Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Salon 21st | The dumbing-down of programming is an essay by Ellen Ullman on Salon on way wizards and interfaces hide the machine from us. It is a meditation on why Linux is so attractive. The interesting part is when Ullman discovers the history of DOS-Basic in the stripping away of Windows.
Continue reading Layers of Computing

Is there a difference between the halucinations of a confined imagination and virtual reality?

This is one thread in Richard Powers’ brilliant historical fiction about 80s VR and politics, Plowing the Dark. Two narrative threads are intertwined in this book: an artist recruited to develop compelling demos for a VR cave being developed at Seattle R&D lab in the mid-80s; and a Lebanese-American who is kidnapped after going to Beirut to teach ESL. The artist reaches back through the history of art (Rousseau, Lascaux cave paintings, and the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium) to create sites for the VR cave. The kidnapped man reaches back through memories until an ex-girlfriend becomes present. Powers reaches back to that moment in the 80s when VR technology was going to be the next paradigm shift.

The first Gulf war brings all this to an end. The war that may have been virtual in popular imagination.
Continue reading Plowing the Dark of Virtual Realities

M.S. Mahoney – Articles on the History of Computing is a page of links by the Princeton historian to articles about the history of computing. He argues in “The History of Computing in the History of Technology” that “the history of computing has yet to establish a significant presence in the history of science” (p. 1 of the PDF). As a result a lot of the popular history of computing out there is “heroic” and focuses on people or companies and insider knowledge.
Continue reading History of Computing

Temporal Modelling is a project led by Johanna Drucker looking at ways to model time. At McMaster we are getting some 3D environments and visualization expertise and I would like to try developing a 3D time visualization environment.
Continue reading 3D Timelines

History Matrix is a massive timeline project by Shiralee Saul. It weaves all sorts of timelines together into a matrix of events. It is not complete and there are parts that don’t work, but it is ambitious and thought provoking.

Hobbes’ Internet Timeline – the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history is a great history of the Internet with both a timeline, graphs, and bibliography. It was last updated in July of 2003.

Dead Media Project is a project inspired by Bruce Sterling to keep track of media that are no longer used. They have a timeline and notes.
Continue reading Dead Media

What if we organized a project around documenting what computing humanists do. “A Day in Humanities Computing” would be a voluntary project where selected HC people with digital cameras would take pictures of what they are doing and write a TEI encoded document that describes their day. It could be coded with subject headings to allow people to search the journal entries. Above all it should be accessible to give people an idea of what we do.
Continue reading A Day in Humanities Computing

Core77 Articles: Pixelvision is an article on the history of the pixel. I got the link from Matt K’s blog.
Continue reading Birth of the Pixel

The Best of Creative Computing were magazine/book collections of articles on computing and culture from 1976 – 7. There are articles on computer art, AI, computer poetry and so on. It has a Computer Lib feeling. Both volume 1 and 2 are scanned in at: http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/. At this site there are also full scans of other early computing books.