This is a promised follow-up for the Soviet tech logos post from a couple of weeks back. Here I’ve redrawn a selection of Western firms from roughly the same period (1960s-1980s). The primary focus here is on electronics, defense and engineering firms which were in some way connected with military contracting during that period […]

The cover of the June 1981 issue of Future life. There’s something about a flimsy NBC suit, the triangular handguard version of M16 and Ray Bans that takes you back to the world of imagined postapocalyptic adventure.

Photograph shot by Jack Lartz (USIA) in Santo Domingo, during the Dominican Intervention of 1965. After waves of bloodshed had buffeted in the country in a seemingly irreconcilable conflict over the constitution, this welcome inversion of the more commonly heard “Yankee go home” message was not an uncommon sentiment in the Dominican capital.

One of my favorite sites is the Museum of Soviet Calculators, which is a vast repository of information about the large quantity of calculating machines the Soviet Union turned out during the Cold War. One of the most intriguing pages there is a gallery of logos for Soviet state electronics firms, that happened to have […]

Intelligence photographs from 1984 of the control unit for the Soviet AT-3 anti-tank missile.

A sequence of maps from a 1987 Department of Defense study, reveal the visual contours of a now impossible future: the conquest of the world by the Soviet Union.

Modern digital camouflage has a Cold War origin in experiments conducted in the late 1970s by the United States Army.