tingilinde

inside the sx-70

Ken Shirriff begins his dive into a landmark Polaroid camera - one of the earliest with some electronics.

 

 

when women got bikes

Just before they got the vote and part of it.

snip

...

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” — Susan B. Anthony,

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15 years

Om comments on the iPhone.

 

smoothly switching sides

A bridge that solved a towing problem during the canal age in Britain.

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

 

christmas shopping by ibm computer

An early primitive social use of an IBM computer - undoubtedly more as an advertising stunt than anything.

An now we have Google, Amazon and Facebook giving bad suggestions.

 

 

great post on analog computers

118 years ago today at 10:35am local time

 

Orville Wright

 

 

brian on where grep came from

Tales from early days of Unix

a tip of the hat to Greg

I knew the story from Ken, but Brian tells it much better.

 

 

jimmy carter and averting a canadian nuclear disaster

A serious hero.

 

an update on the antikythera mechanism

This device continues to amaze.  

snip

...

Much of the mechanism’s design relies on wisdom from earlier Middle Eastern scientists. Astronomy in particular went through a transformation during the first millennium B.C.E. in Babylon and Uruk (both in modern-day Iraq). The Babylonians recorded the daily positions of the astronomical bodies on clay tablets, which revealed that the sun, moon and planets moved in repeating cycles—a fact that was critical for making predictions. The moon, for instance, goes through 254 cycles against the backdrop of the stars every 19 years—an example of a so-called period relation. The Antikythera mechanism’s design uses several of the Babylonian period relations.

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