NotesThere's a small house ( ā ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"āthat's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things?FeedUnfurl
NotesThe internet is littered with digital ghost townsāpremium domains once associated with thriving businesses, now sitting dormant or parked, waiting for their next life. Some of the biggest companies in the world have made strategic acquisitions, only to shut down the businesses they bought, leaving behind valuable domain names that are either redirected, held indefinitely, or simply left in limbo. Letās take a look at some high-profile cases where major corporations scooped up valuable domains, shut down the original companies, and left the URLs in the digital graveyard.FeedUnfurl
NotesRogue is one of the most influential games of all time. Even if you havenāt played it, youāve definitely played several games that have Rogueās DNA in them. It became so popular when it was released for UNIX-based systems in 1980 that it created its own genre, which we still know as āroguelike gamesā. Even in the decades when these games were niche experiences, the genre was important. The action role-playing game Diablo built directly on the roguelike genre, which means that all the games that followed in Diabloās footsteps also have their roots here.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesHere is a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's, including the famous "Netscape NOW" and "Internet Explorer" buttons as well as various other buttons for websites of past and present. All were rescued from a now defunct http://harrypagerubbish.webs.com/buttons just before it disappeared without warning. These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web. Enjoy these buttons and use them to your liking. Unfurl
NotesIt is hard to imagine experimenting with electronics without the ubiquitous solderless breadboard. We are sure you have a few within armās reach. The little plastic wonders make it easy to throw together a circuit, try it, and then tear it down again. But, surprisingly, breadboards of that type havenāt always been around, and ā for a while ā they were also an expensive item. Maybe thatās what motivated [R. G. Cooper] to build Slip-n-Clip ā his system for quickly building circuits that he published in a 1974 edition of the magazine Elementary Electronics.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesMy original vision for this article was to cover the development of computer art from the 50ās to the 90ās, but it turns out thereās an abundance of things without even getting half way through that era. So in this article weāll look at how Lovelaceās ideas for creativity with a computer first came to life in the 50ās and 60ās, and Iāll cover later decades in future articles. FeedUnfurl
NotesIt occurred to me today that ActivityPub is the new, modern FidoNet(-style) networking. Sure you have W3C publishing official specifications, but what you mostly have is every day āhackersā putting the protocol to work building decentralized communications. Anyway, the specifications are quote vague at best, which in this case, Iām going to consider a feature. In other words, a lot like FidoNet. FeedUnfurl
NotesNew Hampshire has installed what appears to be the first historical highway marker honoring computer programming, according to the Concord Monitor. The new sign honors BASIC, Beginnerās All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a programming language that was invented at Dartmouth College in 1964.FeedUnfurl
NotesBASIC wasnāt designed to change the world. āWe were thinking only of Dartmouth,ā says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) āWe needed a language that could be ātaughtā to virtually all students (and faculty) without their having to take a course.āUnfurl
NotesAmong the clones manufactured by the Communists was the Cobra or CoBra. The name stands for COmputere BRAsov, with Brasov being the town in central Romania where these machines were assembled to be used by enterprises. Of course, ordinary people couldnāt buy themāwhich is what first led several students at the Politehnica University of Bucharest deciding to build them themselves.Unfurl
NotesI launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment.Unfurl
NotesIn April 1997, Netscape ReleaseEngineers wrote, and started running, the worldās first? second? continuous integration server. Now, just over 17 years later, in May 2014, the tinderbox server was finally turned off. Permanently. FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesApple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008. Over the course of the next week we're going to take a look back at the origins and development of App Store, and forward towards its potential future. To do that properly, however, we have to start at the beginning, with the original iPhone in 2007. And with the original iPhone, there was no App Store, and no third party apps. At least not at first...FeedUnfurl
NotesBy the end of August 1945, there had been a total of three plutonium cores created in the entire world. Everyone knows about the first two. The first was put into the Gadget and detonated at Trinity in July 1945. The second was put into the Fat Man and detonated over Nagasaki in August 1945. The third, however, has been largely overlooked. The third core was the one that was destined to be the Third Shot dropped on Japan, had there been a Third Shot. Instead, it has a different story ā but it was still not a peaceful one.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesTucked neatly between Yahoo! headquarters and Lockheed Martin is a row of unmarked warehouses. To the common passerby, it's nothing more than an office park surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns. But to those who are in on the secret, there's a place full of technology treasures waiting to be unearthed. It's called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, and for more than 27 years it's been providing the Bay Area with a surplus of old and new technology. It's not just a Goodwill for antiquated hardware, thoughāit's also a step back through time. Inside this warehouse, it's an era when RAID controllers were the size of a modern-day sound card and Windows 95 reigned supreme.Unfurl
Notes Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia. Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two. Unfurl
NotesOf course thereās a well known group of people that have made something of an art out of saving disappearing internet data ā the Archive Team, headed by computer historian Jason Scott. Unfurl
NotesThis is it, folks. This is the ideal world Iāve heard whispered about, referenced, and planned for a very long time. Itās here. I know you might have expected it to land with an earth-shattering boom but it was a slow and steady flowering on the Internet Archiveās servers. The Archive of Historical Computer Software is here, and it is very, very large.
Blow me away.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThis stuff matters. If we want to be the profession that leads the way in understanding and interpreting the past, we should be part of this conversation, or at the very least learn and see how we can help out. I should note here, quickly, that I know there are historians who care. I follow them on Twitter and theyāre awesome. But theyāre a small minority of the profession, and that needs to change. This doesnāt just affect digital historians, it affects historians. Our very profession.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notesin my heart I long for someone to come along with a true Web runtime that lets developers write to a standards-based multi-vendor platform that no one company owns. Democracy is messy, but the Open Web is worth it. Donāt read one article and think that it canāt be done.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.Unfurl
NotesAs we speak, certain vigilante Wikipedia users are hard at work erasing whatever scraps of little-known BBS door game history that resides in Wikipedia's databases. The first casualty in this war was the entry for Space Empire Elite, which was deleted early this morning.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. Itās an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesTwitterās been around for over 6 years now, and itās most of itās early history has been forgotten. The amazing thing about twitter as a platform and community is that itās evolution has come through itās use. Through use, people together evolve new ways of communicating. The #hashtag, the retweet, the @reply, follow friday, trending topics, real time twitter search, explaining twitter trends, cc-ing users, etcā¦ These were all creations of the user base, people tried out ideas and build them. Twitter the company later adopted the conventions of itās community and formalized the tools.
This letting the community of users create, and then adopting the practices is critical to how Twitterās grown to be such an amazing platform. Itās also why new efforts to deliver a āconsistent experienceā are a terrible idea and if they succeed will kill twitterās future innovation. Unfurl
NotesRitchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999.FeedUnfurl
NotesArchive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it's lost forever. Along the way, we've gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we've gotten the message out: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. FeedUnfurl
Notes The Internet Underground Music Archive was better known by the acronym IUMA. The IUMA was started in 1993 by three students at the University of California at Santa Cruz: Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord. The three men worked together to create an online music archive that would help musicians and bands who weren't signed by a major label. The site allowed these unsigned artists to upload files and send them to fans. The site also enabled the artists the opportunity to talk with their fans. The IUMA was first part of the Usenet newsgroups. Unfurl
NotesWhat does the future hold?
It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I donāt really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.Unfurl
Notes Similar to Mike, I was able to scream (not whistle: scream) a 300 baud carrier tone. This skill proved useful when I was in college and the mainframe system was down. Instead of sitting around waiting for the system to come back, I just went about my regular business around campus. Every so often, I would go to a nearby campus phone (like a free public phone but it can only make calls to other locations on campus), dial the 300 baud dial-up number, and scream the carrier tone. If I got a response, that meant that the mainframe was back online and I should wrap up what I was doing and head back to the lab. Unfurl
Notes FRANKEN: I just believe you misstated the history of marriage. Marriage has not existed as a union between one man and one woman for thousands of years in every culture. In many cultures, men have been able to marry many women and young girls. For centuries, women have been treated as chattel in marriage. Further, if the religious purpose for marriage is procreation, why would we sanction marriage between an 89 year-old widower and an 80 year-old widow? I just think we need to be accurate when we talk about the history of marriage, the history of man and woman, the history of our institutions. Unfurl
NotesThe Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991āexactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.Unfurl
NotesA skeuomorph, pronounced /ĖskjuĖÉmÉrf/ SKEW-É-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuosāvessel or tool, morpheāshape)[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.FeedUnfurl
Notes"Halt and Catch Fire, known by the mnemonic HCF, refers to several computer machine code instructions that cause the CPU to cease meaningful operation. The expression "catch fire" is usually intended as a joke; in most cases the CPU does not actually catch fire."FeedUnfurl
Notes"Lemmings started life as a simple animation back in August 1989 when DMA Design had just moved into their first office (which only consited of 2 small rooms), and were begining a new game called Walker (based on the walker that was used in Blood Money)."Unfurl
Notes"How were these things done? Well, on PLATO, you could press SHIFT-space to move your cursor back one space -- and then if you typed another character, it would appear on top of the existing character. And if you wanted to get real fancy, you could use the MICRO and SUB and SUPER keys on a PLATO keyboard to move up and down one pixel or more -- in effect providing a HUGE array of possible emoticon characters. So if you typed "W" then SHIFT-space then "O" then SHIFT-space then "B", "T", "A", "X", all with SHIFT-spaces in between, all those characters would plot on top of each other, and the result would be the smiley as shown above in the "WOBTAX" example. "Unfurl
NotesThis sounds so much more funny when read with a REALLY sarcastic voice. "Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."Unfurl
Notes"Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years agoāa staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agricultureāthe first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that emberāthe spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed."Unfurl
Notes"The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
Donāt hold your breath. As it is, Democrats donāt even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponentsā obstructionism.
Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it. "Unfurl
Notes"I decided: why not ignore the fact that my first computer and my latest computer are 27 years apart? Why not stack them on top of each other, take some silly photos, and put up a chart comparing how many kilo-whatsits of X the Atari had to how many giga-whosits the Dell had.
So you have it... a brief comparison of the classic and short-lived Atari 1200XL to the modern and also short-lived Dell Inspiron 1525."Unfurl
Notes"Situated at Strong National Museum of Play, the National Center for the History of Electronic Gamesā¢ collects, studies, and interprets electronic games and related material and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other."Unfurl
Notes"It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."Unfurl
Why is there a "small house" in IBM's Code page 437? - GlyphDrawing.Club -blog
Digital Ghost Towns: When Big Companies Acquire, Shut Down, and Sit on Premium Domains
The story of Rogue - Spillhistorie.no
Libi Rose Keeps Old Tech Running at the Media Archaeology Lab - IEEE Spectrum
A.N. Lucas's 88x31 button Collection
Retro Gadgets: The 1974 Breadboard Project | Hackaday
Early Computer Art in the 50ās & 60ās ā Amy Goodchild
ActivityPub is the new FidoNet/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16347343/20190615_200806067_iOS.jpg)
New Hampshire installs first historical marker to honor computer programming - The Verge
Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal | Time
The underground story of Cobra, the 1980sā illicit handmade computer | Ars Technica
Oldest software rivalry: Emacs and Vi, two text editors used by programmers.
Firefox 1.0 Launch Day | Mitchell's Blog
Farewell to Tinderbox, the worldās 1st? 2nd? Continuous Integration server
App Store Year Zero: How unsweetened web apps and unsigned code drove the iPhone to an SDK | iMore
The Third Core's Revenge | Restricted Data
The Weird Stuff Warehouse is where old tech goes to retire | Ars Technica
A Profanity-Laced Video Game Password That Breaks Everything | minimaxir | Max Woolf's Blog
Change Computer History Forever: Well, Here We Are Ā« ASCII by Jason Scott
Yahoo! Has Probably Destroyed the Most History, Ever ā And Historians Need to Wake Up | Ian Milligan
The rise and fall of webOS is an epic tale; webOS != Web OS on Dion Almaer's Blog
VC&G | Wikipedia is Deleting BBS Game History
What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor Ā« ASCII by Jason Scott
How Mozilla Was Born
Dennis Ritchie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archiveteam
Two decades of productivity: Vim's 20th anniversary
Skeuomorph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Halt and Catch Fire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emoticons and Smileys on PLATO in the 1970s
Atari 1200XL vs. Dell Inspiron 1525