Boulder Big Data History: Neodata Services

2022-01-28T07:15:21Z

Through an Internet rabbit hole this evening I was reminded of a big piece of Boulder business history and big (at the time) data processing.

As a kid, I was vaguely aware of a bulk mailing company called "Neodata" because (a) the Centennial Middle School computer club would occasionally feed students pizza while we organized Boulder Parks & Rec catalogs into big mail sacks that would go to every house in Boulder, and I think someone from Neodata was involved and (b) I'd noticed that subscription cards for Sesame Street Magazine had an address of "123 Sesame Street / Boulder, CO 80322", which was odd because I knew Boulder didn't have a Sesame St., so my mom explained that Neodata processed subscriptions for all sorts of magazines in Boulder and they had a whole zip code to themselves, so any street address could be used.

My rabbit hole led me to a lot of Neodata-related photos from the Boulder Carnegie Library for local history. I hadn't realized that Neodata's roots in Boulder go all the way back to 1949, when Esquire Magazine opened an office in Boulder to handle magazine subscriptions for Esquire and Coronet. (Yes, it took a whole building full of workers to handle subscriptions for a couple magazines back then.) Their original office was at 13th St. and Portland Pl., across from Casey Middle School. They later built a warehouse on Walnut east of 30th St., perhaps to make it easy to put mail bags on the train. (Based on this photo, it might be the building now occupied by The Spot rock climbing gym and the Brewers Association.)

In 1963, Esquire and The Nielsen Company created Neodata Services, Inc. to provide computerized magazine subscription services. They would've had some of the first computers in Boulder, and they were in town long before IBM. (The Bureau of Standards, now NIST, might've had an earlier computer.) Judging by the photos they might also have been one of Boulder's top employers for women in the 1950s. Fans of punch card systems, magnetic tape reels, and other old office technology will enjoy the collection too.

I hadn't heard anything about Neodata since some time in the 1990s. It turns out that they were purchased by EDS (the IT company founded by Ross Perot) and reorganized with several other EDS business units into "Centrobe" in 1997. A business profile in early 2000 notes that Centrobe processed 3% of all USPS mail and had offices in Louisville and Longmont; I think their Boulder office had closed. EDS was purchased by HP in 2007 and Centrobe got merged into Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I haven't been able to follow the trail further from the public Internet. Does HP still have a magazine subscription services department? Do they still operate in Boulder County?

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Catching Up

2018-11-24T06:00:02Z

I've had this Chrome browser session open for 101 days, ignoring a MacOS security update for a couple months. Why? I had a dozen or so tabs open to /read pages on Dreamwidth and if I restarted anything then i wouldn't be able to read everything that people had posted since, erm, the beginning of August. Appropriately enough, I learned a word from one of those dusty Dreamwidth tabs: tsundoku, “acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.”

So if you got a comment from me that seemed like it was in a time warp, that was me.
Now time to reboot. I'll miss the old Chrome tab UI, though. The *ahem* new one where favicons never disappear looks kinda funny when you accumulate as many open pages as I do.

Hey, don't tab shame me.

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From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Boulder Big Data History: Neodata Services

Catching Up