast world of computing suddenly opens up before you, and I'm now happy to be a part of an industry which still excites me today. something fast moving and ever changing, how many people can say they honestly don't know what their job will involve in 5 years (heck, anything could happen tomorrow!), but it's going to be fun to find out. </geek>