Photos: Dboo

The Internet is a strange and powerful tool. It unites everyone and everything in the universe, while isolating individuals in front of a virtual world. But sometimes the potential of discovery keeps us locked in front of our screens.

Flickr, the photo sharing website, is also a community where you sometimes discover the most outstanding photos by accident.

Yesterday, I was looking for an image of “Beacon Hill, Boston” and found some extraordinary photos from the 1950’s and 60’s of a man named Nick DeWolf which are posted by Dboo on Flickr.

I did some Googling of his name and found this biography on WIkipedia:

Nick DeWolf was one of the founders of Teradyne, a Boston, Massachusetts-based manufacturer of automatic test equipment. He founded the company in 1960 with Alex d’Arbeloff, a classmate at MIT.

Nick was born in Philadelphia on July 12, 1928 and died on April 16, 2006. After leaving Teradyne in 1971, he moved to Aspen, Colorado.

DeWolf designed a computer system without hard disks or fans; this system booted up in seconds, a much faster time than even the computers of today.

Aside from his daunting technological and business achievements, there is also tremendous poignancy, artistry and soul in the images from the life of Nick DeWolf. Especially those black and whites from 1957 that depict such lost worlds as young Republicans sailing off the coast of Boston or elegantly suited New Yorkers at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

Whomever took these images had a curiousity and knowledge of life that he applied to both work and leisure.