InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop is a story about a laptop from Linspire for $498 USD for sale at Wal-Mart. While it isn’t a Mac titanium, it has 128 MB of memory, 30 GB hard drive, a 14.1″ LCD panel, and a VIA C3 processor, 1.0 GHz. See the Walmart.com – Balance 14.1″ Notebook Computer with CD-ROM Drive catalog entry.
Category: History of Computing and Multimedia
How the Wayback Machine Works
The Internet Archive is an amazing database of old web sites. James Chartrand pointed me to an interview with the director of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle from January 21, 2002, titled How the Wayback Machine Works. The interview is by Richard Koman and still interesting, especially for those of us interested in text spiders and archives. I was intrigued by Kahle’s claim that the IA is the largest database in the world, “It’s larger than Walmart’s, American Express’, the IRS. It’s the largest database ever built.”
See my previous post on Ghost Sites and the Internet Archive.
How a Computer Works: 1970s books
From Matt Patey, How It Works…The Computer is a site with the 1971 and 1979 Ladybird books on ‘How it works’; The Computer. The pages are scanned so you can see images of the illustrations used.
Euclid’s Window: Geometry to Hyperspace
Euclids Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
Book suggested by Guy
WorldWideWeb browser
Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb, the first Web client is a page on the first web browser called “WordWideWeb” (without spaces.) I came across this reference in a thorough blog entry by Andrea Laue just a text ª Internet or internet which deals with the capitalization of Internet/internet and Web/web. (See my earlier post, Wired Styles.)
Canadian Multimedia: the Cyclorama of Jerusalem
The Cyclorama of Jerusalem is one of the few remaining large panoramas that are still on exhibition. (The other one I know of is at Gettysburg.) Is was created in the 1880s and has been exhibited at the pilgrimage site of Sainte-Anne-de-Beauprè since 1895. Cycloramas are large paintings that form a complete circle creating a “virtual” space where you can immerse yourself in a place and time. As the glossy brochure says, “We claim 3-D as a modern invention but this Cyclorama, in existence for a so long time, gives such an illusion of depth that viewers feel they are among the crowd marching with Roman soldiers…” (p. 2)
My theory is that types of media are like species – you have periods of exploding variety, and then something happens, and all the experiments die out before a particular technology. The late 19th century saw an explosion of different types of immersive media, including panoramas and other optical expositions. Cinema made them all obsolete, effectively wiping the variety out. We are now in another period of expanding diversity – what technology will survive?
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American Mavericks
I don’t know much about new media and music, but CBC is playing a great show by PBS called American Mavericks which is about musical innovation in the US in the 20th century. It covers people like Laurie Anderson and Glass. The web site is serious – with lots of sound and video clips along with virtual instuments.
Mahoney on the History of Theory in Computer Science
I’m reading an article by Michael S. Mahoney in The First Computers. It is titled “The Structures of Computation” and Mahoney (who is one of the best historians of computing I have read – see my previous entry, History of Computing) makes a closing point,
The history of science has until recently tended to ignore the role of technology in scientific thought, … The situation has begun to change with recent work on the role and nature of the instruments that have mediated between scientists and the objects of their study, … But, outside of the narrow circle of people who think of themselves as historians of computing, historians of science (and indeed of technology) have ignored the instrument that by now so pervades science and technology as to be indispensable to their practice. Increasingly, computers not only mediate between practitioners and their subjects but also replace the subjects with computed models. … Some time soon, historians are going to have to take the computer seriously as an object of study, and it will be important, when they do, that they understand the ambiguous status of the computer itself. (p. 31)
I would go further and say that not only historians, but philosophers, and for that matter other humanities disciplines, are going to have to take seriously the ambiguous nature of the computer as instrument and extension in all knowledge disciplines.
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Canadian Early Information Technology: Marconi and Nova Scotia
On our trip out East we visited a number of sites associated with the early history of telecommunications. At Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, a depressed and exhausted mining town (with a great mining museum) there is a small Marconi National Historic Site of Canada managed by Parks Canada. It is a one room museum on Table Head, a flat windy site above the ocean. Here, in 1902, Marconi established reliable radio transatlantic radio communication. (He had successfully recieved the first signals at Signal Hill in Newfoundland a year earlier, but was forced to move.) For more see the Parks Canada History page.
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ACM Queue: Virtual Machines
The recent issue of ACM Queue is about virtual machines and has some excellent articles that explicitly look at the drift in the concept of a VM from the 60s when a VM was a hardware simulation for sharing to today when the a VM, like the Java VM, can simulate a machine that does not really exist.
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