IT through the eyes of Soviet cartoonists from "Krokodil"

“Crocodile”. The magazine itself was aimed at a wide audience – many cool illustrations from it still flicker. I was interested in how Soviet humorists saw computers and what they laughed at then. Under the cut – a small selection of such caricatures.

There are jokes of the moment, and there are eternal ones: about bicycle construction and where it can lead is one of them.

The cartoonists mostly ridiculed some details of Soviet life, and used computers and robots as images. This is close to me – as a person who spent his entire childhood drawing on yellowed reels of wrapping paper from a ball-bearing factory.

This picture will be especially close to those involved in teaching LLM models:

The eternal problem with any automation is when there is actually manual work under the hood:

Separately, there were illustrations about the fact that the computer exists, but is not used:

Another theme worth noting is the relationship between fathers and children. In “Crocodile” there are many illustrations on this subject, and some of them are reinforced by the theme of robots:

And here we have the eternal theme of decision making:

That's all I have. “Krokodil” was a magazine aimed at a wide audience, so the cartoons, even those related to computers and robots, in one way or another ridiculed common and understandable phenomena. This makes it even more interesting: add modern signatures LLM, ChatGPT, teamlead somewhere – and it's as if these pictures were drawn for our time. That's what classics mean!