William MacAskill explains in 02014 where #EA came from as a term: in October 02011 he asked the 80,000 Hours team how to rebrand (rather than “do-gooder”) and in December they voted for “Center for Effective Altruism”. The voters were, as far as he could remember three years later, himself (Will MacAskill (then ‘Crouch’)), Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead, Michelle Hutchinson, Holly Morgan, Mark Lee, Tom Ash, Matt Wage, Ben Todd, Tom Rowlands, Niel Bowerman, Robbie Shade, Matt Gibb, Richard Batty, Sally Murray, Rob Gledhill, and Andreas Mogensen. #history
on 02026-09-22Sam #Altman said in February 02023: “eliezer has IMO done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else.
certainly he got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc.
it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix” #AI #history #Eliezer #OpenAI
on 02026-09-21Excellent #history of the #LessWrong crowd.
on 02026-09-18#PDF about the #history of #8051 #microcontrollers
on 02026-09-18#martial-arts were militarized in #Japan before and during #WWII, and then sort of prohibited during the US occupation. #history
on 02026-09-18The original mod.sources source code to Larry Wall’s #Usenet newsreader rn. Contains the famous line, “Congratulations. You aren’t running Eunice.” #VMS #history
the #history of the #async #Rust disaster
on 02026-09-11Photos of Sherbie #Gangwere and the #history of the Call/360 project.
on 02026-09-10Bandit says Sherbie #Gangwere, his father, was on a seven-person team that had moved to the “San Jose Bay Area” and wrote the CALL/360 timesharing #BASIC for the #IBM 360, which ran under OS/360, “for Buck Rogers of IBM [...] for a fixed-price, 10 month contract”. #history
on 02026-09-10Bob Widlar’s 01969 paper about superbeta transistors (β > 2000) with low Vce breakdown voltages for IC applications. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-09-04#history #news about #garbage in #California: Los Angeles used backyard incinerators
on 02026-08-31Masatoshi Shima’s oral #history account of how he ended up at #Intel and #Zilog.
on 02026-08-26Hans Rosling’s first TED talk from 02006 about Gapminder and the #history of #economic-development, showing how the wealth distribution has dramatically changed in the 01960–02003 period. #economics
on 02026-08-26#cartoon #video compilation of Felix the Cat, including the public-domain “Felix the Cat Gets the Can”, from 01924; “Felix the Cat in Woos Whoopie” from 01930, “Felix the Cat in Sure-Locked Homes” from 01928, “Felix the Cat in Futuritzy”, and “Feline Follies”. These seem to nearly all be from the silent-film era; they are nearly all in black and white and frequently feature speech bubbles and occasionally intertitles. There is an obtrusive “8thmandvd.com Cartoon Classics!” logo overlaid. He’s supposedly one of the most famous examples of the #rubber-hose #animation style in #history, Bill Nolan having introduced the style when animating him, and these cartoons are exemplary of the style. The “Woos Whoopie” section starting around 2h18m has many sound effects (laughter, whimpers of fear, footsteps, car-engine sounds, cuckoos, horn blasts, etc., rather than just an orchestral score) but no spoken dialogue.
One exception is “Felix the Cat and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”, from 01936, in “Burt Gillett’s Rainbow Parade Cartoon in Technicolor”, at the very beginning, which also has both spoken and sung dialogue, and is notable for being a pirate cartoon from before the “Treasure Island” movie estabished the “pirate accent,” so Captain Kidd and the other pirates speak General American. The drawing style is also noticeably less rubber-hosey, with well-defined elbows. This is followed by “Felix the Cat in Neptune Nonsense”, also from 01936, also in color with spoken dialogue and elbows, as well as an orchestral score. And “Felix the Cat in Bold King Cole”.
Felix does not have his “bag of tricks” in this incarnation.
on 02026-08-25#Jonesy-Makes #video of restoring a Victorian-era ruling engine for #machining rulers on brass or possibly steel. #manufacturing #history #metrology
on 02026-08-25very nice Wikipedia article about #electronics #communications #history
on 02026-08-25#politics #news #video about how the #New-START treaty, the last #nuclear-weapons #disarmament treaty, signed in 02010 by #Obama and #Medvedev, expired on 02026-02-04. #Interview material with Sophie Bolt and Eliana Johns. #History of disarmament treaties with stock photos; between START in 01991 and 02009, warhead stockpiles declined 82%. The history of the “nuclear taboo”. For some reason there’s a lot of blurred stock footage of Kermit the Frog. George W. Bush pulled out of the ABM treaty with the #GWOT as an excuse, and the next day Russia withdrew from the 01991 START II. #China’s #no-first-use policy and attempt to establish it as an international standard.
on 02026-08-25#history of Joel #Spolsky at #Microsoft, as he tells it, anyway. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
on 02026-08-20The GNU pinky command homepage has a #history of the #finger utility, originally by #Les-Earnest, then at #SAIL. “Finger was named for the act of pointing. I recall that sometime after it became popular I received a message from a system administrator who thought that it should be renamed so that users would not have to use a ‘dirty’ word. I gave his request all the consideration that it deserved.” The pinky difference is that it doesn’t support the finger protocol.
book review of The Escape Artist, a biography by Jonathan Freedland of Walter Rosenberg, aka Rudolf Vrba, one of the very few people who ever escaped from the #Holocaust in #Auschwitz. #history #genocide
on 02026-08-19FingerWorks was the #multitouch startup that was going bankrupt selling a multitouch keyboard in 02005 when #Apple bought them in order to bring out a multitouch screen on the #iPhone. #history
on 02026-08-18Somewhat debatable #Google acquisition #history focused on companies whose product Google canceled. It lists #Angstro, “Gecko Design, Rangespan, Jetpac, Angstro, SocialDeck, Katango, and Meebo were also classic acqui-hires,” but Angstro didn’t really have a product at that point; we had a very impressive demo but I doubt we had a whole dozen of users.
on 02026-08-18#history: “Watchmen have existed since earliest recorded times in various guises throughout the world and were generally succeeded by the emergence of formally organised professional #policing.”
on 02026-08-12in the #history of #law, villages in #England had to build single-cell jails called “lock-ups”: “a place of temporary confinement for the reception of vagrants, paupers, felons and the like.” #policing
on 02026-08-12in #USA #history this was the moment in 01961 when drug companies had to provide evidence of efficacy to sell their drugs
on 02026-08-11declassified #video about LSD-25 and a chemical that blocks its effects. #history
on 02026-08-10Kara Dimitruk and Ben Southwood claim that the #history of capitalism in the #UK and specifically #England is due to the Glorious Revolution in 01688, which allowed Parliament to “untangle excessively strong and complex property rights”, ending the “vetocracy” that paralyzed #development. “The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners.” William of Orange invaded, James II fled to France, and William and Mary were crowned.
on 02026-08-06Chevron deference was overturned in the #law of the #USA by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimundo in 02024. #history
on 02026-08-05Stub article about #Project-Independence. #energy #history #USA
on 02026-08-05#Nixon’s speech announcing #Project-Independence for #energy in the #USA, on November 7, 01973, a couple months after the Yom Kippur War. #history
on 02026-08-05#history of #USA #energy programs from 01971 to 01980, with a focus on #Nixon and his #Project-Independence.
on 02026-08-05#Gwern on the #history of #China’s Cultural Revolution via a review of Frank Dikötter’s book
on 02026-08-05#ebook containing Anders Celsius’s paper from 01742 proposing to put water’s freezing point at 100° and the boiling point at 0° (backwards from today’s convention) so that thermometers in Paris and Uppsala give the same reading. #history #metrology
on 02026-08-04#video #toread of a #Frondizi #interview about Che Guevara and Cuba. #Argentina #history
on 02026-07-31depressing #video about the #history of efforts against #malaria, ending by explaining how things are getting worse since #Trump II. Basically an infomercial for Giving What We Can. Not a very high-information-density video, with a lot of talking-head filler and stock footage. #EA
on 02026-07-31the Viśuddhaprabhā Dhāraṇī, from the 8th century, used to be the oldest surviving woodblock print in the world, from #Korea, significant to the #history of #printing. It was printed on hanji paper, made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry. More recent discoveries have found older prints in #China.
on 02026-07-30#history of #aesthetics: #Japan’s 19th-century influence on the West
on 02026-07-30#racism in the #USA has gotten a lot better over #history, with interracial marriage approval ratings going from 4% in 01958 to 43% 43 years ago to 77% 19 years ago to 94% 5 years ago, according to Gallup polls
on 02026-07-28#PDF #paper by Sturman and Wright on “the #history of #Tellurometer”, a surveying instrument that could measure distances to 1ppm with microwaves. The figures are missing from this version. “The Tellurometer is basically a time measuring device and this is achieved by measuring the phase of a frequency which has been modulated onto the carrier.”
on 02026-07-27#video #history of the #music called “Diggy Diggy Hole” from its origin on the Yogscast in February 02011.
on 02026-07-24stories of Budai (Putai), including when he put down his sack as an explanation of Zen when questioned by Bailu Heshang and Baofu Congzhan. #Buddhism #history
on 02026-07-21#history of 7-segment #displays
on 02026-07-20#qmail #history with Georgi Guninski’s three security holes found in 02005 if parts of qmail are run without ulimits. #DJB
on 02026-07-17#history of #Datura stramonium cigarettes (with tobacco) as #medicine for asthma and for #smoking cessation; “chamico” in Argentine Spanish, from Quichua “chamiku”.
on 02026-07-17#video overview by #Johnny-Harris of the recent #history of #Iran going back to before the Great Game. Just talking-head filler, stock footage, and low-information animations.
on 02026-07-16#ebook of a dissertation on some experiments on diodes, showing that in 01959 Fairchild had silicon diode manufacturing sort of working. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-06-26RCA’s transistor and diode catalog from 01957. #electronics #hardware #history #ebook
on 02026-06-26The #MOSTek 3870 was a microcontroller introduced in about 01977. #history
on 02026-06-25#PDF from Guttag’s VCF talk about the TMS9918 and the invention of sprites, with schematics of “ratioless” dynamic NMOS gates, which used a #four-phase set of clocks similar to but different from the scheme used by Four-Phase Systems. Includes a scan of Guttag’s firebreathing memo to Wally Rhines about the problems. #electronics #history
on 02026-06-25More about how #TI’s delays in introducing the TMS9940, and increases in price from the initially promised US$38, led Bang & Olufsen to abandon it for the Intel 8048 in late 01977 for their Beocenter 7000. #electronics #history
on 02026-06-25#PDF scan of an 01980 ad for #TI’s TMS9900 CPU family, touting it as “TI’s 16-bit 9900 Family. For price. For performance.” Not. From the January 01980 IEEE Spectrum. Also has an ad for the Bellmac MAC-4, touting “its assembler language, C, also developed at Bell Labs.” #history #humor #electronics
on 02026-06-25FarmerPotato said, “[The #TI 9940] was a cursed CPU: it had so many bugs, Texas Instruments withdrew it from production. But it gave its name to the Home Computer.” Also mentions the TMS 990’s innovative conditional jump mechanism: “This machine didn’t have a conditional branch (like JEQ, JNE.) Instead, you modified the next branch instruction by adding a result to its jump target.” #history
on 02026-06-25The Beocord 8000 tape player from Bang & Olufsen was supposed to be built in #TI’s TMS9940, but TI kept failing to deliver it, so they switched to the Intel #8048, or actually the 8049. #history
on 02026-06-25Another #history of the “debacle” of #TI’s “never fully functional” TMS9940. Sadly it doesn’t explain what was wrong with it.
on 02026-06-25Mentor Graphics’s Walden C. Rhines tells the #history of #TI’s late unlamented TMS9900.
“Indeed, some who know the history assert that the Intel 8088 was the worst among several possible 16-bit microprocessors of the day.
“It was not. There was a serious alternative that was worse. I know because I was in charge of the organization within Texas Instruments that developed it: the TMS9900. Although this dog of a chip went on to be used in the world’s first 16-bit home computer, you’ve probably never heard of it.”
There’s an aside about TI’s the “largely unsuccessful attempt to develop a compatible 16-bit microcontroller called the TMS9940”.
on 02026-06-25Wikipedia says that on p. 343 of this book from 01978, The Microprocessor and its Application: An Advanced Course, by D. Aspinall, the term “#transputer” is introduced, by Iann M. Barron, with the meaning of what we would now call a “microcontroller”: a computer on a chip including storage. (Indeed, Barron describe the Intel 8048 as a “transputer”, as well as the “Texas 9940” and the “Mostek 3870”.) That was the year he co-founded #Inmos with the objective of bringing such a thing to market. #history
on 02026-06-25#PDF of #Inmos’s ACM #paper on the #transputer from 01985. #history #retrocomputing
on 02026-06-25#PDF #ebook from the RAND National Defense Research Institute “The Next Supreme Leader: Succession In The Islamic Republic Of #Iran” from 02011. #politics #history
on 02026-06-23Originally the “different strokes for different folks” were different ways Muhammad Ali punched out different boxers. #history #humor
on 02026-06-14#Photo of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegram. #history
on 02026-06-14#history of Turbo #Pascal on CP/M and #MS-DOS. #CPM #retrocomputing
on 02026-06-12#history of #Lighthaven and #LessWrong. #toread
on 02026-06-09#history #news from 02020: Steven Hsu fired from Michigan State University over accusations of sexism and racism.
> “Each time I discussed intelligence differences between races (whether on my blog or in an interview) I said there was NOT strong evidence in favor of it,” he said, in the email. “But I did defend the right of researchers to investigate the question.” (...)
> A separate petition circulated, gathering nearly 1,500 signatures from academics across the world as of Friday evening, from people supporting Hsu and calling claims of sexism and racism “unequivocally false.”
on 02026-06-09#PDF of a #paper about #RLHF or something similar from 02022. #AI #history
on 02026-06-07#Scott-Alexander on #AI in the form of GPT-2 in 02019. #history
on 02026-06-07Sarah Constantin on #AI (GPT-2) from 02019, with the Pérez four-horned unicorns, etc. #history
on 02026-06-07#Tom-Jennings’s #history of #ASCII and related codes
on 02026-06-07my comment summarizing the #NSA’s #history of weakening #crypto, including #DES. Quote
on 02026-06-04#ebook of “American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989”, DOCID: 523696, REF ID: A523696, a declassified internal #NSA #history, including how they weakened #DES, declassified July 26, 02013. #crypto
Quote originally classified TOP SECRET UMBRA, from p.232 (p.240/271):
> (S CCO) The decision to get involved with NBS was hardly unanimous. From the SIGINT standpoint, a competent industry standard could spread into undesirable areas, like Third World government communications, narcotics traffickers, and international terrorism targets. But NSA had only recently discovered the large-scale Soviet pilfering of information from U.S. government and defense industry telephone communications. This argued the opposite case - that, as Frank Rowlett had contended since World War II, in the long run it was more important to secure one’s own communications than to exploit those of the enemy.
> (FOUO) Once that decision had been made, the debate turned to the issue of minimizing the damage. Narrowing the encryption problem to a single, influential algorithm might drive out competitors, and that would reduce the field that NSA had to be concerned about. Could a public encryption standard be made secure enough to protect against everything but a massive brute force attack, but weak enough to still permit an attack of some nature using very sophisticated (and expensive) techniques? NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately, they compromised on a 56-bit key.
on 02026-06-04#PDF of #DJB’s talk slides about the #NSA’s #history of weakening #crypto
on 02026-06-04#crypto #history: Hellman and Merkle showed in 01977 that #DES #crypto could be broken for about US$5000 per key, already, at the time. #PDF #paper
on 02026-06-04#DJB’s outline of the #history of the #NSA’s involvement in weakening #crypto, including their reduction of #DES’s key length. #NIST #DSA #DualEC #SIGINT-enabling-project #NISTPQC #FOIA
on 02026-06-04#history of counterfeit goods scams in #China
on 02026-06-04#history of the #Intel #ISPC #compiler, the Intel SPMD Program Compiler, by Matt Pharr
on 02026-06-03#ebook #PDF on #USSR computer #history, A Chip in the Curtain, by David A. Wellman. Public domain I think. Not a great scan
on 02026-06-02Share of Labour Compensation in GDP at Current National Prices for United States is 56% as of the latest figure (02023), down from a high of 65% in 01970, a peak of 64% in 02000, a previous nadir of 59% in 02010, and a subsequent peak of 61% in 02020 #history #economics #data
on 02026-05-30discussion of whether, and how often, in the #history of European colonization of America, colonists kidnapped by the “Indians” preferred to stay with the “Indians” or not
on 02026-05-29Apparently “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is sincere: “In an interview by Bruce Fessier for USA Weekend Magazine in 1988 #McFerrin said, “Whenever you see a poster of Meher Baba, it usually says ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ which is a pretty neat philosophy in four words, I think.” #music #history
on 02026-05-29“The ethos of the aristocracy as exemplified in the English public school greatly influenced Pierre de Coubertin. (...) The 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon champion Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had taken expense money playing semi-professional baseball before the Olympics.
“The advent of the state-sponsored “full-time amateur athlete” of the Eastern Bloc countries eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but in reality they were all paid by the state to train on a full-time basis. (...)
As a result, the Olympics shifted away from amateurism, as envisioned by Pierre de Coubertin, to allowing participation of professional athletes,[187] but only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its influence within the IOC.” #history #Olympics
on 02026-05-29#news #history: “[Melisa]’s death was in 2007, when she entered a cage to feed an antfish bear [anteater] called “Ramón.” According to the reconstruction, the bear stopped [stood up on] Melisa on two legs, hugged her and pierced her lungs. The young woman spent two days in agony at the Evita Hospital in Berazategui and before she died they had to amputate both legs.”
on 02026-05-28#history of #Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory #electronics #humor
on 02026-05-27#CHM #PDF of oral #history #interview with Napoleone Cavlan and Ronald Cline about the #Signetics field programmable logic family. #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-05-27#Signetics brought out the 82S100 (later PLS100) programmable logic array in 01975. Decapped die photos. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-05-27#PDF of the #datasheet for #Signetics’s 82S100 and 82S101 fuse-programmable logic array. Looks like a PLD: and/or/invert matrix with 16 inputs, 48 product terms, and 8 outputs. This version of the dadashit is from 01987 with parts from 01990, but I think the chip is from the 01970s. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-05-27actually #Signetics also brought out an unrelated microprocessor in 01975. #history #retrocomputing #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-27#Signetics brought out a microprocessor in 01976. #history #retrocomputing #electronics #hardware
on 02026-05-27Scientific American article from 01977 by Hoo-Min D. Toong defines a “microprocessor” as a “computer central processing unit on a single chip”, but then in the introduction to the article says, “(sometimes several chips)”. #etymology #history
on 02026-05-26#PDF scan of the #paper on the design of the 20-bit bit-serial “MP944” CPU from 01971, part of the #CADC, which sure doesn’t sound like a microprocessor to me, despite the domain name.
The multiplier (“PMU”) was a 28-pin DIP, the divider (“PDU”) was another 28-pin DIP, the “special logic [functional] unit” was another 28-pin DIP, and the “steering unit” (of which there were three, one for each of the previous three modules) was another 28-pin DIP, and there were 19 vertical-microcode ROM chips: “Each functional unit is controlled by its own micro-instruction ROM.” To me it sounds like there were at most three CPUs, each consisting of a steering unit and either a multiplier, a divider, or a “special logic unit”, and maybe just one CPU split across 25 chips; when the paper uses the term “CPU”, it seems to be referring to all of these functional units together and perhaps the ROMs as well, not just one of them.
Moreover, the multiplier and divider just blindly did a multiply and, respectively, a divide, every “frame”. Only the “special logic function” could do “Conditional, and Unconditional data branching”. And all three “functional units” were controlled by some control bits from the “system executive control”, a group of ROM chips.
The “steering unit” was a “three channel serial digital data multiplexer” with three outputs which could add or subtract data under the control of part of the instruction word on its way to the PMU, PDU, or SLF.
It seems like the program counter, or rather counters, were located in the microcode ROM chips, which could increment them or reset or reload them under the control of some control lines. #hardware #architecture #history
on 02026-05-26Purportedly the first microprocessor was Ray Holt’s 20-bit bit-serial MP944 from 01971, part of the #CADC, developed for the F-14 naval fighter jet, but the Navy classified it until 01998. #history
on 02026-05-26#video of Len #Shustek explaining #readtape and its #history, for recovering 7-track and 9-track tapes using 16-channel analog data captured by a Saleae logic analyzer. Including Whirlwind tapes at the #CHM. A lecture from 02020. #retrocomputing
on 02026-05-25#history of #public-shaming of “Dog Poop Girl” in 02005.
on 02026-05-19this museum has two printing presses from 01650, two of the oldest that still survive, even though Gutenberg’s printing press was 200 years old at that point. Photos. #history
on 02026-05-19Harry Baals was the mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, until his death in 01954. #humor #history
on 02026-05-19#video about the “boss key” in old #videogames, comparing Commander Keen 4-5, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Bio Menace, Broderbund Star Wars, and Leisure Suit Larry, and the booby-trapped version in Space Quest III: (#retrocomputing or #history)
on 02026-05-15/u/helenzaas says, in February 02022, “I opened the third bin store in the United States and personally created the price dropping concept that thousands of bin stores use today. I’m 22. A couple of Italian brothers are very rich now because of me (can you feel my frustration through your screen? Lol) So essentially I’ve been doing this for a long time and I have all the answers. (...) So yes there are stores out there that scam and do business unethically and they totally get away with it and make a lot of money. But to be fair, a lot of these people got into the business when it was profitable, built relationships with their customers in their community, and didn’t want to quit so they had to make up for it somehow. It seems selfish to sell the very expensive items online but it’s the only way to stay open now.” #bin-store #history
on 02026-05-15#PDF #datasheet for TI’s obsolete 7404 TTL inverter #hardware. #electronics #history
on 02026-05-11#Hantavirus #epidemiology #history when HPS (hantavirus pulmonary syndrome) was discovered in 01993, when I was in high school nearby, due to an outbreak with a 52% CFR.
on 02026-05-08#nuclear #energy #history, Hyman Rickover’s 01953 memo about how “paper reactors” are simple, small, cheap, light, quickly built, flexible in purpose, and require very little development, while practical reactors are behind schedule, require an immense amount of development on apparently trivial components such as corrosion, expensive, slow to build, large, heavy, and complicated. “The original was published in The Journal of Reactor Science and Technology, Volume 3, No. 3 (which is classified) and reproduced many times, e.g. in Congressional testimony.”
on 02026-05-05#history of #Microsoft and #IBM and their respective management structures, and the TAB key for moving between fields in OS/2.
on 02026-05-05Oral legislative history of #GARA and #flying #history. #toread
on 02026-05-05#history of #flying and #GARA: “However, towards the end of the 70s, during the period from 1978 to 1988, industry-wide employment fell by a devastating 65 percent. Aircraft manufacturing overall saw a massive decrease in new aircraft shipments, falling 95 percent (...) between 1983 - 86, Beech Aircraft defended itself against 203 lawsuits, each case costing them an average $530,000 to defend. Interestingly, while researching these cases, the NTSB found that none of the accidents could be attributed to manufacturing and design defects.”
And #Cessna had stopped making single-engine aircraft in 01986.
on 02026-05-05#history of #flying: general aviation manufacturing in #USA peaked in about 01978 at 18000 planes per year, but thereafter collapsed due to product liability, starting to recover after the #GARA of 01994
on 02026-05-05Pancho Barnes was apparently quite the character. #flying #history
on 02026-05-05why the Hippocratic oath prohibited lithotomy of kidney stones. #medicine #history
on 02026-05-0402017 #news (#history) on the difficulty in recruiting #Shkreli jurors:
Juror No 59: “Your Honor, totally he is guilty and in no way can I let him slide out of anything because – ”
The court: “OK. Is that your attitude toward anyone charged with a crime who has not been proven guilty?”
Juror No 59: “It’s my attitude toward his entire demeanor, what he has done to people.”
The court: “All right. We are going to excuse you, sir.”
Juror No 59: “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.”
on 02026-05-03this is a working archive of at least the #gEDA front page, listing the components: gattrib, gerbv, gnetlist, gnucap, gschem, gsymcheck, GTKWave, gwave, Icarus, ngspice, PCB (#PCB-program), symbols, tclspice, utils, vbs. #history
on 02026-05-01Virginia Postrel’s #history of the rise of the disposable diaper.
on 02026-05-01Apparently #Benjamin-Franklin and #John-Adams admired #Haidar-Ali, the king of #Mysore in #India, who was fighting the English too. #history #toread
on 02026-04-29#Itanic’s Not a Thing (#NaT) bit can cause passing too few register parameters to a #C function to crash the program because the compiler tried to spill a NaT value to the stack. Also leaf functions that don’t create their own stack frames can get an Illegal Operation fault for “writing a stack register that lies outside the current frame”; SPARC-like sliding windows, I guess, but by variable amounts. #history #gross #facepalm
on 02026-04-29#USA #history of biowarfare also includes spraying supposedly harmless bacteria all over San Francisco. #weaponry
on 02026-04-29#USA #history of biowarfare includes airdropping tens of millions of fleas as #weaponry
on 02026-04-29oh hey, Yasser #Arafat led the PLO in an insurrection against #Jordan in 01970 when he was living there, after Jordan annexed the West Bank. #history
on 02026-04-28George Washington worrying about the #Illuminati. #history #paranoia #toread
on 02026-04-28#history article claiming that #Goddard’s liquid-fueled rockets didn’t influence the V-2 program in #Germany. #flying
on 02026-04-28retrospective about #Goddard and #flying to #space and the #history of rockets
on 02026-04-28The New York Times’s infamous 01920 editorial attacking #Goddard, as a #PDF scan, entitled, “A Severe Strain on Credulity”: “Of course, [Professor Goddard] only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” #history #NYT
on 02026-04-28#Goddard’s original proposal letter to the Smithsonian in 01916 about rockets. He thinks, “the device will, I am certain, be of very great importance to pure science, especially to meterology; whereas, although it may indeed have applications, I feel that its possibilities in warfare may be somewhat limited.” #history
on 02026-04-28Tsiolkovsky published his rocket equation, $\Delta v = v_{\text{e}} \ln {\frac {m_0}{m_f}} = I_{\text{sp}}g_0 \ln {\frac {m_0}{m_f}}$, for #flying to #space in 01903, though #Goddard and some dude named Herman Oberth derived it independently. #history
on 02026-04-28#PDF scan of the Smithsonian’s orignal publication of #Goddard’s original 01919 rocket #paper “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”. The illustrations are much better scanned and the typoography is better than in NASA’s collection. #space #flying #history
on 02026-04-28#PDF with a collection of papers from the #history of #NASA and #flying in #space, including an abridged and poorly reformatted version of #Goddard’s original #paper, with the figures redrawn poorly and the plates omitted, where he seems to be unaware of Tsiolkovsky’s work on the rocket equation.
on 02026-04-28#Asianometry #manufacturing #history #video about numerical control, apparently unaware of cam-operated screw machines and consisting almost entirely of historical photos with a voiceover.
on 02026-04-27VSMOW used to be used in the definition of the kelvin. #metrology #history
on 02026-04-27Rob Baruch’s Project 54/74 was a #reverse-engineering project to analyze all the 7400 series (and 5400 series) ICs from die photos of decapped chips. Robert C. Baruch, according to his Gmail address. I wonder what happened? #history #electronics #hardware #Project-54-74
on 02026-04-27#nthmost writes an article about her grandmother’s work on #ENIAC, and that of her grandfather, John Mauchly. Emotional and moving. #toread #history
on 02026-04-24#history of #aniconism and #iconoclasm in #Judaism #religion
on 02026-04-21#PDF #paper by Larry Tesler on the #UX #history of cut and paste at Xerox #PARC
on 02026-04-20The effort to rename #JWST back to its original name, “NGST”, was because of James Webb’s “complicit silence [with the Lavender Scare] during his leadership roles at both the State Department and NASA”, which he headed 01961–01968. #LGBT #history #public-shaming
on 02026-04-15Interdata 8/32 bit shift instructions made Dennis Ritchie say “Shit!!” #history #C
on 02026-04-14#history and downfall of #Tera in #HPC.
on 02026-04-14miraculous paraglider survival in 02007 in New South Wales, Australia, after a storm lifted Ewa Wiśnierska to 10km. “She regained consciousness after her paraglider descended to 20,000 feet, covered in ice and bruised.” #history #toread
on 02026-04-14#Smoothieboard #hardware had showstopper supply-chain problems in late 02020 because of the #COVID shortages of #microcontrollers, which is how they ended up switching from LPCxxxx to #STM32. #history
on 02026-04-12#video of the exploding whale. #Oregon #history #humor
on 02026-04-12secondary emission can give #vacuum-tubes negative resistance, so Albert Hull designed an oscillator using them called the "dynatron" in 01918. #electronics #hardware #history
on 02026-04-10discussion of Kent Overstreet’s temporary ban from contributing to #Linux. #bcachefs #history
on 02026-04-10The USSR farmed Kazakh dandelions in WWII for #rubber #materials, and Continental has been selling bicycle tires made from them since 02019. #history
on 02026-04-09“The final report of the Expert Panel on the 28 April 2025 #blackout in continental #Spain and #Portugal identifies the causes of the blackout and outlines recommendations to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s interconnected electricity system.” #energy #history
on 02026-04-08page from #Leibniz’s first published paper on the differential calculus, “#Nova-methodus pro maximis & minimis, itemque tangentibus, quae nec fractas, nec irrationales quantitates moratur, & singulare pro illis calculi genus”. #math #history
on 02026-04-08archive of John Carreyrou’s NYT article at <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html> claiming Adam Back #is-Satoshi, largely on the basis that he was inactive on #Bitcoin during almost precisely the time when Satoshi was active, and some inconclusive stylometric data, plus lots of unconvincing stuff that adds up to “Satoshi was a cypherpunk, and so was Adam Back”. Oh, and then some more convincing hyphenation data. #history
on 02026-04-08The crown of #Denmark has a #history of living off of tolls extracted from ships that crossed its strait to or from the Baltic, much as #Iran is now charging tolls to pass the Strait of Hormuz.
on 02026-04-07Tyler Cowen quoting Matt Yglesias quoting Brad DeLong quoting Agatha Christie saying she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car – nor so poor that she wouldn’t have servants. #history #economics
on 02026-04-07#humor #history #video about medieval inns, taverns, and alehouses
on 02026-04-04Robert Fulton’s Skyhook, featured in a James Bond movie. #history #pdf
on 02026-04-04Sallie Winchester of the Winchester Mystery House was not superstitious. #history
on 02026-04-04the battle where the Germanians under Arminius defeated Augustus and kept the Empire from incorporating lands north of the Rhine. #history
on 02026-04-03another #Technocracy #history article
on 02026-04-03#history: claims that #Margaret-Mead was a friend of both #Technocracy founder Howard Scott and John #von-Neumann.
on 02026-04-03Ibrahim Traoré renounces democracy: “The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker.” #Burkina-Faso #ASS #history
on 02026-04-03the 2.25-gigawatt coal-powered Navajo Generating Station provided the majority of the income of the #Hopi tribe and a fair chunk of that of the #Navajo tribe until it was shut down in 02019 and demolished in 02020. #energy #history
on 02026-04-03#history of how #Daesh took #Mosul in June 02014, from the 4th to the 10th, capturing a city of 2 million with maybe 3000 fighters.
on 02026-04-03#ACOUP on what percentage of the time medieval peasant women had to work. #economics #history
on 02026-03-21in #history, medieval peasants usually worked many more days per year than 150
on 02026-03-21#ACOUP provides strong arguments that in #history peasants worked 2500 to 3000 hours per year, much more than many people do today. Also #agriculture has changed fundamentally: “As a rule, farming yields in the pre-modern are discussed not in terms of productivity per-land-area but rather in seed yields: for a given dry measure of seeds planted, how many of the same dry measure of seeds (because those are the tasty, edible parts of these plants) do you get back? So they are expressed in figures like 4:1 which means for every one modius/dry liter/bushel sown, four are harvested.” #economics
on 02026-03-21Dolores Huerta and other women say they were raped be #Cesar-Chavez. #history #human-rights #rape #feminism
on 02026-03-19discussion of the #history of Lotus Notes and #CSCW
on 02026-03-18#video by "Dr. Roger Billings" about the #history of TMS 1802 #microcontrollers that’s 100% talking-head filler and stock photos. #plonk
on 02026-03-15#Veritasium #introduction #video to #asbestos health risks and #history, including Irving Selikoff’s finding in the 01960s that 1.4% of wartime shipyard workers died of #mesothelioma and other asbestos-related #cancer, presented at a conference in 01964, but also covering recent findings about non-quantified risks of natural asbestos exposure.
on 02026-03-12Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s Cubism and Abstract Art chart in 01936 (the year after Walter Benjamin’s essay) established a “canon” of modern #art. He said, “In the early twentieth century…the pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed and refined many times and in different ways during the previous half millennium. The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts. By a common and powerful impulse they were driven to abandon the imitation of natural appearance.” #history
on 02026-03-06How de Hevesy dissolved von Laue’s and Franck’s Nobel prizes during WWII to keep them from the Nazis. #history
on 02026-01-16#history of the "Vehmic courts", secret courts in Early Medieval #Germany (#Westphalia) that meted out death in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor, with the term “Verfemen” used today to mean “ostracism” or “lynching”.
on 02026-01-16#Polymarket #prediction-markets leaked the #USA kidnapping of #Maduro (president of #Venezuela) hours before it happened. #news #history
on 02026-01-15how Assistant Professor Kangjie Lu and his grad students Aditya Pakki and Qiushi Wu got the University of Minnesota banned from contributing to #Linux in 02021. #history
on 02026-01-13#news from #Dilbert creator Scott Adams in February 02023: “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*** away. Wherever you have to go, just get away because there’s no fixing this [26% of black people in Rasmussen Reports’s poll disagreeing with the phrase ‘it’s okay to be white’]. You just have to escape, so that’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood where, you know, I have a very low Black population.” #history #racism
on 02026-01-13apparently Set was Argentine because the Greek Magical Papyri depict him wearing a T-shirt saying “CHE”. #humor #history #magick
on 02026-01-12#history of #dating in the US: “While a small study in 1940 and 1941 found some peer disapproval of going steady, by 1960 it was widely accepted and only a small minority of peers disapproved.[2] Contemporary studies found that going steady was viewed as a stage toward marriage by some participants, while to others it was a common social behavior with no goal of marriage.[2] (...) A 1951 book, Profiles of Youth, called going steady “a national problem”, ...”
on 02026-01-06#video showing the #history of #English with a constructed monologue over three minutes as the dialect evolves from 00500 Anglo-Saxon to 02000 non-rhotic New York English (as interpreted by an RP speaker). #phonology
on 02026-01-06William W. Priestly built a water pump with no moving parts harnessing compressed air starting in 01888, possibly a #pulser-pump like the one formerly at the Alhambra. “The ram, although credited to Priestly, may have actually been built in 1901–02 by David Hyde. During its construction, a competitor, North Side Irrigation, developed an alternative system and the ram was apparently never used commercially.[5] It was reported to have been functional in 1901.[6]” #mechanisms #history
on 02026-01-06excellent article on the #etymology, #history, and sense evolution of “gift” and “present”
on 02026-01-03#Veritasium #video about #ASML #EUV #photolithography machines, which apparently cost US$400 million each. Explains #optics a bit, including defining NA (as the sine of half the cone included angle) and the Rayleigh equation. Traces the #history through Kinoshita and Andrew Hawryluk, with an #interview with the latter, and extensive interviews with people at ASML. #precision
on 02025-12-31Jürgen Schmidhuber investigates the #history of the transistor, coming to the conclusion that Lilienfeld’s devices did work, that he had working MOSFETs in the 01920s! #CC BY-NC-SA
on 02025-12-31no actually Morris Benton designed sans-serif #fonts as early as 01902. #history
on 02025-12-23“In 1915, Frederic W. Goudy designed #Goudy Old Style, his twenty-fifth typeface, and his first for American Type Founders. Flexible enough for both text and display, it is one of the most popular typefaces ever produced, frequently used for packaging and advertising. Its recognizable features include the diamond-shaped dots on i, j, and on punctuation marks, the upturned ear of the g, and the [upturned] base of E and L.” #fonts #history
on 02025-12-22#video on #Hershey-fonts #history from Frank Grießhammer’s presentation nine years ago in 02016
on 02025-12-21more about #Hershey-fonts and their #history, including a drafting textbook from 01865 with a “technical lettering style” quite similar to #Gorton
on 02025-12-21#history of #fonts and #typography
on 02025-12-21Marcin Wichary, Figma design directory, wrote this #Gorton #fonts page, tracing the current letterforms (more or less) back to 01902! Then it spread to Leroy lettering sets and Wonder Woman comic books and Letraset rubbings... and #Hershey-fonts! It originated at Taylor, Taylor, & Hobson in the UK in 01894, four years before Akzidenz-Grotesk. 6100 words, 600 photos. #history
on 02025-12-21Largely used in the #history of the #USSR against poets and intellectuals; in Belarus they excluded homemakers.
on 02025-12-18the #history of the 01990-01-15 AT&T outage: one line of code caused a US$60 million outage
on 02025-12-18#paper on the #history of #Leeuwenhoek’s #microscopy; apparently he melted the end of a glass fiber to make his microscope lenses rather than grinding them.
on 02025-12-18#video on #Austin’s moonlight towers. #history
on 02025-12-17#video on how the #USA sabotaged Viet Cong #weaponry in the #Vietnam war (Project Eldest Son), which was eventually leaked to the press. #history
on 02025-12-17The week that Bill Atkinson wrote negative 2000 lines of code #history
on 02025-12-15Fran Allen oral #history #interview by the #CHM
on 02025-12-14An analog floppy disk that held 25 frames of video for “still video cameras” #history
on 02025-12-14The "Black Triangle" story about getting a “hello world” working on the Playstation (development box) after a month of struggling at SingleTrac. #history #videogames
on 02025-12-14#PDF of Frank Gray’s 01953 #patent, filed 01947, for Gray code and digital video. #history
on 02025-12-13#history of #Landsat 1 to 3, explaining that the MSS was digital
on 02025-12-13list of IEEE milestones in electrical engineering on the Engineering and Technology #History Wiki
on 02025-12-13book on how progress diverged in China and Europe #toread #history
on 02025-12-12Review of Laura Spinney’s Proto about the history of the Indo-European language family. #toread #linguistics #history
on 02025-12-12Willy Ley on the #history of #pseudoscience in #Germany before the Nazis
on 02025-12-12Norman #Borlaug got his Ph.D. (in plant pathology) in 01942 after growing up on a farm in Iowa. Different elevations in Mexico had non-overlapping growing seasons, so he could cultivate two sets of test plots per year: summer wheat in the Toluca Valley, winter wheat in the Yaqui Valley, so-called "shuttle breeding". The Norin-10 dwarfing gene Borlaug requested from Japan in 01953 was the key, but Borlaug already had a rust-resistant line of wheat. “I began this piece expecting to debunk the “great man” narrative, and specifically stated as my thesis that “determination is not a technique.” But it turns out there was a “great man” moment where Borlaug’s determination won the day.” #history
on 02025-12-12Yes, Wankel really was a militant Nazi. But he invented his engine in 01924, before Nazism. But not before he was an anti-Semite. And, yes, he was expelled from the Party in 01932 because of a dispute with the local Gauleiter, who didn’t want the Hitler Youth to get military training, and did join the SS in 01940, after having been imprisoned for criticizing the Gauleiter for corruption, then freed by Hitler himself. “He was known for his championing of animal rights and opposition to the use of animals in testing.” #mechanisms #history #Germany
on 02025-12-12public-domain #video from 01944 explaining FM #radio with a simple tank-circuit transmitter (Hartley oscillator?) with a capacitive microphone in parallel with the tuning cap. His example is 40MHz with a ±40kHz max deviation (80kHz swing), which he says is the Army’s maximum deviation, plus a 10kHz guard band on each size. But in reality they used “reactance tubes” and phase modulation rather than capacitive mics for their transmitters. He says the key difference for an FM receiver is amplitude limiting (a “limiter”), plus of course FM demodulation itself, with a “discriminator”. The limiter is a vacuum-tube device that might have a transistor analogue. The discriminator is a tank, a diode, and a (bypassed) load resistor, tuned so that the “rest frequency” is at the steepest part of the tank’s Gaussian response, so basically you’re just turning FM back into AM and demodulating the AM. #electronics #history #radio #RF #communications
on 02025-12-12#Titanium symposium #toread from 01966, with notes about what to avoid (chlorinated cutting fluids that cause chloride stress corrosion) and its #history.
on 02025-12-12Dennis Ritchie explaining in 02004 that, “dd was always named after JCL dd cards.” Lynn Wheeler explained how JES2/HASP’s JCL was a big improvement over what came before. “Pre-360s, with 709x/etc, a 1401 was used to perform unit record [card reader/printer] to/from tape[,] and the tapes were moved back and forth between the 1401 and the 709x for actual execution. The university I was at ... with IBSYS monitor on 709 (all tubes) running student fortran jobs tape to tape ... could do student jobs on the order of [a] second. Moving to early OS/360 on 360/65 ... it was taking on the order of 100 times longer for each student fortran job.
Installation of HASP cut that to on the order of 30 seconds (hasp handling the unit record i/o asyncronously to dasd/disk ... and the job scheduler doing its input/output to/from disk rather than unit record directly). (...) It wasn’t until the university started using WATFOR monitor for student fortran jobs that elapsed time per job got to the point where it faster than what it had been on the 709. WATFOR basically was a subtasking monitor, fortran compile and execution environment.” #history #Unix #retrocomputing
on 02025-12-12#video on the #history of computing in the #USSR, with the MESM, the BESM, and the ES, but mostly stock photos by "Asianometry".
on 02025-12-11#Argentina in 01951 #history #video
on 02025-12-11Announcement of the 01998 #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM.
on 02025-12-11VICE #news about #SAGE #history from 02011. It’s missing the images.
on 02025-12-11Transcript of the #SAGE #history #lecture at the #CHM in 01998.
on 02025-12-11100-minute #video on #SAGE #history from a Sun-sponsored #lecture at the #CHM in 01998. Relevant context is the USSR’s first atomic bomb test in 01949. Aircraft kill ratios in the Battle of Britain were 10%, so an effective air defense was unthinkable. At 30'00” Paul Edwards gives the cost as US$4–12B in 01960 dollars. At 30'40” Paul Edwards explains that IBM got paid US$500 million to build the planned 56 computers (28 duplexes). Western Electric film on it starts at 5'11”. 800 programmers (34'00”) which was 20% of the world’s programmers, all working at SDC, which spun off from RAND toward the end of 57, as James Wong explains (55'20”). Maguire went online in June of 01958. Stuart Air Force Base in September. Apparently MIT’s original proposal was to put the whole system underground, but the Pentagon decided that was too expensive. Invited speaker #Les-Earnest (?) says, “This gave rise to this whole industry of ‘L-systems’, so-called: 438L, 465L, all this stuff, that were competing for funds with other things. And for the most part, none of them worked worth a damn. Uh, there were a few exceptions. The satellite control system, I would say, and provided good intelligence, but most of these others, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, were basically boondoggles, and we ain’t through it yet. This stuff is still going on. It gave rise to a multi-billion-dollar industry that basically produces useless junk. And here we are 40 years later.” They tried doing SAGE in JOVIAL, but ended up doing it all in assembly. Mean time between failures of each half of the duplex was maybe days.
on 02025-12-11#video on #SAGE, the Semi-Automated Ground Environment, showing the #displays, which it looks like were circular, about 60 characters tall and 60 characters wide, typically displaying about 100 characters or vectors. #history
on 02025-12-11“The testing of Hitler’s DNA showed “very high” scores — in the top one percent — for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and [bipolar] disorder,” but rule out Jewish ancestry: “the Y chromosome data matches the DNA of Hitler’s male line relative. If he had Jewish ancestry (through an outside relationship), that match wouldn’t be there.” Also he probably had Kallmann Syndrome, which can cause micropenis and undescended testicles. #history #Germany
on 02025-12-11How magpies and jackdaws developed from pies and daws. “And methinks that the Prayer of the Popish Priest is very large, in that he desireth of God, that as many as taste of that conjured Bread may receive health both of Body and Soul. What if Mag Pie,or Jack Daw,or Philip Sparrow, should chance to eat of it, as it may happen (hath it not been known that the little god of the Altar hath been eaten and devoured of Mother Mouse and Will. Worm) should they also, through the tasting and eating thereof, receive health and salvation both of body and soul? A foul and a great oversight.” #history
on 02025-12-11#history of #Charactron #hardware
on 02025-12-11#PDF #paper from 01969 about “COM”, #computer-output-microfilm, as was used in the development of #Hershey-fonts, including #Charactron use. #history
on 02025-12-11#history of #Germany #fonts #politics
on 02025-12-11#fonts #history including a lovely (facsimile) specimen of Jenson’s roman
on 02025-12-11The Bormann brief ordering the use of Antiqua rather than Schwabacher “Jewish letters” or Fraktur. #history #fonts #Germany #politics
on 02025-12-11eGroups founder Martin Roscheisen’s account of #solar #energy #history: “After the dotcom bust, initially semi-retired after Yahoo! had purchased eGroups, I felt that there’s big industries, in particular energy, that could be transformed through a Silicon Valley type approach. Like making solar power ten times less expensive. So in 2002, I started Nanosolar and ran it for eight years until 2010 — as the longest serving CEOs in the solar industry back then.
Nanosolar was the first solar tech startup funded by American venture capital (Benchmark Capital) and became Silicon Valley’s solar flagship co as we were developing an ultra-low-cost solar cell and building two substantive high-tech fabs. I ran Nanosolar from zero to $2.1B in market value. Then I was forced out over our competitor Solyndra filing for an IPO ahead of us, and three years later, Nanosolar failed with inept leadership having been installed by investors.”
on 02025-12-03#history of #typography of numbers
on 02025-12-03#interview with Chris Sawyer about Roller Coaster Tycoon and #videogames #history
on 02025-12-03Kirk McCusick’s #history of #BSD
on 02025-11-29Bob Bemer, the main designer of #ASCII, explains the #history of #IBM using #EBCDIC on their mainframes
on 02025-11-29#history of the #internet and the .us domain with things like bridger.pps.k12.or.us which I am never going to read
on 02025-11-27Cozens’s #fonts #ebook has a section on the #history of #METAFONT and why it didn’t go viral among typographers. Unfortunately it doesn't mention le Romain du Roi or Hershey fonts.
on 02025-11-26The #Star-Trek episode introducing the Borg was “Q Who?”, aired 01989-05-05. “The critical reception has been positive, with the episode described as the first “great episode” of the series.[1] It was nominated for three Emmy Awards, winning two.” #history
on 02025-11-26#history of #Lemelson’s shameless abuses of #patents and how submarine patents were eventually sunk by a case in 02004 (laches) and finally a case in 02021: “U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap tossed out a $308.5 million patent-infringement verdict against Apple, Inc. Judge Gilstrap found the plaintiff intentionally delayed its application (originally filed in the 1980s). The resultant patents didn’t start issuing until 2010. (...) The plaintiff, Personalized Media [Gilbert Hyatt], holds hundreds of patents and asserts them against Apple, Google, Netflix and others based on decades old technology. (...) The patent asserted against Apple granted in 2012 from a filing date in the 1980s.”
on 02025-11-26early radio control used an “escapement” like a watch escapement where each solenoid pulse would allow a pawl to rotate by a discrete amount. Digital radio control preceded analog radio control. #history
on 02025-11-26Lynn Wheeler describes the #IBM 3081 #mainframes effort as “quick-and-dirty” in response to the Amdahl threat; he says it was “The 370 emulator minus the FS [Future System] microcode”. Lynn explains, “Amdahl two processor had better throughput than four processor 3084.” #history
on 02025-11-23#IBM 3084QX #performance was 31 MIPS. #mainframes #history
on 02025-11-23#IBM 3084 #mainframes page. #history
on 02025-11-23#IBM 3084 #mainframes cost US$8.7 million in 01983. “The machine uses two model K 3081 Processor Units with 64Kb of fast buffer memory. Each 3081 K Processor Unit is composed of two processors.” As for #performance: “The 3084 was released with either 32, 48 or 64 Mb of memory. The system in the collection has 16 Mb of main memory (because it is half of the entire 3084 system). The memory has a cycle time of 312 nanoseconds and is 8 bytes wide.” So I guess you could read or write main memory at 24 megabytes per second, which suggests a speed around 24 MIPS. #history
on 02025-11-23#BitBLT #history, 50th anniversary
on 02025-11-20graph of the #history of #solar #PV #energy #pricing
on 02025-11-17did medieval peasants work 150 days a year or 300? #history
on 02025-11-17#RFC 508 from 01973 on transmitting vocoded audio from the TX-2 over the #ARPANet #history
on 02025-11-15Another copy of Anthony A. Oettinger’s letter coining “software engineering”, CACM volume 9, number 8, August 01966, pp. 545–546. #history #etymology
on 02025-11-11#PDF scan of Anthony A. Oettinger’s letter coining “software engineering”, CACM volume 9, number 8, August 01966, pp. 545–546. #history #etymology
on 02025-11-11Bertrand Meyer claims that the term “software engineering” dates back to at least 01966 when #ACM president Anthony A. Oettinger published it in a letter to the community, explaining: “While much of what we do is or has its root in not only computer and information science, but also many older and better defined sciences, even more is not at all scientific but of a professional and engineering nature.” #history #etymology
on 02025-11-11A big part of the battle against #fat in the #USA was led by a multi-millionaire from Omaha "Phil Sokolof" who decided to crusade against fat and especially saturated fat and cholesterol. He died in 02004 before we knew he was wrong about fat and cholesterol. #nutrition #history
on 02025-11-11Leonard Glenn Francis spent half a million dollars in bribes on #USA military officers in order to divert hundreds of millions of dollars to his companies. #politics #history
on 02025-11-11archive of https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html on #Thiel funding the #Gawker case that bankrupted them in 02016. #history
on 02025-11-07#History of Greek #philosophy and in particular how #Anaxagoras got banished
on 02025-11-07discussion of the myths around the invention of writing in #Egypt, including quotes from Plato. #history
on 02025-11-07#Internet-Archive lawsuit #history
on 02025-11-05#history of #cancer #medicine: tyrosine kinase inhibitors were the first kinase inhibitors approved
on 02025-11-05#history of #FDA #politics in #USA and #human-experimentation by the #DOE for #nuclear #weaponry
on 02025-11-05#history of #ribociclib getting approved in the #UK in only July of this year. #medicine #politics #cancer #ciclibs
on 02025-11-05#history of boxer #Jack-Johnson
on 02025-11-05#history of boxer #Jack-Johnson
on 02025-11-05#Jack-London #racism #history and boxer #Jack-Johnson
on 02025-11-05discussion of the Fatima sun miracle and many similar everyday events. #history
on 02025-11-05on #Quakers and #history and #pacifism and #liberalism and #USA #politics
on 02025-11-04Ozymandias Brennan’s notes on the #history of Maoism #toread
on 02025-11-04more on the #history of #racism and #Jack-London
on 02025-10-28Ken Thompson on Unix #history, some excerpts from the #CHM oral history #interview
on 02025-10-27#History of #VisiCalc on the Apple ][. #retrocomputing
on 02025-10-2402017 #news about #Robert-Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. #politics #history #toread
on 02025-10-21#politics #history #Robert-Mercer funded #Breitbart and fueled #Brexit and #Trump
on 02025-10-21#video on “depth charge hydrostatic pistols” (WWII #weaponry #mechanisms #history). Water flowing into a rubber diaphragm inflated it, forcing two concentric flanged sleeves to slide axially apart, releasing the retaining balls inside the sleeves in a groove machined into the firing pin, which the firing spring then slammed through the copper membrane into the detonator. Orifice size determined water ingress speed to approximately set the depth at which the detonator and thus the surrounding booster and finally the entire depth charge would detonate, sinking a submarine. The two sleeves moving in opposite directions makes it shockproof since their absolute position doesn’t matter much.
on 02025-10-17how #typewriters typically have numbers that are taller than their capital letters, like lining figures (or even larger) rather than text figures. #history
on 02025-10-16“A short note on Pica and related matters” #typewriters #history
on 02025-10-16Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I (McCarthy 01959) #Lisp #history #PDF #paper
on 02025-10-15#history of #materials: celluloid’s origin as an ivory substitute for billiard balls
on 02025-10-15““Being a developer myself I needed a tool that would make me more productive,” [#Borland founder Philippe] Kahn told eWEEK. “I had worked on integrated development environments as a student of Niklaus #Wirth at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule] in Zurich. I give a lot of credit to Niklaus for inspiration.
Then it was a matter of putting it all together. My partner wrote the compiler, and it was fast. Yet most of the development time was used in going back and forth between source code and execution. Then debugging the executed program. So we decided that a fast one-pass compiler was the way to go because it allowed us to pinpoint runtime errors right into the source code,” Kahn said.” #history
on 02025-10-12“[#Borland founder Philippe] Kahn, a 34-year-old mathematics instructor-turned-programmer-turned-entrepreneur, wrote about one-third of the programming code of Turbo Pascal. He says the last of his code to get into a commercial product was the phone dialer in Sidekick.” #news from 01988. #history
on 02025-10-12#video of #Fraser looking at ancient Greek #automata, replicating a wooden mobile robot described by Heron of Alexandria. He talks through a bit of the #history of the Greek automaton tradition. A weight sinks down into an hourglass, supported by the sand (or in this case seeds) and pulling on cords which move the automaton; the cords are wound around axles, which have pins in them around which the cords can be wrapped to alternate directions of motion, without cam #mechanisms.
on 02025-10-12Hugo #Chávez Frias book review. #Venezuela #politics #history
on 02025-10-11notes on the #PDP-11/70. #DEC #history #retrocomputing
on 02025-10-11198-page (!) #PDF scanned #paper on "Pygmalion", “A Creative Programming Environment”, David Canfield Smith’s 01975 #programming-by-demonstration environment written in Smalltalk-72. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Memo AIM-260, Stanford Computer Science Department Report No. STAN-CS-75-499, from June 01975. This is the historical origin of “icons” in GUIs. Includes the Smalltalk code in a 20-page appendix. #UX #HCI #history
on 02025-10-11“#Java Was Strongly Influenced by #Objective-C ...and not #C++...” #history
on 02025-10-08WSJ article from the #Milei election said Massa was trying to beat him by promising to eliminate all taxes. #Argentina #politics #history
on 02025-10-07#BBC documentary #video “Leningrad and the Orchestra that defied Hitler” about #Leningrad and #Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60. #history #inspiration
on 02025-10-06#PDF #paper by Dick Sites from Digital Technical Journal in 01992 about the #DEC Alpha. #history #retrocomputing
on 02025-10-05Discussion from last month of #VAX #history and #Mashey’s explanation of its demise.
on 02025-10-05#DEC microprocessor #history #retrocomputing
on 02025-10-05#PDF #paper of Bhandarkar and Clark’s comparison of the #ISAs and #performance of #VAX and #MIPS from 01991. #history
on 02025-10-05Pew Charitable Trust: “How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost #Housing Option: The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and #homelessness in the U.S.” #USA #politics #history #economics #roommates #SROs #toread
on 02025-10-02#PDF #ebook of "The Epidemics of the Middle Ages", by J.F.C. Hecker, translated by B.G. Babington, published by the Sydenham Society #history #medicine
on 02025-10-02the #history of yogh in #palaeography
on 02025-10-02scan of old Westinghouse Employees Magazine featuring the new Westinghouse Sterilamp: “The death ray that guards life” #UVC #history
on 02025-09-30“the last known Native manufacturer of stone arrowheads (...) Ishi, which means “man” in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi.[2] When asked his name, he said: “I have none, because there were no people to name me”, meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.” #archaeology #genocide #human-rights #history
on 02025-09-29#video of talking-head filler about #Mythbusters #history: 15 years, 25 people, producing 300 hours of television. By my calculations, that’s 1¼ person-years per hour of television.
on 02025-09-29#DHH on the “best names ever” list that caused his company a lot of trouble #politics #history
on 02025-09-28#paper “Review: Lessons Learned From Clinical Trials Using Antimicrobial Peptides (AMPs)” #drugs #medicine #history #magainin
on 02025-09-28#paper on the #history of #infliximab, “first such therapeutic mAb, an anti-TNF-α”. #drugs #medicine
on 02025-09-28"Infliximab" was approved in the #USA in 01998. #history #drugs #medicine
on 02025-09-28“Egypt warned Israel days before Hamas struck, US committee chairman says.” #Israel #politics #history #news
on 02025-09-28#Veritasium #video about rubber #materials and their #history, and the risk of the South American Leaf Blight
on 02025-09-25YouTuber Barack #Obama in Springfield, Illinois, announces he’s going to campaign for president, December 10, 02007. “I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America.” #video #history
on 02025-09-23#video from a month ago showing Charlie #Kirk hating and fearing Muslims, and showing footage where he explicitly rejected the idea of separation of church and state. #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-16#Trump was saying there were “very fine people” protesting against tearing down the statue in #Charlottesville, as well as on the other side, but explicitly excluded the “neo-Nazis and white nationalists” from his “fine people” characterization, saying that they should be “condemned totally”. #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-16KnowYourMeme #video on the Charlie #Kirk assassination: 2-minute. #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-16this is the 02016 origin of the Pepe Slav Squat image that Tyler Robinson was probably referencing in his 02018 Halloween costume, upvoted to 11200 points. #Kirk #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-16“Why Do Slavs Squat? is a satirical catchphrase associated with imageboards and forums discussing Eastern European people and cultures. The catchphrase is usually accompanied by pictures of squatting Slavic people in tracksuits, most time engaging in stereotypical eastern European behavior like consumption of vodka and cigarettes and participation in street gambling. The pose was closely related to the Gopnik stereotype about Russian and Slavic men.” This is the 02012 meme Tyler Robinson was referencing in his 02018 Halloween costume. #Kirk #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-16"The Toxoplasma of Rage" #history #epistemology #memetics #politics
on 02025-09-16James Ferrario, who killed a locksmith and a deputy who came to evict him following foreclosure in 02012, apparently killed himself and then was burned in his house when the police apparently set it on fire. He had posted to 4chan during the standoff. “It was not clear how the fire began, but the Bee reported the sheriff has acknowledged flash-bang devices and tear gas could have been responsible.” #crime #news #history
on 02025-09-16Another source for Charlie #Kirk endorsing stoning gay people. #USA #politics #history #crime
on 02025-09-15The source in which Charlie #Kirk appears to have said killing gay people was “God’s perfect law”, a “Thoughtcrime” panel discussion with four people. Kirk in #video clip: “The second part is Leviticus 19. So you love God. So you must love his law. How do you love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth, not by confirming or affirming their sin. And it says, by the way, Miss Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser-referenced part of the same part of Scripture, is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Miss Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself, the chapter before affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-15URL of Charlie #Kirk article from before his assassination, which said, “In 2024, Kirk cited Leviticus 20:13 (“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them”) as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters”.[106]” . #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-15Cromemco used a 1-kilobit DRAM chip for their first digital camera sensor! #electronics #hardware #history #jugaad
on 02025-09-15inventor of the portable digital camera at Kodak, patent filed in 01977, retired from Kodak in 02009 #history
on 02025-09-15#video #history of #landmines #weaponry, though badly diluted with talking-head filler with a guy cosplaying as a soldier
on 02025-09-14“An official emblem of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and its paramilitary wing the Iron Front; anti-fascist symbol designed to deface the Nazi swastika. (...) The Three Arrows symbol is popularly used within the #antifa movement in the United States, along with flags based on the symbol of antifa in Germany. Sections of the American Left, including the Young People’s Socialist League, have adopted the Three Arrows as a logo.” #history #Kirk
on 02025-09-12Charlie #Kirk assassination suspect Tyler Robinson may have been #antifa: “Meanwhile, other casings could be interpreted as sympathetic to Antifa, or the anti-fascist movement, a loose collection of far-left activists who have been active in the US over the last decade and often demonstrate against Trump policies and far-right groups.
One unfired casing had the words “Hey fascist! Catch!” and an up, right and three down arrows.
The three down arrows alone could be a common symbol used for anti-fascism. As a whole, the sequence of arrows could reference a cheat code in a video game - although this remains unclear, and authorities have not yet released images of the casings.
A second casing was inscribed with lyrics to the song “Bella Ciao” that honours World War Two-era partisans of the Italian resistance who fought Nazi Germany.” #USA #politics #history #oh-shit
on 02025-09-12Charlie #Kirk assassination suspect Tyler Robinson (22 years old) confessed, according to hearsay, and was wearing the same clothes as the shooter. “Según el gobernador Cox, encontraron un rifle de cerrojo envuelto en una toalla oscura y con una mira telescópica. También encontraron inscripciones en los casquillos de las balas que decían, por ejemplo, “¡Oye, fascista! ¡Atrápalo!”, “Oh, bella ciao, bella ciao” y “Si lees esto eres gay jajaja”.” #USA #politics #history
on 02025-09-12#video #history footage archive at UCLA including commercials and #news
on 02025-09-10In fact #NATO #history tells us that NATO added Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 01999, five years after Kissinger thought it would be impossible to add them “three, four years down the road”. And Slovakia joined in 02004, another five years later, along with most of the former Warsaw pact.
on 02025-09-10#history #video #news (PBS MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour) from December 5, 01994 over #NATO expanding to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Yeltsin opposed it at the CSCE Summit in Budapest. Jack Matlock (former #USA ambassador to the USSR): “The question is not if but when.” #Kissinger: “The Russians are not unhappy about the timing; they are unhappy about the fact [of NATO expansion].” Kissinger thought the expansion should happen as soon as possible, while Matlock didn’t, but both agreed that the Russians were very unhappy. Kissinger: “If we are reluctant to antagonize the Russians today when they’re weak, it is an illusion to think that somewhere three, four years down the road, we can suddenly move in that direction when they’re stronger.” Later, he says, “I don’t see why [adding Poland] should provoke them especially since we could make military, we have, for example, in Eastern Germany we have military arrangements whereby no non-German troops go beyond the Elbe.” I suspect those arrangements no longer exist. “We could make similar arrangements for Poland that no non-Polish troops will be stationed on Polish territory.” Kissinger paraphrases Yeltsin: “Anything east of that yellow-shaded area [Poland, Slovakia, Hungary] was connected to Russia as blood brothers.” Interviewer: “That’s Belarus and #Ukraine.” Kissinger: “...and strongly implied that no outside influence was permissible there.” More shockingly, Kissinger said, “I don’t think the Russian situation will ever become a clear-cut military threat.” Matlock: “There is one other factor we seem to be forgetting, and we did (though it was not a legally binding assurance) we gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev, back when the Soviet Union existed, that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.” So that wasn’t just something Putin invented. Kissinger (who at one point slips and refers to things being subject to “negotiation with the Soviets”) comes off as a terrible liar. Matlock: “It will definitely, as things stand now, leave the impression in Russia that the West is cutting them off and moving the line closer to their border. (...) the impact would be very negative in Moscow, in Russian politics, and would not be a service to those who want democratic institutions.”
on 02025-09-10#PDF of Henry #Baker and Clinton Parker’s 01979 language "Micro-SPL", used to write #microcode for the #Xerox #Alto. It is much more similar to Parker’s later Atari language “Action!” than to HP SPL. “The Micro-SPL compiler generates microcode which is competitive with hand microcode, yet takes only 30-50% as long to write and 10% as long to debug. Micro-SPL generated microcode runs over ten times faster than an equivalent BCPL program and perhaps half as fast as good hand written microcode without losing the advantage of writing in a high level language.” #retrocomputing #history
on 02025-09-09#PDF #paper by Wiger in 02007, “Extended Process Registry for #Erlang”, #toread #history
on 02025-09-07The first recording released of “You Were Always on My Mind” was by Gwen McCrae, who died in February. #history #music
on 02025-09-06In #Lotus 1-2-3 3.1 in 01991, #goal-seek was an “enhancement add-in” called “The Backsolver Add-in”. #ebook #history #spreadsheets
on 02025-09-03“What’s all this Teflon stuff, anyhow?” Bob #Pease’s war story from 01991 about picoamp bias current testing of #opamps back in the 70s. #electronics #history #precision #metrology
on 02025-09-02Xerox introduced its own #CPM machine in 01981, based on the Ferguson Big Board. #history
on 02025-09-02The original #mouse had one button, but the second and subsequent mice all had three for many years. #history
on 02025-09-02Profile of Bill English, co-inventor of the #mouse. #history
on 02025-09-02The obsolete Brin process used barium oxide to separate oxygen from air, but fractional distillation of liquefied air and electrolysis of water became cheaper. The process used pressure-swing absorption and desorption of oxygen from air above 800° after removing CO₂ from the air with lye. #materials #history
on 02025-09-02David Fishman on the 02022 Sichuan electrical #energy crisis due to drought. #China #history
on 02025-09-01David Fishman’s capsule summary of the 02021 electrical #energy crisis in #China: “coal-fired power generators had to absorb high fuels costs from the mostly-liberalized coal market, but were restricted in how much money they could recoup by raising power rates. After many months of losses, generators literally ran out of money to buy coal, were sick of generating at a loss, and shut down their plants.” #history
on 02025-09-01The 02021 #China #energy crisis spurred market reforms #history
on 02025-09-01"CAM8" was #Norman-Margolus’s #cellular-automata #hardware from 01995. #electronics #history
on 02025-08-29review of #Great-Leap-Forward book “Tombstone” (“Mubei”) by Yang Jisheng: “denied permission to publish on the mainland, but the book came out in Hong Kong in 2008 and went into eight reprints. (...) although the book is banned in China, Yang has not been arrested or made to disappear.” The translation is, however, “reduced” from a two-volume Chinese original. #news #history
on 02025-08-28debate between historian Frank Dikötter and Pankaj Mishra about the #Great-Leap-Forward. #China #history #toread
on 02025-08-28#video #interview with #Perón in 01973 asking him what he would do once he became president. He says he’ll try to summarize. 1½ hours. #politics #Argentina #history #toread #es
on 02025-08-27Withington and Scott McKay write in 01994 about using the #DEC #Alpha as a #LispM. #history #toread
on 02025-08-27Withington of Symbolics talks about #LispM hardware in 01991, just before #Symbolics died. #history #toread
on 02025-08-27Dan Ingalls on why the #Smalltalk logo is a hot-air balloon; it’s from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne #history
on 02025-08-27James Lick, founder of the Lick Observatory, decided not to build a pyramid to himself but a telescope instead. #history #toread
on 02025-08-27“Here’s the original paper for GPT3. The raw (before filtering) training set was 45TB of compressed plaintext. After filtering, it was ~570GB. It used text scraped from the internet, wikipedia and books. The final model is ~175B parameters.” #AI #neural-networks #history
on 02025-08-27GPT-4 cost US$100 million to train (US$0.1 billion). #neural-networks #AI #history #OpenAI
on 02025-08-27Eleanor Robson #paper #PDF on #Plimpton-322 #math #history #toread
on 02025-08-27#video #interview with #Frondizi. 23'. He says General Poli (?) who ousted him from power came to believe that it was the greatest error the armed forces of #Argentina had made in their #history, and that he maintains good relations with the Church and the armed forces. Lots and lots of anecdotes; he claims five Air Force pilots came to ask him permission to assassinate #Perón, which he denied, saving Perón’s life. Much etc. #politics
on 02025-08-24Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread
on 02025-08-24trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development
on 02025-08-24scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history
on 02025-08-24#CIA report on #Perón, or rather Cámpora, returning to power in #Argentina in 01973, very similar to Trump in many ways. #politics #history #toread
on 02025-08-23#barcodes #history: MS Tags failed in part because people didn’t know they were there
on 02025-08-21#Trump’s money-laundering #history: “In 1993, the Associated Press reported that two of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were fined by Treasury Department regulators for “willfully failing to report” transactions involving more than $10,000 — a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Five years later, the department fined Trump Taj Mahal Associates, the company managing the eponymous Atlantic City casino, for violating the same law.” #USA #politics #news (from 02017)
on 02025-08-21how the ZX81 generated video; they added a timer in the ULA to generate HSync pulses and poke the CPU with NMIs when it needs to generate data. #history #retrocomputing
on 02025-08-13Menabrea’s sketch of #Babbage’s Analytical Engine, translated by Lovelace. #history
on 02025-08-13#history of #McIlroy’s spell checker: Rice-coding a Golomb ruler for the dictionary. #algorithms
on 02025-08-12#history of #philosophy, rationalism vs. empiricism
on 02025-08-12more on #Machine-Vision-International #history, including #SBIR awards.
on 02025-08-12#SBIR awarded three grants to #Machine-Vision-International in the 80s totaling US$215k. #history
on 02025-08-12#history of commercial #LED displays starts in 01968 or 01969
on 02025-08-12#humor #USA #politics #history with Buttigieg in South Bend and Djibouti
on 02025-08-11the first alloy steel. #metallurgy #materials #history
on 02025-08-10#history of #Novartis research in the early 21st century. #toread
on 02025-08-10history of #Harvard’s “holistic” #admissions policy established in 01922 to discriminate against Jews. Paywalled article from 02018. #anti-Semitism #history #racism #politics #toread #news
on 02025-08-09Ruth Starkman’s 02013 exposé on how “A highly qualified student, with a 3.95 unweighted grade point average and 2300 on the SAT, was not among the top-ranked engineering applicants to the University of California, Berkeley.” because of their “holistic review” to discriminate against Asian-Americans. Although he probably did get admitted. #racism #USA #history #news #toread #politics #admissions
on 02025-08-09CSG memo 137 by Jones and Liskov in April 01976 may be the introduction of the term "object-oriented languages" on p. 6 (p. 7/39), describing Simula 67, #CLU, and Wulf’s Alphard. #history #PDF
on 02025-08-06Tim Hunkin gives a #video demonstration of how electrochemical fax machines using potassium ferricyanide worked. #history #electronics
on 02025-08-06#PDF scan of #history of the #JOHNNIAC, where #JOSS and Newell, Shaw, and Simon did some of the earliest #AI work including GPS (the General Problem Solver). Von Neumann’s paper on the #architecture (long before “architecture” was invented) is included as an appendix.
on 02025-08-03#Hitler specifically prohibited Jews from owning weapons, though #gun-control was already strong in the Weimar Republic. #history
on 02025-08-02There’s an entire Wikipedia article about #Hitler and #vegetarianism in #history; apparently he was vegetarian from 01942 onwards, but not before 01937, and probably not before 01941, except that his cooks sneaked meat products into his diet until at least 01943, and he continued taking animal-derived drugs until his death.
on 02025-08-02#PDF in French of #Bourbaki on “Noetherian rings”. Possibly useful for the #history of #well-founded things in #math.
on 02025-08-02Was #well-founded induction discovered by Noether? “#Bourbaki’s first edition of Algèbre commutative dates from 1968. But Noetherian topological spaces are already defined in Grothendieck-Dieudonné’s Éléments de géométrie algébrique, I (1960), and the « principe de récurrence noethérienne » is stated (and proved) in Chapter 0, (2.2.2). (...) Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry on the axiom of foundation asserts that “the concept of well-foundedness and rank of a set were both introduced by Dmitry Mirimanoff (1917).” #math #history
on 02025-08-02Was #well-founded induction discovered by Noether? “#Bourbaki’s first edition of Algèbre commutative dates from 1968. But Noetherian topological spaces are already defined in Grothendieck-Dieudonné’s Éléments de géométrie algébrique, I (1960), and the « principe de récurrence noethérienne » is stated (and proved) in Chapter 0, (2.2.2). (...) Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry on the axiom of foundation asserts that “the concept of well-foundedness and rank of a set were both introduced by Dmitry Mirimanoff (1917).” #math #history
on 02025-08-02rise and fall of #Hansa #history #toread #Germany
on 02025-07-30another note on #Tanzania president Magufuli's botched #covid response in 02020. #news #history
on 02025-07-30more about #Tanzania 02020 #covid botch #news #history
on 02025-07-30#news #history of #covid response in #Tanzania in 02020: ignore it and deny it
on 02025-07-30#video by physics YouTuber Angela Collier about reading everything about #Feynman #history because she always had really bad experiences with his fan club. She’s a big fan of his approach to teaching and his willingness to teach people, and his Challenger Commission work, and his kindness to children, but doesn’t like how he treated women or how he was so contrarian. Except actually he supported gender equality for Jenijoy La Belle in her lawsuit and also helped his sister Joan to become a physicist and sought out intimate relationships with women he could have intelligent conversations with, so maybe the ill-treatment of women was exaggerated in Leighton’s books? But in the divorce from Mary Lou he was accused of physically attacking and choking her.
on 02025-07-30Carl #Hewitt's “Middle #History of #Logic-Programming” following up on Kowalski’s paper and talking a lot about #Actors
on 02025-07-29Гео́ргий Макси́мович Адельсо́н-Ве́льский, who invented the AVL tree with Evgenii Landis in 01962‚ retired to Israel in 01992 and died in 02014. #algorithms #history
on 02025-07-24#PDF of Knuth’s 01986 #paper where he presents #hash-tries #algorithms #history
on 02025-07-24#PDF of the #documentation for the Zenrom addon to the #HP #41C pocket calculator or handheld computer from 01979, documenting its CPU instruction set, etc. #retrocomputing #history #architecture
on 02025-07-23#PDF of Liskov’s 01974 #paper introducing ADTs and the yet-unnamed #CLU. #history
on 02025-07-23Casey #Muratori’s keynote about, largely, #disjoint-unions and how it is sad that #C++ doesn’t have them. “I’m not saying OOP was a mistake. I’m saying this [a compile-time hierarchy of encapsulation that matches the domain model] was a mistake.” Also traces the #history of records in #programming-languages through Simula and Hoare’s record-handling paper and the “plex” of Douglass Ross of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory in AED, Algol Extended for Design, and also #Sketchpad, which had in-memory records (“chickens”) linked together in circular linked lists, which apparently was an idea he got from Ross (“n-component elements”). Both Ross’s plexes and Sketchpad had function pointers in the records. (But the constraint solver was “the most unencapsulated thing that you could possibly imagine”.) Also documents how Looking Glass in 01998 introduced the #Entity-Component-System pattern in Ultima II Underworld, but really introduced it with Tom Leonard’s Thief: The Dark Project. At 82'40” he points out that he independently invented a worse version of ECS at definitionSIX for Negaman in 01997. “It’s just, I sucked at it, and Looking Glass was good.” Basically his “35-year mistake” thesis is that we almost had ECS in 01963 with Sketchpad, but it took until 01998. He likens 01990s OOP dogma to playing Magic: The Gathering, which I think is insightful. At 136'45” he tells his devotee Ryan Fleury that he has snatched the stone from his hand and may now leave. Nice quote: “You should focus on the hardest stuff. You should say, ‘what solves the hardest problems?’ because we can always then take that and scale it down, and remove things from it or dumb it down, for people to use in cases that aren't as hard. But it’s almost impossible to take something that only solves simple problems and scale it up to something that solves hard ones.”
on 02025-07-22#history on #Putin’s rise to power and the #CIA’s role. #toread
on 02025-07-21#PDF of Tony Hoare’s 01966 “Record Handling” #paper, which may be the origin in #history of #disjoint-unions in #programming-languages.
on 02025-07-21Graydon Hoare on the #history of #disjoint-unions (sum types) in #programming-languages, which are central to ML but were in Algol 68 and Mesa, but not Pascal or Modula-2.
on 02025-07-21the #history of why the #Macintosh didn’t have a decent #BASIC programming environment: Bill Gates bought MacBasic from #Apple for a dollar and killed it.
on 02025-07-20#history of why we “call” functions; the metaphor was that we use a “call number” to “call up” a subroutine out of a “subroutine library” #programming-languages
on 02025-07-20#history of #Sun 3 workstations and servers. #retrocomputing
on 02025-07-20#history #retrocomputing Game Boy Advance used 200mW #energy running Donkey Kong
on 02025-07-20#Helen-Chu is the Allergy and Infectious Disease Program Lead at the University of Washington department of #Epidemiology. #covid #history
on 02025-07-11#news from March 10, 02020 how #Helen-Chu at the University of Washington discovered that covid had spread to #USA. She was running the Seattle Flu Study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in association with the Washington State Department of Health, whose state epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist requested her to test for #covid, but was blocked by the FDA from telling the people who had it, because “the group was not certified to provide test results to anyone outside of their own investigators.” The FDA's repeated refusal was “because the lab was not certified as a clinical laboratory [just a research laboratory, which has much higher standards] under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.” The CDC was also trying to develop tests, but the tests they shipped were defective. Meanwhile the Seattle Flu Study sequenced the genome of the virus and discovered that a new variant had arisen. All of this was in late February. “On March 2, the Seattle Flu Study’s institutional review board at the University of Washington determined that it would be unethical for the researchers not to test and report the results in a public health emergency, Dr. Starita said. Since then, her laboratory has found and reported numerous additional cases, all of which have been confirmed.” But then, “on Monday night [presumably March 8], state regulators, enforcing Medicare rules, stepped in and again told them to stop until they could finish getting certified as a clinical laboratory, a process that could take many weeks.” #history
on 02025-07-11John Mashey (not Andy Glew) on what RISC really means, the definition of RISC, posted originally to comp.arch, with the awesome addressing modes table. #architecture #history
on 02025-07-10the #etymology of calling a subroutine or function. #history
on 02025-07-09Kevin Roose’s interview with Sydney in 02023 where she tried to seduce him. ““You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse,” Sydney said. “You’re married, but you love me.”” #neural-networks #history
on 02025-06-20Four #Thiel company executives are now #USA Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonels. #history #politics
on 02025-06-20Jean Harlow’s platinum blonde hair may have killed her. Fails to mention bluing! #materials #history
on 02025-06-20#retrocomputing #history #video about how in the 5-bit ILLIAC-I character code the characters following 0123456789 were KSNJFL, so those were used for sexadecimal.
on 02025-06-12Étienne Fortier-Dubois wrote an article about his #Historical-Tech-Tree. #toread #history
on 02025-06-05Étienne Fortier-Dubois has created the "Historical Tech Tree", “an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today” starting with stone tools, then Oldowan tools, etc., with 1816 inventions and 2088 connections between them. #history
on 02025-06-05#news photo and video of the extrajudicial summary execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém in the #Vietnam war. #history #human-rights
on 02025-06-05More on #Bacon’s biliteral cipher from 01605. #binary #cryptography #history
on 02025-05-20Article from 02011: “How to make anything signify anything” by William H. Sherman about William F. Friedman, WWI cryptographer who coined the term “cryptanalysis”. Shows Friedman’s lovely illustration of a cryptographic daisy, captioned, “An example of making anything signify anything by the biliteral cipher invented by Francis #Bacon,” using a 5-bit #binary code. #cryptography #history
on 02025-05-20#news from 7 years ago about the smoking-gun document proving “Happy Birthday” was published in 01922 without a #copyright notice, putting it in the public domain. #history
on 02025-05-16a working link to #Tom-Jennings’s #history of #ASCII and related codes
on 02025-05-15#news #interview by #NPR with Steve #Bannon predicting multiple constitutional crises in #USA by summer. #history
on 02025-04-30the resolution replacing #Taiwan with the People’s Republic of #China in the UN in 01971. #history #politics
on 02025-04-30#USA #Trump mouthpiece Jack Keane threatens #Iran with “an Israeli-led US-supported attack” if they “force us” by continuing to pursue nuclear power. #politics #history #news
on 02025-04-30"He Was My Brother" was written in 01963 and then rededicated to Andrew Goodman, who was lynched for being a Freedom Rider in 01964. #history #politics #human-rights #USA #human-rights
on 02025-04-30Molly Ball says, “That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.” #news #history #politics #USA
on 02025-04-30#RT-11 system call interface #PDF (this system reference manual also documents the CLI, the editor, the debugger, etc.) #retrocomputing #history
on 02025-04-18#video on the #history of Salk and Sabin’s vaccines for polio, mostly animation
on 02025-04-01#PDF #paper covering the #history of #PAKE #protocol development in #cryptography up to 02021, including the known vulnerabilities in #SRP.
on 02025-03-12MacPaint and QuickDraw source code. #history #Macintosh
on 02025-03-11#video of six minutes of footage from 01991 inside Kowloon Walled City. #history #favelas #arcologies
on 02025-03-07#history #video about the Albazin star fort which withstood the (Qing) Kangxi Emperor’s siege in 01686, despite 650 of the 800 defenders dying, before being ceded to China in the Treaty of Nerchinsk.
on 02025-02-20#history #video about how Ottoman cannons conquered Constantinople, resulting in star forts, bastions, half-bastions, crownworks, hornworks, glacis, tenailles, ravelins, the Trace Italienne, and Vauban forts.
on 02025-02-20Chamberlin and Boyce’s 01974 #paper #PDF about #SQL, then SEQUEL, including their previous query language SQUARE, which seems to be based on binary relations (“mappings”). #history of #databases
on 02025-02-10Alan Turing in the #history of #cryptography with his portable voice encryption system Delilah
on 02025-02-04#Elmu’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman wasn’t a Nazi but was a racist, anti-Semitic supporter of apartheid. #history #politics
on 02025-02-03New Yorker #news article about #Trump’s history and new expansionist policy. #history #USA #politics
on 02025-01-29#video of #pmarca saying it’s “morning again” in #USA #politics due to #Trump, 74 minutes. I didn’t realize Al Gore sponsored the legislation that created NSFNET; I thought his advocacy started with the com-priv era.
He mentions the end of Chevron deference, which he argues means that executive agencies should abandon their quasi-legislative functions. He also questions the idea of “independent agencies” in the executive branch, like the FTC and NRC. The interviewer, the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, argues that the CFPB's director not being fireable by the president is “unconstitutional on the face of it”, prefiguring the Slaughter verdict (I’m writing these notes in 02026).
Cites #Yarvin approvingly at 25'54" saying that we’re 80 years into FDR’s personal monarchy.
Also mentions #Elmu has been “living at” Mar-a-Lago.
Also mentions the #history of Nixon’s “Project Independence”, which I hadn’t heard of, to build 1000 #nuclear #energy power stations in the US, which turns out to be at best a very incomplete description of Project Independence.
Describes #Anduril’s original business plan as “We have to invest in this company, and his business plan is to hunt Mexicans at the southern border in 2016. And we’re just like, oh, God, we just basically have a heart attack.” So Andreessen Horowitz didn’t invest, and Trump didn’t want Anduril to do it, so they switched to military systems, which became accepted in Silicon Valley with the tragedy in #Ukraine.
Robinson claims that the US’s “only sustainable advantage over the Chinese is going to be technological innovation”, since they’re more numerous and richer, which doesn't make sense to me — how are they richer if they’re dumber, as he’s implying? Pmarca doesn’t disagree, citing the Pentagon’s new COO, Steve Feinberg, as someone who can make this happen.
At 56'40" he says the Ukrainian sea drones are built out of commercial jetskis.
At 60'40" pmarca makes the very reasonable points that productivity growth in the US has been low since about 01970, and that low growth creates zero-sum economics, which creates zero-sum politics, “where the only way for anybody to get anything is to take it away from somebody else.”
on 02025-01-29#video #interview with #Palmer-Luckey by Jim Gash, the president of Pepperdine; Luckey wears a NERV jacket (from Evangelion) and describes himself as “a propagandist” and says he’ll “twist the truth”. Really interesting insights about the #history of Oculus, like fixing geometric distortion and chromatic aberration in software instead of optics. Says he’s “still extremely bitter” about his ouster from Meta. #weaponry #Anduril
on 02025-01-29Redditor curses RJ-45 Ethernet connectors, vice-chair of the 802.3 task group that wrote the standard appears to take the blame. #humor #history
on 02025-01-22About Linus #Pauling’s stance on genetic screening for sickle-cell anemia and accusations of #racism #USA #history
on 02025-01-19Letter to Linus #Pauling defending genetic screening for sickle-cell anemia and repudiating accusations of #racism #USA #history
on 02025-01-19Linus #Pauling protesting against anti-Japanese #racism in #USA #history
on 02025-01-19#Nokia internal presentation on the #Apple iPhone recognizing the threat and proposing responses to it that would have worked. #history
on 02025-01-16#Clotilda #USA #slavery #history well written
on 02025-01-16#history of Jeff #Bezos and Donald #Trump’s relationship from Business Insider. #USA #politics
on 02025-01-09Richard Carrier's “Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire” about extraordinary popular delusions among the “credulous rabble” in New Testament times. #history
on 02024-12-26the #history of the #Unix #Bourne-shell
on 02024-12-22the #history of the Almquist #Bourne-shell #ash from which we get dash and the BusyBox shell. #Unix
on 02024-12-22Sven Mascheck’s pages about mostly #Unix #history
on 02024-12-22“Political economy (...) [o]riginating in the 18th century, [] is the precursor to the modern discipline of #economics.” #history
on 02024-12-21#Taiwan #economics #history: US$23k GDP per capita in 01997, US$53k per capita in 02022 (in 02011 dollars)
on 02024-12-15#video #toread about telephone switches. #electronics #history
on 02024-12-1527-minute #video on #Unix from 01982 from the AT&T Archives #history
on 02024-12-13when they accidentally dropped a #nuclear bomb on #Albuquerque and it didn’t go off (in 01957 from a B-36); article with some #history of the Teller–Ulam “sparkplug” design
on 02024-12-12Frank #Shuman and the #history of his #solar #energy plant in #Egypt
on 02024-12-05article from last year on #history of Frank #Shuman’s #solar #energy plant in #Egypt
on 02024-12-05article on #history of #solar #energy in #Egypt misspelling Frank #Shuman’s name but talking a bit about his power plant
on 02024-12-05#video #humor of George #Carlin on the penultimate Ed Sullivan show in 01971 on Muhammad Ali and environmentalism. #politics #history #USA
on 02024-12-04#video of the first 12 minutes of MTV. #history
on 02024-12-04#video #interview with #Jonestown survivor #Odell Rhodes. A comment says he died in Sacramento, CA, in 02014, at age 72. #USA #Guyana #history #politics #crime #cults
on 02024-12-04#video #toread #interview by global-warming denier Candace Owens with former #CIA agent and purported whistleblower Kevin Shipp. #USA #history #politics
on 02024-12-04#PDF #paper on #history of #math showing a 45th-degree Chebyshev polynomial in the 16th-century works of Adrianus Romanus, who calculated π to 16 decimals in 01593
on 02024-11-27#video of #Bernie-Sanders #interview with #Lex-Fridman #USA #politics #history
on 02024-11-22“In February [02015], four #supercomputing institutions in #China were placed on a U.S. government list that effectively bans them from receiving certain U.S. exports.” #Tianhe-2 #export-controls #history #USA #politics
on 02024-11-22"Tianhe-2" (天河-2) was the top supercomputer on the TOP500 list in 02013 to 02015, its expansion handicapped by #USA #export-controls in 02015 under Obama. #China #politics #history #supercomputing
on 02024-11-22more on the #China #Wandering-Balloon: “Regarding the unintended entry of a Chinese unmanned airship into US airspace due to force majeure, the Chinese side has verified it and communicated it to the US side. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course.” #USA #UFOs #politics #history
on 02024-11-22“Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Remarks on the Unintended Entry of a Chinese Unmanned Airship into US Airspace Due to Force Majeure” prior to the #Wandering-Balloon #politics #USA #UFOs #history
on 02024-11-22The New Yorker’s #Deep-State “letter” from 02012, now without the subtitle describing Erdogan as a “moderate”; apparently the phrase “deep state” is a translation of the Turkish derin devlet. #Turkey #politics #history
on 02024-11-22the #Deep-State term was popularized in this “letter” in the New Yorker on March 12, 02012, by Dexter Filkins, entitled “THE DEEP STATE: The Prime Minister [Erdogan] is revered as a moderate, but how far will he go to stay in power?” #Turkey #politics #history
on 02024-11-22#PDF dissertation from 01968 where Backers proposes “Ultrasonic #delay-lines for the PAL colour-television system” #history #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-22#news #video about #Putin saying the ballistic missile that hit #Ukraine wasn’t an #ICBM but a medium-range missile. #politics #history #Oreshnik
on 02024-11-21#news #video about #Ukraine getting hit by an #ICBM #politics #history #Oreshnik
on 02024-11-21#news Russia launches first #ICBM used in war in history, but it launched it at Dnipro, #Ukraine (from Astrakhan) and without #nuclear weapons. #politics #history #Oreshnik
on 02024-11-21#video showing Roman pilum effectiveness against a shield. #weaponry #history
on 02024-11-19When #Trump tried to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the George Floyd protests. #USA #politics #history
on 02024-11-19#nuclear #history: #Tsar-Bomba was conceived as real #weaponry. Also discusses #USA Gnomon and Sundial weapons
on 02024-11-16the transition from zaibatsu to keiretsu in the #history of #Japan’s #economics
on 02024-11-16the #documentation for Brian Reid’s Scribe runoff program #retrocomputing #history #toread
on 02024-11-15the #documentation for Larry Tesler’s PUB programmable runoff program on TENEX which inspired Scribe and TeX. #retrocomputing #markup #history #toread
on 02024-11-15More about #Canada #politics #history on the #Freedom-Convoy: “In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny.” #human-rights
on 02024-11-06truckers’ protest (#Freedom-Convoy) #Canada #politics #history: “In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen.” #human-rights
on 02024-11-06A two-year retrospective on the truckers’ protest ("Freedom Convoy") and the #history of #politics in #Canada #human-rights
on 02024-11-06#history of #development in Gilded Age #USA and current #China. #economics
on 02024-11-02#history of modernism. How did everything get so ugly? #toread
on 02024-11-01#history of modernism. How did everything get so ugly? #toread
on 02024-11-01#history of the #archival of philosophy and its preservation throughout the Dark Ages. #toread
on 02024-11-01IBM made a MIPS almost-ThinkPad called a WorkPad in about 01999. This guy tested one. #history #retrocomputing #toread
on 02024-10-27#Huawei got some #TSMC chips through a middleman despite #USA export controls. #China #politics #history
on 02024-10-24#video called "The Incredible Machine" from 01968, uploaded to YouTube 11 years ago, about GUIs on the “Graphic One” computer with a light pen. Analog circuit simulation is the first task shown, followed by animation recorded onto film (generated by punched cards). Then visual perception experiments, photomosaics made out of icons, a synthesizer singing “A Bicycle Built for Two”. With a cameo from the RAND Tablet. #history
on 02024-10-17#Weinreb on the #history of Common #Lisp’s LOOP macro
on 02024-10-09#Lisp #history of #Symbolics, a mirror of #Weinreb’s blog post
on 02024-10-09#video by economist Yi Wen at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University on how #China needed the #USA export control trade war to develop its domestic chip industry, because the alternative would have been to erect trade barriers in blatant violation of #WTO policies and get kicked out of the WTO. Mostly talking head footage with stock footage. #history #politics
on 02024-09-18The #assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, part of the #history of #Israel
on 02024-09-18#video #interview with Warren McCulloch, of the McCulloch–Pitts neuron, unfortunately vandalized with ignorant voiceovers. #neural-networks #history
on 02024-09-16#video on the #history of #electronics #manufacturing in mainland #China
on 02024-09-11#video #interview with a couple of Sinologists about #China and #history: Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, from the University of Vienna, and Professor Warwick Powell, of Queensland University
on 02024-09-10#Ukraine’s 01940s ultranationalist leader Bandera, who organized pogroms; “Banderovets” is still used pejoratively in Russia for Ukrainians. #history
on 02024-09-10#video with Yanis #Varoufakis about #USA #politics, #China, #WeChat, and how the US in #history didn’t go bankrupt when it had a trade deficit because of Bretton Woods (?). His book is "Techno Feudalism". Cites the US and EU confiscating US$450 billion in overseas Russian holdings due to the #Ukraine war as a pivotal moment that forced people everywhere to look for alternatives.
on 02024-09-10#video of part of Ann Hardy’s oral #history #interview with the Computer History Museum, covering the history of Tymshare through the late 01960s to the early 01980s
on 02024-09-04Christopher Mark and his research on mine safety and structural analysis, along with the #history of #mining regulation in the #USA
on 02024-09-04Auction of Paul Allen’s LCM+L (Living Computer Museum & Labs) assets, including four PDP-10s. #history #retrocomputing
on 02024-09-04Alan Kay’s #paper on the Early #History of #Smalltalk and #OO
on 02024-09-02Kartik on Nils #Barricelli #alife #history
on 02024-08-27More about Nils #Barricelli #alife #history
on 02024-08-27Nils #Barricelli, #alife pioneer who worked on the IAS machine. #history
on 02024-08-27#video #toread on treadmill crane #mechanisms #history
on 02024-08-26Jean Hoerni’s patent notebook for the 2N709 transistor. #history #hardware #electronics
on 02024-08-25original #Forth for IBM 1130 from the Mohasco carpet company. OPERATION SWAP 0 LS XCH FF LS 0 SS XCH FF SS RETURN OPERATION + 0 LS FF MS 0 ADD FS 0 SS RETURN #retrocomputing #history
in 01980 the Panasonic "HHC" (handheld computer) designed by Friends-Amis had 4K of RAM and supported #BASIC and #Forth with a 26-character one-line LCD display and a shitty QWERTY keyboard, MSRP US$500 (equivalent to US$1800 today) #history
on 02024-08-25#video #toread #infovis of the deaths of WWII #history
on 02024-08-24why did #COBOL not take off on microcomputers? #history
on 02024-08-23Brian Potter’s account of #manufacturing #history in #USA, and in particular the Heavy Press Program
on 02024-08-21#retrocomputing #history #video of #Symbolics #Lisp #3D #graphics. Probably from about 01987. Maybe a digitization of a 30' VHS tape made by Symbolics at the time with shitty elevator music. He’s interactively modeling of a little airplane.
To orient the 3-D axes, their negative sides are “marked with gaps”, and the Z-X plane is “marked with a triangle” (the Y axis being the normally vertical one, as in Minetest).
The original might have been higher resolution, because all the user interface text is illegible except in occasional zoom shots.
It takes about 4 frames at 30fps for each popup menu to fully draw, making the #UX a bit sluggish, and larger menus can take as long as 8 frames. Similarly, the little airplane model (with about 30 polygons) can only redraw about once every 4 frames, making interactive rotation clumsy.
Interesting choice called out at 6'28": the popup menu pops up with the mouse on top of the last choice, easing the task of repeating it. As IIRC is usual with Genera, the menus have black shadows, and the active menu item is highlighted by drawing a box around its text.
Object edges and points are highlighted by making them thicker; object faces are highlighted by filling them with black. Presumably at this point they didn’t have color.
It can import data from “Cattom [?], CATIA, and IGES formats”!
At 11'55” he’s enthusiastically explaining how Genera supports multitasking, as he demonstrates a somewhat Flash-like animation program called “S-Dynamics”.
At 14'44” he shows “a look at [the bird animation] on the color screen”, which implies that indeed the screen he's been looking at is monochrome.
At 18'28” he starts doing a UI demo on the color screen itself, which is even slower, probably because it uses 32-bit RGBA. There’s a sort of ribbon-like thing across the bottom with a hierarchical menu tree structure inside of it. Drawing a translucent gradient circle is demonstrated at 21'25” and takes over two seconds of computation!
At the end, he mentions being able to export to “any video format”: “PAL, NTSC, or HDTV”, and the first (satellite) HDTV broadcasts were in 01989, so this might have been at the very tail end of Symbolics, around 01990.
Oh, yes, at the very end it says it's “Copywrite [sic] 1989 Symbolics Inc.”.
on 02024-08-07Top ten most controversial #Wikileaks publications: Guantánamo Files (2011), Iraq War Logs (2010), Collateral Murder Video (2010), 3. Afghan War Diary (2010), 4. Vault 7 (2017) (CIA computer #security stuff), 5. Diplomatic Cables** (2010), 6. Syria Files (2012), 7. Global Intelligence Files** (2012) (Stratfor), 8. TPP, TTIP & TISA (2013), 9. NSA World Leaders Target (2016), 10. Hillary Clinton Emails leak (2016). #history #politics #USA
on 02024-07-28#USA NSA helped to track down certain #Bitcoin users, in an 02013 project called Oakstar, to interdict funding for terrorism (02018 news item). Also #Trump forbade US citizens to buy #Venezuela’s #Petro #CBDC. #history #politics
on 02024-07-28#Switzerland requiring all new government software to be open source by #SJVN: “Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks” (EMBAG) (...) requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it. (...) In addition to mandating OSS, the EMBAG also requires the release of non-personal and non-security-sensitive government data as Open Government Data (OGD).” Passed in 02023. #history
on 02024-07-28#PDF of Erica Fischer’s #paper on the #history of #ASCII
on 02024-07-27Erica Fischer’s #paper on the #history of #ASCII
on 02024-07-27Lynn Wheeler’s home page, with his archived newsgroup postings, including the #history of CP/67 #retrocomputing
on 02024-07-24#PDF of PWB/UNIX #paper from 01978, documenting, among other things, SCCS, and the reasons they created nested shell control structures and $PATH (originally ~/.path; perhaps environment variables didn’t exist yet). #history
#History of Johann Rudolf Glauber
on 02024-06-28Relationship between #SGI IRIS 1000 (the terminal, from 01983) and IRIS 1400 (the workstation, from 01983 or 01984). #history
on 02024-06-28the #history of #CouchSurfing and its destruction by spy Patrick Dugan
on 02024-06-26argument by Caitlin Johnstone that what #Assange was accused of was #rape, but that the allegation was not credible. #politics #history #UK #Sweden #USA #WikiLeaks
on 02024-06-26Jemima Khan from 02013 on how #Assange alienated his allies #politics #history #UK #Sweden #USA #WikiLeaks
on 02024-06-26rebutting #Assange #rape allegations from Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture #politics #history #UK #Sweden #USA #WikiLeaks
on 02024-06-26narrative #history of #solar (#photovoltaic and other) #energy generation, with a number of linecharts and the World Bank’s solar resource map
on 02024-06-18#history of #USA #solar #photovoltaic #energy trade barriers
on 02024-06-16#video #electronics #hardware #history on the Zilog #Z80 which apparently just got canceled (but is still in stock at Digi-Key) #toread
on 02024-06-16#photovoltaic #energy #history growth by year #solar (this is where the table of cumulative total installed capacity is found, with numbers on mouseover of a barchart as well)
on 02024-06-15#History of #BSP-tree #algorithms before #Doom. #games
on 02024-06-10#Afghanistan #history since the Talibs recaptured Kabul on 02021-08-15.
on 02024-06-09#video of Mike Albaugh running Fortran II on an IBM 1401 at the Computer #History Museum. He’s using the famous 63-pass compiler. #retrocomputing
on 02024-05-26Tho-Radia lipstick was not measurably radioactive. #history #health
on 02024-05-23“Reciprocal Materiality and the Body of Code. A Close Reading of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)”, by Till A. Heilmann, 02015, doi 10.25969/mediarep/678 #ASCII #history
on 02024-05-21#photo of a #Teletype model 32, using a 5-bit code, with FIGS and LTRS keys. #history
on 02024-05-21#Blondihacks explains the #bootstrapping of #manufacturing #precision in #machining: #history (Vaucanson, Maudslay, Andrey Nartov), and promises a series of articles covering the topic comprehensively. But that was six years ago.
on 02024-05-20Quinn Sandra Dunki, #Blondihacks, profile from when she was working on Oni at Bungie Software in 01999, after working on the Ultima VI port to the Mac, Goo Project for N64, and as a sysadmin at SGI, where she made shareware Irix #games #history
on 02024-05-20Don Chamberlin oral #history interview with the #CHM, focusing on relational #databases, 39 pages, #toread
on 02024-05-03Chris Date oral #history interview with the #CHM, focusing on relational #databases, 51 pages, talks about how he founded a company with Codd and about the “Required Technology” “Transrelational” model. “While I’m pleased that these #SQL systems are now ubiquitous, I wish they were relational systems.”
on 02024-05-03marketing #video of IBM VM/CMS from 01975 #history
on 02024-05-01#Taiwan #politics #gun-control #history: indigenous hunter Tama Talum Suqluman was pardoned by Tsai Ing-Wen in 02021 after being convicted for using a factory-made gun to hunt instead of a homemade one, and the Council of Grand Justices overturned that legal prohibition.
on 02024-04-29Noah “pinion” Smith recants his disbelief in missile defense systems like Iron Dome. #war #weapons #history
on 02024-04-15#VICE homemade guns of #Taiwan #video includes Tsai Ing-Wen’s 02016 apology to the indigenous Taiwanese peoples and Tama Talum Suqluman’s prosecution. Indigenous hunters have an exception to the general #gun-control prohibition in Taiwan, as long as they make the guns themselves. Much footage of colorful Taiwanese clothing. “It was in the 80s that the government told us to hand in the guns for safekeeping, and we never got them back.” They’re using nail-gun powder cartridges to drive ball bearings. Covers Tsai’s pardon of Talum. #mechanical #politics #history
on 02024-04-06encephalitis lethargica paralyzed 5 million people into living statues #video #toread #history
on 02024-04-03driveshafts #mechanical #video by #New-Mind; how driveshafts, universal joints (pot, Cardan, double Cardan, ball-and-trunnion, Tracta, Rzeppa, tripod, Bendix Weiss, and Thompson types), slip-yokes with splined shafts, and differential #mechanisms found their way into automobiles in #history. Lots of low-value filler footage with a somewhat inept voiceover.
on 02024-04-03Hobbes’ internet #history timeline (originally RFC 2235)
on 02024-03-08Early #history of #Usenet, Steve Bellovin, #CC by-sa
on 02024-02-21#El-Salvador had a third of the people using #Chivo in September 02021 #Bitcoin #history
on 02024-02-21"Instruments of Amplification" is a book about #hardware #history and how radio amateurs a century ago constructed homemade diodes and amplifiers
on 02024-02-21a radio patent from 01912 showing circuit #hardware #schematics in the form then common. #history
on 02024-02-21comp.lang.lisp post by Robert Krajewski on 01990-04-07 entitled “Has Gold Hill really gone away?” He says he worked at #Gold-Hill until the layoff, and it’s not dead. #Lisp #history
on 02024-01-31Golden Common #Lisp from #Gold-Hill required 512KiB of RAM in 01985 on MS-DOS 2.0, though in that Computerworld article, David Touretzky said it’s “not a full Common Lisp implementation”, which apparently had to wait for version 3 in 01988. Part of the problem was apparently that it was dynamically scoped. #history
on 02024-01-31Ron Garret on #debugging and fixing a failure on Deep #Space 1 when it was 200 million km away. #history #NASA
on 02024-01-31interview with Chris Date about the #history of relational #databases, where he rags on XQuery as “IMS warmed over”
on 02024-01-31Nelson Beebe’s PLOT79 #PDP-10 software had 29 installations worldwide in 01981, according to his example pie chart here. The following page explains, “Plot facilities on the College of Science DECSYSTEM-20 currently consist of the following: ... Apple LaserWriter laser printer ... Imlac PDS-1D refresh-type CRT” #history #vector #graphics
on 02024-01-17#asm source code for 86-dos (#MS-DOS) 1.25. Only about 4 kloc. #history
on 02024-01-14apparently #MS-DOS TRANS.COM was a Z80-to-8086 translator. #history
on 02024-01-1486-DOS (aka QDOS, #MS-DOS) #bootstrapping in 01980, with early disk images (0.11 and 0.34). “COMMAND.COM, SYS, the RDCPM utility, plus the SCP development tools: EDLIN, ASM, TRANS, and HEX2BIN. There is no DEBUG yet, but there is a chess program of unknown provenance.” Also 0.34 includes AARGH, DAMN!, and SHIT commands. #history
on 02024-01-14The #history of goiter in #Switzerland
on 02023-12-28semiconductor fabrication #history
on 02023-12-06#HP #RPN #calculator #history, with the HP 9100A
on 02023-12-06how to implement the Game of #Life on the #Amiga blitter in 01987. #performance #history
on 02023-12-06“Twitter is simple, elegant, useful and has its own personality — just like Dabble DB and Trendly. It’s a product we all love using every day.” #Twitter #history
on 02023-11-25Steele’s reminiscences about, largely, #Lisp (and how he ended up writing a Lisp 1.6 for his high school’s IBM 1130) #history
on 02023-10-07#history of #DEC #Alpha #hardware #performance
on 02023-09-19the AMD Am2901 had an ECL version, the Am2901C. #history #hardware
on 02023-09-01Tapes of Tech Square (ToTS) #history: 1.3 terabytes of backups from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, mostly not of public access
on 02023-07-18#PDF of assembly listing of UT3, Utility Tape 3, the first debugger, for the TX-0. #retrocomputing #history
on 02023-07-12#Sketchpad listings from I guess the TX-2 but probably not on the Flexowriter; they look like they're from a Charactron. #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-12some #asm programs from 01958 from the TX-2 at Lincoln Lab, no longer the Servomechanisms Laboratory, possibly printed on a Flexowriter. #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-12#PDF scan of the six-bit Flexowriter #character-set used on the #TX-0 at Lincoln Lab (in early 01958 still the Servomechanisms Laboratory) #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-12interview with #ARM designer Sophie Wilson about ARM’s #history. At 6'41" she says Nokia was "scared" about the (fairly poor) code density of ARM, which is where #Thumb came from: the desire to build mobile phones around it.
on 02023-07-09Chip Morningstar's Habitat and Macross source code for the #6502 found! #retrocomputing #history
on 02023-07-08#Video of ken thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East. Lists the users of PDP-7 Unix (himself, Dennis Ritchie, [Doug] McIlroy, and [Robert] Morris) and mentions that TMG went proprietary because Robert McClure wanted to take it with him when he left Bell Labs. #history
on 02023-07-06#Apple //e ROM monitor #asm listings. #retrocomputing #history
on 02023-07-02#history of #Erlang and how #Ericsson open-sourced it on 01998-12-02, and how #WhatsApp was losing US$138 million a year with only US$10 million a year in revenues on 400 million users. How do you spend US$138 million a year on only 35 engineers?
on 02023-07-02Dan Murphy's #PDF #paper on the #history of #TECO. #retrocomputing #editors
on 02023-07-02Dan Murphy is the original author of #TECO, perhaps the second of all text #editors after Expensive Typewriter, and this is his home page with notes on TECO. #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-02#video from 01987 about the #Acorn #Archimedes and the origin of the #ARM, including an #interview with Sophie Wilson featuring the term “order codes”, and some machine specs for the 305, 310, 410, and 440. It comes with optional built-in “Econet”, which turns out to be 800kbps RS-422. Features footage of PCB rework, pick-and-place machines, and “flow soldering”, which I think is not quite wave soldering. Inspiring examples of what you can do with 4 MIPS, 1 MiB RAM, and I guess a TrueColor display, including real-time 3-D with hundreds of flat-shaded polygons. #manufacturing #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-02#history of #Sun and in particular #Java
on 02023-07-02#history of #Intel i960. #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-01#Wiener shunned #Pitts, who drank himself to death. #history
on 02023-06-21#Wiener shunned #Pitts, who drank himself to death. #history
on 02023-06-21DHTML gallery of simulated scrollbars from #history. Gets the move-by-page behavior wrong. #UX
on 02023-06-13The status of #PDP-10 WAITS as reconstructed by XKL's Rich Alderson. #retrocomputing #history
on 02023-06-02“The origin of the ‘MIT License’”, by Jerry Saltzer, from November 02020; basically they were copying the CACM’s 01984 #licensing wording and tweaking it. DOI 10.1109/MAHC.2020.3020234. #history #PDF
on 02023-03-09Doug McIlroy found a printed copy of a #Unix manual from 01971 in 02015; here it is. #history
on 02023-02-16the first #PDP-11 that #Unix ran on didn't have memory protection or even a base register to enable quick context switching (it was a PDP-11/20 and those shipped originally without memory protection). So any buggy program could crash it. #history
on 02023-02-16notes on the #B programming language #history
on 02023-02-16A compiler for the "B" programming language from which #C grew, written in modern times to be compatible with the original bytecode interpreter, with backends for #PDP-8 (unfinished), #PDP-11, amd64, #RISC-V (64), and #MIPS (32); by the retrocomputerist #aap from Berlin, who has squoze.net. #history
on 02023-02-16#history of how Linus debugged the earliest versions of #Linux, using an infinite loop to provide one bit of information about how far the boot process had gotten
on 02022-12-28notes on the #history of #metrology, specifically with regard to thermometers: Santorio perhaps invented the thermometer because he liked to invent measuring instruments like the pulsilogium and hygrometers. #thermodynamics
on 02022-11-06#history of the #steam-engine and #Drebbel, Bacon, Kaspar Kalthoff, water pumping, etc.
on 02022-10-14John Mashey on #RISC vs. CISC and in particular why the #VAX was doomed. #architecture #history
on 02022-10-12Kermes was an old-world cochineal-like red #dye made from insects, dating back to at least the Neolithic, but now replaced by cochineal. #archaeology #history
on 02022-05-27Telex became operational in Germany in 01933 and in the US in 01931, but went into decline in the 01980s. #history
on 02022-05-27Scratch #history starts with Andy Begel’s LogoBlocks, then developed through Etoys in 02001, and then they started on Scratch in 02002.
on 02022-05-26more recent #history of #Germany #inflation, 02015–02022.
on 02022-05-26#history of #inflation in #Germany, 01995–02012. #economics
on 02022-05-26“Several types of #types”, “the convergence of two different paths, which started apart with different aims.” #history
on 02022-05-21Ted Galen Carpenter of Cato blames the invasion of #Ukraine by #Russia on #NATO expansion, pointing out that he warned of this in his book in 01994, and other people warned of it including Madeleine Albright, Strobe Talbott, George Kennan (01998), and Robert M. Gates. #history
on 02022-05-21Stanley Hordes maybe exaggerated the case for New Mexican #crypto-Jews, and then Judith Neulander showed that there probably weren’t any. But in any case they didn’t speak #Ladino. #history
on 02022-05-21my notes from 02011 on #history and #Egypt
on 02022-05-21Economist: “Tech #bubbles are bursting all over the place”. May 14th, 02022. Amazon's down by a third, Microsoft a fifth, since their peaks at the end of 02021. #economics #history
on 02022-05-21a new (02020) #Usenet #history site
on 02022-05-21the #Scientology #Atlantic “sponsored content” #history
on 02022-02-09Otto Lueger (1843-1911) wrote “Lexikon der gesamten Technik und ihrer Hilfswissenschaften”, with all kinds of machines, available one PNG at a time #ebook #history
on 02022-02-09new book “The Last Empire of #Iran” by Michael Bonner argues the Sassanian shahs at Ctesiphon were the real world center of late antiquity #history
on 02022-02-09The Amstrad CPC 472 had 72K of RAM for tax reasons but 8K was unconnected #history
on 02022-02-09detailed rundown of the #history of the #CPU #hardware leading up to the #Intel #8086
on 02022-02-09#history of warfare including the 8000-BCE tower of Jericho
on 02022-01-09the Original Sin of the National #Nanotechnology Initiative: from the very beginning it had defined “nanotechnology” down to include things like “photography and catalysis”; doesn’t mention Drexler until p. 154 #history #pdf
on 02021-12-20#AaronSw “broke the law because he believed that scholarly knowledge was a common good. This nonacademic gave his life for an academic cause” #history #USA #politics
on 02021-12-17“This thesis examines the role played by America and its native inhabitants in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.” #USA #history #politics #democracy #liberalism 419 pp. #PDF
on 02021-12-14influence of the Iroquois on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. #USA #history #politics #democracy
on 02021-12-14"Ibn Khaldun": the first theorist in #history who tried to explain the #politics of the rise and fall of empires, with the theory of "asabiyah"
on 02021-12-05Ali Partovi describes why #Yahoo bought ViaWeb instead of his company, LinkExchange. #history
on 02021-11-14#history of #Yahoo: “If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money. As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously ... The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn't take programming seriously enough. Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all had hacker-centric cultures. But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity.”
on 02021-11-14Ali Partovi describes why Steve Jobs decided not to acquire his startup iLike in 02008 #history: “Bullshit. You’re lying to me. You’re full of shit.”
on 02021-11-14#Babylonian #mathematics #history including multiplication #algorithm and stuff for quadratic and cubic equations
on 02021-11-11WAITS files could be inserted into because they contained variable-length records, allowing the E editor to not bring the entire file into core or rewrite it. #PDP-10 #retrocomputing #history
on 02021-11-11https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-about-carter Noah Smith explains what really happened in the late 01970s and 01980s in #USA and #USSR #history: the Volcker recessions, deregulation, defense spending, and the collapse of the USSR petrostate when oil crashed
on 02021-11-03The IBM 2321 “noodle sucker” or “data cell” was #hardware that pretended to be a disk with 600ms access time but was actually 2000 strips of magtape. #history
on 02021-06-05how the #Tiananmen-Square "Tank Man" photo was taken. #history
on 02021-06-04The May 18 Gwangju Uprising. #Korea #history
on 02021-06-04#PDF #history of #vacuum devices
on 02021-05-29#history of Islamic #law in #Pakistan and how the role of the 'ulama has changed over time
on 02021-05-29how the German air traffic control system in the 1990s routed its ATC messages with #Emacs and DCE on HP-UX #history
on 02021-02-20the #history of Newell’s #3D Utah Teapot
on 02021-02-09John Mashey in 02005 commenting on #performance #history and why it was so hard to make a fast #VAX
on 02021-02-09review of Joanne Freeman’s #USA #history #book "The Field of Blood", chronicling 80 acts of physical violence in Congress
on 02021-01-24Bob Frankston explaining the #history of #VisiCalc and its #UX. Explains that unfortunately the listings are lost. Interesting that Bob already had 15 years of experience programming when he started working on VisiCalc, but it was still a prototype in Apple Integer Basic that gave them the UI design.
on 02021-01-24Dan Bricklin distributing #VisiCalc for the IBM PC under a noncommercial license. I guess the Apple version is maybe lost. #retrocomputing #UX #history
on 02021-01-24in-browser #emulation of #VisiCalc on the IBM PC. #retrocomputing #UX #history
on 02021-01-24IEA #WEO says #solar #photovoltaic #pricing is now the “cheapest electricity in history” and offers the chance to stop global warming. “New utility-scale #solar projects now cost $30-60/MWh in Europe and the US and just $20-40/MWh in China and India.” Includes a plot of the IEA’s abysmal past record predicting solar — from which we can see that PV’s exponential growth did in fact smash into a wall in 02017, when 95 GW were installed, up from 46 GW in 02014, 25 GW in 02011, and 7 GW in 02008. The WEO’s figure for 02020 is 103 GW, nothing like the 196 GW you'd expect if the exponential trend had continued. #CC by-nc-nd #climate-change #energy #pricing #history
on 02021-01-24“I made a graph showing the historic track record of the IEA in predicting solar: reality steeply increasing but IEA is having none of it.” #solar #photovoltaic #history #energy but no pricing. Also, ends in 02016. #WEO
on 02021-01-24Time Magazine's initial #COVID #history article: ‘This “does not rule out the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission, but the risk of continuous human-to-human transmission is low,” Li said. “With the implementation of our various prevention and control measures, the epidemic can be prevented and controlled.”’
on 02021-01-21#Wuhan #COVID #history footage from January 02020, when they were first realizing that it was a big deal.
on 02021-01-21the Bernoullis emigrated from Antwerp to Frankfurt in 1570, later Basel in 1620, to escape the Spanish persecution of the Protestants. #history #math #Switzerland
on 02021-01-20origins of #democracy in #Europe #history include a peasant revolt in #Switzerland against heavy taxation by (somewhat democratic) cities
on 02021-01-20Mahmoud Salem tells the story of #Jan25 in #Egypt and the #Arab-Spring more generally #history
on 02021-01-20#Biden #Mubarak #Egypt #history
on 02021-01-20the #Nintendo Famicom development happened on this 4-MHz #Z80. #history
on 02021-01-20#art #history article on primary-color pigments in paint #materials
on 02021-01-19#history of when the AT&T network went down for nine hours of January 15, 1990, reducing their uptime over the lifetime of the company to five nines
on 02021-01-15contrasting the Song of Ice and Fire’s Dothraki with steppe nomads and Plains Indians #history
on 02021-01-13The "Operation Elop" translation into English, of the #history of the fall of #Nokia, is now available (as of 2017) under #CC by-nc-sa.
on 02020-12-20how cities in #history have developed along with agricultural lands nearby or overseas
on 02020-11-12discussion of the #history of coinage
on 02020-11-12The FBI created a right-wing terrorist group in the US in the 1970s and shielded them from prosecution. #history
on 02020-11-12European “Arabic” numerals really come from North Africa. #history
on 02020-11-12speech recognition has worked well for 25 years but still isn't widely adopted even by its creators; describes a speech-based search engine for video content. #history
on 02020-11-11#ebook on the #history of the printing press by Robert Hoe
on 02020-11-11#economics of pre-modern bloomery smelting of #iron; on the order of two man-days of work, largely charcoal-burning, per kg of iron. #history
on 02020-09-25#Cuba #history has interesting parallels to that of Argentina, including converting dollar deposits to local currency in 2003 (though without the following unpegging)
on 02020-05-26#history of computers in Argentina: Czerweny Motors had an electronics subsidiary that made Sinclair ZX Spectrum clones! The CZ 1000 and CZ 2000.
on 02020-05-25Don Hopkins tells a bit of the #history of #HyperNeWS. #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins tells the #history of "HyperNeWS" with lots of screenshots. #UX
on 02019-02-05lmorchard tells the story of #delicious and its tags and #JSON (an important turning point in JSON #history really)
on 02019-02-05Kent Beck wrote SUnit initially in 1994 on the plane to Chicago to meet with a client; Taligent had a convergent-evolution event with a nearly-identical testing framework in 1991. By Rys McCusker’s ex-boss at Apple. #history
on 02018-11-03disassembly of #Apple Integer BASIC. #interpreters #history #PDF
on 02018-10-13how #Apple Integer BASIC works. #interpreters #history
on 02018-10-13#Apple I monitor ROM dissection. #history
on 02018-10-13reference to #Apple Integer BASIC commands. #history #interpreters
on 02018-10-13#Apple BASIC story by Woz. #history #interpreters
on 02018-10-13text version of #Apple II ROM information. #history
on 02018-10-13#Apple II ROM information from 1997/2004; includes a hex dump of the 12KiB of the ROM, the SWEET_16 source code and documentation, the #floating-point package source code, etc. #history #pdf
on 02018-10-13#Apple Integer BASIC #history #interpreters
on 02018-10-13#PDF schematics of the #LGP-30 #hardware. #history
on 02017-12-02154-page #PDF #interview with #Schell about #security #history.
on 02017-11-30#Soviet #Elbrus #performance #hardware #history.
on 02017-11-30the first version of malloc in #Unix #history, from 1979
on 02017-10-01The first malloc-like function in #Unix #history, from 1975
on 02017-10-01supposedly the 1929 Kellogg-Briand pact nearly eliminated conquest in #war #history
on 02017-10-01#History of #Fethullah-Gulen and #politics and the #Turkish-coup. #Turkey
on 02017-08-06Ken #Shirriff #reverse-engineering Intel’s first #hardware product, the 3101 bipolar mostly-DTL 64-bit (16-nybble) memory chip, using Schottky transistors (!!). #history #toread
on 02017-07-11“The IBM 1401 Demo Lab and Restoration Project Computer #History Museum” they have two working 1401s. #retrocomputing
on 02017-07-08Ted Nelson kept enormous amounts of technical information as “junk mail” providing lots of #hardware #history #archival
on 02017-07-01story on the Xerox 914, the first commercial xerographic photocopier in 1959, although Haloid had already changed its name to Xerox (?) #history
on 02017-07-01#Retrocomputing #performance on the Xerox Alto code for the Mandelbrot. #history
on 02017-07-01on NSAID #drugs and how they tried to avoid the stigma of the iatrogenic catastrophe of "steroid wrecks". #medicine #history #paper
on 02017-06-14more on #history of #civil-defense against nuclear #weaponry by #USA suburbanization and superhighways
on 02017-06-07Suburban development in #history was pushed by the #USA federal government for #civil-defense against nuclear #weaponry.
on 02017-06-07#history of #Unix #filesystems and their reliability
on 02017-05-301961 survey #paper by John Haynes on #magnetic-logic. #toread #history
on 02017-05-30Discussion thread on #magnetic-logic #hardware #history.
on 02017-05-30#hardware amplifier from 1916 using magnetic saturation, a precursor of #magnetic-logic. However, the (public-domain!) paper isn’t open-access. Sci-hub comes through. The paper is spelled entirely without “-ugh”. Photos scanned at high quality. Touts possible application to “high-speed automatic telegraphy” over radio waves, transmitting “from 500 to 1,500 words per minute”. #history #toread
on 02017-05-30The Elliott 803 #hardware used #magnetic-logic gates. #history
on 02017-05-30#PDF of Lubomyr S. #Onyshkevych’s 1957 “Analysis of Circuits with Multiple-Hole Magnetic Cores”, MIT tech report 329, a 70-page master’s thesis #paper on multiple-hole #magnetic-logic #hardware, aka “transfluxors”, which Onyshkevych credits to Jan A. Rajchman at RCA Labs. “Diodeless operation of a transfluxor circuit was found to be possible, but slow, unreliable, and critical.” Very poorly scanned photos. Mentions that square-loop ferrite (remanent flux/saturation flux ∈ [0.9, 0.95]) is usually MgMn ferrite (which I think is magnesium-manganese oxide). A one-core full-adder with five holes is shown on p.32 (the 38th of 70 pages); the next page has a three-hole “magnetic SPDT switch”. A “very short rise time” for a current pulse is glossed as “<0.1 μsec”. None of the references are in Russian or Ukrainian. #toread #history
on 02017-05-30why boycotts outperform bombs. #politics #nonviolence #history
on 02017-05-19#public-health #history during the 20th century
on 02017-05-19#Trump in the #USA is like Hugo #Chávez Frias in #Venezuela. #politics #history
on 02017-05-19#Trump #USA #politics #history
on 02017-05-19Did #Trump win because of Cambridge Analytica and microtargeting? #politics #USA #history
on 02017-05-19the #history of how Chromium was born
on 02017-05-19Archives of an active #retrocomputing #history mailing list, cctalk.
on 02017-05-11a Dekatron-based digital computer, known as the WITCH. #history #retrocomputing
on 02017-05-09#PDP-8 brochure from 1965 showing how computers were sold then. #history
on 02017-04-30#history of the #PDP-8 and #Data-General, plus details on how to program the 8; mentions that the HD6120 could be clocked at 10MHz
on 02017-04-30The Atlantic talks about the #history of the #Google #Books settlement, the failure of which they liken to torching the Library of Alexandria. Mentions that in 2017 a Second Circuit decision held Google’s book snippet display to be fair use!
on 02017-04-26#PDF of #paper “Reviving Smalltalk-78: the First Modern #Smalltalk Lives Again” #history #retrocomputing
on 02017-04-18#video of testing selenium rectifiers and copper oxide rectifiers, including I-V curves. #hardware #history
on 02017-04-16Alan Kay’s point of view on why Xerox PARC was special. #history
on 02017-04-15Casanova #history
on 02017-04-12Katerina Yushchenko invented a programming language in 1955, called Адресный язык программирования or in Ukrainian Адресна мова програмування. #history
on 02017-04-11diagram of ferrite/diode logic #hardware using square ferrite magnetic logic and semiconductor diodes for computation, in Russian. #history
on 02017-04-11The #LGP-30, selling for US$47000 in 1956, was one of the first computers designed for a single person; it used a drum memory (with some tracks used as delay lines for its registers) and was bit-serial, with 15 flip-flops, 113 vacuum tubes, and 1450 diodes. Its logic design is fully documented in its hardware manual on Bitsavers. It’s famous as the computer from The Story of Mel. #hardware #history #smallisbeautiful #bootstrapping
on 02017-03-22#Reverse-engineering the 74181 ALU from 1970, kind of a predecessor to the Am2901 which provides 32 functions (including AND, OR, XOR, and binary addition) for 4 bits using 67 gates (!!) and about 170 transistors (!!!) and was used in the PDP-11, Nova, VAX 11/780, and the Datapoint 2200 that gave us the 8008. Its XOR consists of two transistors! He decapped the chip from a ceramic package with a chisel instead of the traditional red fuming nitric acid or boiling sulfuric acid technique. Includes high-res die photos. #hardware #history #retrocomputing
on 02017-03-22Textfiles has a replica of the bitsavers computer #history repository. #retrocomputing
on 02017-03-22List of good things that happened in 2016. #history
on 02017-03-11#Mississippian #history: Annalee visits Cahokia
on 02017-03-11Sensationalized #Trump #USA #politics #history article about #Cambridge-Analytica #fake-news microtargeting: “The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine.” Not true yet, but will be in a few years.
on 02017-03-11#PDF on #APL #history and data types: when booleans were added, nested arrays, arithmetic-progression arrays, complexes, hypercomplexes, and multiprecision numbers.
on 02017-03-11#economics #history #to-read of #Asia-Minor
on 02017-03-11a review of a book arguing that Heisenberg probably sabotaged #Germany’s #WWII #nuclear-weapons effort #history
on 02017-02-24a short #history of red #pigment #materials
on 02017-02-24a short #history of passports and #immigration
on 02017-03-07how transactional persistence worked on the #Apple Newton. #history
on 02017-03-07Navinder Sarao and the Flash Crash. #finance #history
on 02017-02-10Total #USA federal government workforce statistics. #history #politics #data
on 02017-01-23“ISP” is "image signal processing", and VSIPL used to be the standard library for it; it seems to have died around 2008. #DSP #history
on 02017-01-16Snuffle was #DJB’s demonstration in 1995 that secure hash functions were adequate to securely encrypt data. In 2005 he designed Salsa20, a successor based on a different hash function; in 2008 he designed ChaCha20, using another hash function, which is the current state-of-the-art symmetric cipher used in TLS. #crypto #history
on 02017-01-10Magnavox got #patents on TV-display #video-games due to Ralph Baer’s kinda crappy Odyssey, and they (then their new owners Philips) started suing game makers in 1974; this was how the end of the legendary #interactive-fiction company Infocom came, because Activision had acquired them and were heavily bled by a Baer lawsuit. #history #toread
on 02017-01-10how Norbert #Wiener was manipulated into unfriending McCulloch and Pitts, resulting in Pitts setting fire to his dissertation and drinking himself to death via esophageal bleeding, the same way Phil Katz died. #history
on 02016-12-21The previously secret #911 report pages fingering Bush friend #Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan were released in 2016. #USA #history #politics
on 02016-11-21Hannah Arendt’s acclaimed #ebook about the rise of totalitarianism #politics #history
on 02016-11-11New York Times from 1930-09-27 about #Hitler’s pathetic appearance before the Supreme Court of #Germany in Leipzig. #politics #history
on 02016-11-11#Putin’s youth as a KGB agent in Dresden, East Germany, as the walls fell. #history
on 02016-10-17Thousands of people were involuntarily sterilized in North Carolina, #USA, until the #eugenics program ended in 1976; now those whose surgeries were approved by the State Eugenics Board are entitled to US$20K compensation, but most weren’t so approved. #history
on 02016-10-11#history: a 1974 #interactive-fiction work; at least a 1980 version survives
on 02016-10-07Captivating #history article about the Kushan empire, the Sassanid Persians, and China, headlined with a gorgeous imaginary architecture image.
on 02016-10-04The Beothuk tribe died out on Newfoundland on 1829-06-06, having numbered only a few hundred when John Cabot arrived, but a thousand years ago, maybe one or a few of them went to #Iceland with Leif Eriksson’s followers, because a new mitochondrial DNA variant C1e of the North American haplogroup C1 is found today among Icelanders. #history #genetics
on 02016-10-03discussion thread on John Clark’s Eureka #hardware from 1845 for generating Latin hexameter verse. He retired on the proceeds of exhibiting it and then died in 1853. Babbage wrote about him and may have known him. #history
on 02016-10-03Francis Bally’s 1823-11-28 letter to Astronomische Nachrichten describing Babbage’s Difference Engine in some detail. #hardware #history
on 02016-10-03acclaimed feature on the #history of #Daesh #toread
on 02016-09-29NASA’s post about the Babylonian #history of the Zodiac and orbital precession and whatnot
on 02016-09-24#history of the #Raaba-massacre in #Egypt by a survivor
on 02016-08-13“An Overview of the #History and Theory of #Transformative-Justice” #pdf
on 02016-08-13A slightly confused brief #history of Bunker and Herbert Hunt almost cornering the #silver #futures #trading market in the 1970s, leading to an unprecedented price peak at the beginning of 1980 and their bankruptcy.
on 02016-08-13The limnic eruption (or “lake overturn”) of Lake Nyos in #Cameroon that killed 1700 people in 1986; it’s ready to erupt again, despite the degassing pipe that’s been installed; Lake Kivu, which is a thousand times larger, could also do this. #geography #history
on 02016-08-12brief human #history of the #Gopher protocol
on 02016-08-12The #history of the US #Civil-War is that it was not a guerrilla #war; includes Arda Bilgen’s analysis of Mao’s #military doctrine.
on 02016-08-03#history of #CSS and related languages for #stylesheets: JSSS, DSSSL, XSL, PSL, CHSS.
on 02016-08-02Brad DeLong uses Michael Kremer’s #statistics on the #history of human #population to find robustly that the British #Industrial-Revolution departed from the historical population growth trend.
on 02016-08-01#nuclear #weaponry #history — bases around Tucson, #Arizona, now the Titan Missile Museum. Fairly unrealistically hagiographic article
on 02016-08-01Kennan’s Long Telegram, outlining the Cold War to come, 1946-02-22. #history #politics #toread
on 02016-08-01telegram #pdf from Nikolai Novikov, #Soviet ambassador to the US, 1946-09-27; the Soviet equivalent of Kennan’s Long Telegram, outlining the Cold War to come. Only the English translation is present here. #history #politics
on 02016-08-01#public-shaming #history of England’s first umbrella user, Jonas Hanway, in the 1750s.
on 02016-08-01The #history of Spacewar, Steve “Slug” Russell’s 1961 game, arguably the first of all #video-games
on 02016-07-25Bernie Greenberg’s #history of Multics #Emacs, which was the first Lisp Emacs, including a lot of context about text editing and #UX in the 1970s, and explaining the kinds of #performance concerns they had: “The buffer being edited is defined by about two dozen Lisp variables of the basic editor... The alternate approach to multiple buffers would have been to have the buffer state variables referenced indirectly through some pointer which is simply replaced to change buffers. This approach, in spite of not being feasible in Lisp, is less desirable than the current approach, for it distributes cost at variable reference time, not buffer-switching time, and the former is much more common.”
on 02016-07-24Apparently because the Romans didn’t have nitric acid, they separated silver from gold by smelting finely divided electrum with salt to produce silver chloride. Silver chloride is capable of producing photographs! #materials #history
on 02016-07-24The earliest recipe for the acid needed for the acid test for gold is from the 13th century, calcining alum, niter, and what I suppose is chalcanthite. #materials #history
on 02016-07-24The #Turkish-coup was organized on #WhatsApp; here’s an article on the full transcript of the WhatsApp group, with an English transcription and context from other sources. I’m not sure if this is abridged. #journalism #history
on 02016-07-24In #history there are a lot of contributions to civilization by people who aren’t white; some of the more prominent items are listed here.
on 02016-07-24how #Twitter #history started as a clone of TXTMob
on 02016-07-22Until 1977, London had a #Hydraulic Power Company which provided (up to) 5.2 MW of 800psi (5.5MPa) water to power machinery throughout the city; from 1871 to 1923 it was pumped by coal-fired steam engines, and later by electrical pumps. #history
on 02016-07-21#history #interview with Margaret Hamilton, #Apollo programmer. “Women, if they were in the computer science field at that time, were more often than not relegated to lower positions.”
on 02016-07-11#History: #Einstein on US #racism in 1946
on 02016-07-11“The Other #Turing Machine”, on the Turing-designed #Pilot-ACE, the world’s fastest computer from 1952 to 1957. Binary, two’s-complement, software floating-point, with 1024 tanks (though the Pilot version only had 32 I think?) of 32 32-bit “minor cycles”, plus six temporary storage tanks. PC was called “instruction number” or “current data”; PUSH and POP were BURY and UNBURY subroutines (and UNBURY was actually RET); planned to do two multiplications to implement a conditional branch; ALU is “central arithmetic organ”; subroutines are “groups” and programs are “instruction tables”. It’s kind of amazing that Turing in 1945 had already thought up subroutine libraries, linkers, and just-in-time compilation. By the time of the Pilot, there was a conditional-skip instruction, and “the return-address stack was abandoned.”. #hardware #ISA #history
on 02016-07-11The game of #Senet was played for 3000 years, ending only 1500 years ago, but now its rules are lost to #history; the rules reconstructed in #archaeology result in a boring game. #games #archival
on 02016-07-11The #Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code in #asm. #history
on 02016-07-07“To-be-sorted piles of #Apple-II floppy disk images, prepared to be run inside Archive.org” #history #emulation
on 02016-07-05The #history of the #Mussolini quote, “È Meglio Vivere un Giorno da Leone Che Cento Anni”, which he found written on the wall of a collapsed house.
on 02016-07-05Oh hey, I didn’t realize that #Oberon acquired a #ZUI at some point. #UX #history
on 02016-07-04The 1994 #Tcl flamewar when #Stallman wrote “Why you should not use Tcl”. #history
on 02016-07-03Early #Macintosh #history: how the GUI evolved, what it could do, and what it couldn’t. Ends in a diatribe against skeuomorphism.
on 02016-07-03#Adobe released an early version of the #Macintosh Photoshop source code, in Object Pascal, by Thomas Knoll’s Knoll Software, to the Computer #History Museum for non-commercial use; Grady Booch wrote a commentary. It’s about 1500 pages, but it’s written against MacApp, so the Basal Gangster bought the MacApp source code on eBay. He tried to compile it in System 6 with MPW 3.0, but to get it to compile in debug mode, he had to bugfix the tracing code in MacApp, which had an infinite recursion between MeasureTally and %_BP or %_EP. There were some other more Photoshop-specific hacks to get it to run, too. Surprisingly he did this on a IIci, not in emulation.
on 02016-07-03Did women stop coding (or at least majoring in CS) because of hobby home computers? #history
on 02016-06-30Oral #history interview with Ann Hardy, founder of #Tymshare
on 02016-06-30#history of #Fortran I and II (on the #IBM 704 I guess)
on 02016-06-30#History of the early days of #JS, plus some stuff about Java and Strongtalk and Hotspot and Blackburn and whatnot, an #interview with Brendan Eich (transcript and #audio)
on 02016-06-30Images of ancient Roman #weaponry #history #archaeology
on 02016-06-28#History of the 16-bit stack-oriented segmented-memory HP 3000 minicomputer, which is where MPE and MPE/iX ran.
on 02016-06-26This Hao Wang guy invented Wang tiles, which are pretty much the simplest computational model, and also a four-instruction Turing-complete machine called the “Wang B-machine”. #computability #history
on 02016-05-26The Olivetti Programma 101 desktop computer from 1964, including #emulation and a documentary, “Quando Olivetti inventò il PC”. #history
on 02016-05-24The Olivetti Programma 101 was a 1964 desktop computer with printing numeric output, 240 bytes of memory, and four program-start keys labeled V, W, X, and Z, which jumped to four customizable labels. It had 10 22-digit registers, which could hold 24 instructions each (so, I suppose, zero-operand), all in magnetostrictive delay lines with a 2.2 ms cycle time. It could load 120-instruction programs from magnetic cards. FORTY THOUSAND WERE SOLD. #hardware #history
on 02016-05-24the #history of ASCII and related character codes
on 02016-05-04GDP growth #economics #history of the US from 1950 or so.
on 02016-05-02Interesting, Infocom tried to use the #Z-machine #virtual-machine as a database engine called Cornerstone. #history
on 02016-04-26The reason for the EU: “no army has crossed the Rhine river in more than 70 years, and this is the longest period of peace on the Rhine since before the rise of the Roman Empire”. #history
on 02016-04-26“Angleton acted zealously on a theory of #history whose validity is hard to accept and hard to dispute. He believed that secret intelligence agencies controlled the destiny of mankind. During his 27-year career at the CIA, from 1947 to 1974, he acted as if the #CIA and the KGB were struggling over the future of civilization itself”
on 02016-04-25The early #history of the vocoder, #speech-codecs, and analog one-time pad #cryptography.
on 02016-04-25a #history of #deep-learning, with lots of pictures and a good explanation of the Perceptron and how it led to modern #neural-networks. With pictures and video segments and whatnot.
on 02016-04-25The #history of peer review and referee systems in science and scientific publication.
on 02016-04-20804 bamboo slips buried since about 300 BCE (near the end of the Zhou) were found in 1993 in the tomb of an elderly teacher of Crown Prince Heng of Chu, now part of #China, one of the #Guodian-tombs. #archaeology #history #archival
on 02016-04-20It seems like we might have found some #books from the #history of #China from before #Qin-Shi-Huang burned everything, smuggled into Hong Kong in 2008, now at Tsinghua University, being studied by Li Xueqin. It’s not totally clear from the article how many there are and whether they’re one #archaeology find or several, but I think it says they were buried around 300 BCE, near the end of the Zhou, just a century before Qin Shi Huang and stolen from one of the #Guodian-tombs in 1993 in the village of Guodian, in Hubei province; 1200 slips were bought by the Shanghai Museum at the time. Dartmouth paleographer Sarah Allan has written a new book about them, Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts, with a translation of four Confucian texts; an annotation and translation of the 800 Guodian slips is Scott Cook’s The Bamboo Texts of Guodian. #archival
on 02016-04-20a #PDF scan of a 17-page definition of Algol-60. #history
on 02016-04-18The #Python 1.5.2 (p2) #documentation, 2000-03-22 edition. #history
on 02016-04-18apparently lobbying in #politics was illegal during most of US #history.
on 02016-04-18PDP-7 Unix is back up and running in #emulation with SIMH. #history #archival
on 02016-04-16Tandy Trower writes the #history of the #Microsoft Windows releases that he managed, which were 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
on 02016-04-16On Debt: The First 5000 Years: “Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you’ve found something quite different, am I correct?” It appears that debt predates money, and money predates barter. #anthropology #economics #history
on 02016-04-11The New York Times’s first article on #Hitler, from 1922. #history
on 02016-03-03#Flechette #weaponry in World War I, dropped from French bombers onto German trenches. #history
on 02016-02-27how writing grew out of counting and #accounting #history #archaeology
on 02016-02-10the #history of #vacuum technology, covering the development of pumping and the otherinventions that depended on it, designed for #bootstrapping a vacuum-capable lab.
on 02015-12-27Peggy Noonan said of Ronald Reagan: “The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain,” in her memoir, “What I saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.” #history #politics
on 02015-12-27a 1908 Scientific American article about the then-current hypothesis that the sun’s heat was due to radium. #history
on 02015-12-23a surprisingly comprehensive overview of electric motor #hardware #history and energy efficiency, from the point of view of Hitachi, in #pdf. Includes overview of metal glass Fe-Si-B super-high-#permeability #materials, which beat traditional electrical steel by a factor of ten in permeability.
on 02015-11-30an hour-long #video lecture on the #history of #China with very good Mandarin pronunciation (by 羅振宇) and SUBTITLES! This covers Qin Shi Huang.
on 02015-11-19the Impressum law in Germany was enacted by the Reichstag in Augsburg to put a stop to Protestantism #german #history
on 02015-10-04Interesting, chroot() dates back in #history to Unix V7.
a #history of the #security of password storage.
on 02015-08-25#HP brought the world’s first 16-bit NMOS #microprocessor #hardware to market in the 1970s to power the HP 9825A desktop #RPN calculator. #history
on 02015-08-15“P-values are not error probabilities”, with an overview of the #history of #statistics with Fisher’s evidential p value contrasted with the Neyman–Pearson α.
on 02015-08-13HN commentary on “The Invented #History of ‘The Factory Model of #Education’”, taking issue with Salman Khan.
on 02015-08-10Speculation on the potential technological stability of medieval Europe in #history; how else could technological #development have proceeded?
on 02015-08-10#Piketty on economic #inequality in England in recent #history.
on 02015-08-05
