Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

▶ Perseus Digital Library: Diachronic View

Perseus Digital Library Diachronic View is a YouTube video put together by Mihaela as part of a project we are working on as part of INKE. We started asking about the evolution of digital humanities interfaces which then led us to asking if there were projects that have been around long enough that their interfaces may have changed. This led us to the Perseus project which existed before the web. Using the Internet Archive and other sources we tried to reconstitute a history of major versions of the interface from the first HyperCard interface. We then created this video to show the evolution. We are now collaborating with Perseus to study the evolution of their interface, to preserve key screens, and to improve the interface for mobile devices.

Why the spammers are winning

The Guardian has a good article on spam,Why the spammers are winning that is based largely on a new book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton. The article tells about what may be the first modern spam message which was distributed on a Sunday evening of 1864 by a telegraph company. The urgent message was from a dentists company advertising their hours.

What is interesting is that spam filtering and spam filter bypassing agents are text technologies that are getting more and more sophisticated. As filters got better spam is no longer a matter for amateurs. Spam is also changing – there are more an more inventive ways to get you to read junk ads. For that matter at the end of Guardian articles there has been a collection of links to articles in the Guardian and elsewhere that feels a lot like clickbait. The links are paid for and provided by Outbrain. They tend to be ad cloaked as stories.

Apple: Their Tablet Computer History

Looking at the Wunder web site I came across this interesting history of Apple tablet designs, Apple: Their Tablet Computer History. We forget that the iPad is their second foray into tablet computing. The first was the Newton MessagePad, of which I had two. As much as I wanted to like the Newton, it was really too big (for a pocket) and didn’t do anything important to make lugging it around worth while. When the PalmPilot came out I switched because it could do the useful things of the Newton (calendar, address book) while fitting in a pocket.

What is interesting about the Apple tablet history is how many designs they went through of which only a few surfaced into products.

Wundr has an Epub authoring tool, Playwrite for publishing attractive works to tablets. Unlike Apple’s iBooks Author, Playwrite authors to an open standard, which is good.

The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton has written an essay about the launch of the Digital Public Library of America that everyone should read. A great writer and a historian he provides a historical context and a contemporary context. He quotes from the original mission statement to show the ambition,

“an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”

The essay, The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton is in the New York Review of Books. A lot of it talks about what Harvard is contributing (Darnton is the University Librarian there), which is OK as it is good to see leadership.

He also mentions that Daniel Cohen is the new executive director. Bravo! Great choice!

Cupid Computers – Student Dating service 1966

Victoria led me to this 1966 form for a student computerized dating service called “Cupid Computer.” You can see the form in context in the University of Waterloo student newspaper, Coryphaeus. See 1966-67_v7,n09_Coryphaeus. Click to read and page forward and you will see the two page insert with the questions you have to answer and send in. Here are some examples.

The Cupid Computer service was apparently “run by students” and would, for $3 give you a list of 3 scientifically compatible dates. They mention using an IBM computer and that the Computronics Company is “The Leader by far in Canadian Computer Dating Systems”. The PDF of the insert (and cover page) is here, 1966-67_v7no9_Coryphaeus.

It is worth noting that this was a student developed service. While serious university computer centers were doing other things, students were developing their own social uses of computers … and long before the web.

Future Hype: Near Futures

I gave a lecture at Kim Solez’s course on the future of medicine and he taped it and put it up on YouTube here:

Geoffrey Rockwell FutureHype LABMP 590 2013 March 7 – YouTube.

This talk came out of a conversation we had at a pub about Ray Kurzweil where I disagreed with Kim about Kurzweil’s predictions. Thinking about Kurzweil I realized how fundamental prediction is. We call it hope. It is easy to make fun of the futurists, but we need to recognize how we always look forward to the near future.

The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art

The Atlantic has a story about The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame). The image (see above) was apparently created by an IBM programmer for the SAGE system and was used as a diagnostic.

According to Tipton, the program that displayed the pin-up image was a diagnostic that tested data flow between the two SAGE computers on site (referred to as the A and B computers). At the end of every shift, as one computer was about to go offline and switch over to the other, the active machine would begin transferring flight and intercept data to the standby machine so there could be a seamless switch over.

Two switching consoles on site were used to handle this process. After running the diagnostic, Tipton describes, if the pin-up displayed correctly on the screen, then data was being transferred between the A and B computers correctly. If the image displayed improperly, then the technicians immediately knew there was a problem.

This reminds me of the story of Lena and the use of her image. Why were so many early images drawn from porn? Does this say something about the male culture of computing in those years that it was cool/acceptable to use pin up pictures when you needed a graphic image?

Thanks to @manovich for this.

Sample on Randomness

Mark Sample has posted his gem of a MLA paper on An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing. I wish I could write papers quite so clear and evocative. He combines interesting historical examples to a question that crosses all sorts of disciplines – that of randomness. He shows how the importance of randomness connects to poetic experiments in computing.

I would recommend reading the article immediately, but I discovered, as with many good works, I ended up spending a lot of time following up the links and reading stuff on sites like the MIT 150 Exhibition which has a section on Analog/Digital MIT with online exhibits on subjects like the MIT Project Athena and the TX-0. Instead I will warn – beware of reading interesting things!