History of technology
The Internet is 40
On September 2, 1969 a small but exceedingly important event took place. Almost no one paid it any attention. In fact, it was the beginning of the revolution that we call the Internet. (Not the Worldwide Web, that came 20 years later.) You can read what one of the participants in this historical event [...]
Missed opportunities
The history of technology is filled with instances of companies missing major opportunities. Xerox failing to capitalize on the pioneering work at its Palo Alto research facility and IBM missing the PC revolution are two of my favorite examples. These two and eight others are discussed in a PC World post, The 10 Stupidest Tech [...]
Profile of Steve Jobs
Anathema to some, adored by others, Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs is always in the news. He has been one of the biggest influences in the tech world but his recent health problems have caused much speculation about his future role. Whatever his future at Apple, Jobs has had a profound influence on personal [...]
PCs from the 1980s
Ah, nostalgia. If you were one of the few who had a PC in the 1980s, you might enjoy a gallery of pictures of old PCs from the recently opened National Museum of Computing in London.
Remembering the HP-35 calculator
Recently, the IEEE History Center recognized the HP-35 handheld electronic calculator from the 1970’s with an award as a Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing. I owned one of these and a nifty device it was. eWeek has an article about it:
The HP-35 was HP’s first product that contained both integrated circuits and LEDs. [...]
How the Internet got its rules
It is amazing that the gargantuan Internet of today is still using pretty much the same rules and methods that were devised at its beginning 40 years ago. It is a tribute to those pioneers who put together the original structure. The New York Times has an article by one of those pioneers about how [...]
For computing history buffs
If you are like me and occasionally have nostalgic moments thinking about operating systems of days past, Computerworld has an article, Gone but not forgotten: 10 operating systems the world left behind. There is also a photo gallery accompanying the article.
Unix, which is still going strong, is approaching its 40th birthday and so Computerworld has [...]
Internet history at the Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is an archive of old Web pages. (The name comes from a time-travel machine in the 1960’s TV cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, specifically the segment, Peabody’s Improbable History.) The archive is a place to go if you want to see what Google looked like ten years ago. It has [...]
Is the WIMP interface obsolete?
WIMP stands for windows, icons, menus, pointing device. It is the way computer interfaces have been constructed since the Alto system was first packaged at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. First Apple and then Microsoft adopted WIMP and it is the way we are still doing things nearly four decades later. It is a [...]
How the Web began
The concept of what became the World Wide Web was in a paper dated 20 years ago today that was written by Tim Berners-Lee. As a scientist, Berners-Lee made his ideas freely available to all. Imagine where we would be if Bill Gates had come up with the same ideas and, true to his credo [...]
The good old days
Do you have fond memories of the good old days? Take a step back in time and recall how the Internet was in the year 1996 with this post from Slate. AOL? Compuserve? Dialup? Maybe the good old days were not that good after all. Actually, people didn’t spend that much time on the Internet [...]
