History of technology
Another computer magazine goes down
Another venerable print magazine has bitten the dust. Computer Shopper will be online only after its April issue. PaidContent reports:
You’re reading it here first … paidContent has learned that Computer Shopper will cease print publication with its April issue, due off the press next week, and become online only at ComputerShopper.com.
At Technologizer, Harry McCracken comments:
Shopper’s [...]
The burgeoning Internet
PC World has an extensive presentation showing how the Internet has evolved and mushroomed in the past few years. There are some revealing charts and statistics. For example, the figure below shows that email is now almost all spam.
Another very interesting chart shows the growth in Internet users.
Video clip on the history of the Internet
I previously mentioned the National Science Foundation show on the history of the Internet. Here’s another presentation; It’s an 8-minute video. There isn’t a lot of detail and it omits some things I think should be included but it’s worth a quick look.
Anniversary of the Apple Mac
The Macintosh computer is 25 years old and Macworld has an article giving us a little of the history of the Mac:
In 1977, Apple made a splash on the world stage by introducing the Apple II, one of the world’s first personal computers. In the time between the Apple II’s release and IBM’s introduction of [...]
History of the Internet
As you probably know, the Internet began as a US Defense Department project and was later turned over to the civilian research agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF, in turn relinquished control to the loose administrative setup that exists today. The NSF has prepared a presentation about the history of the Internet. Navigation [...]
The hard drive as it once was
Speaking of hard drives, here is an advertisement from the old days when a hard drive was something special. Remember that a dollar then was worth at least ten times what it is today.
A billion mice
It is now almost 40 years since the invention first public demonstration of the mouse. The original name was something like “graphical user interface pointing device”. One story that I have heard is that the much shorter and quickly adopted tag of “mouse” was due to the young daughter of an engineer who visited dad [...]
Alternative operating systems
It may be mostly a Darwinian world but just because something is the best doesn’t mean it will succeed. History has many examples of this and so does technology. Consider the universal “qwerty” keyboard layout. This is not the most efficient way but better layouts such as the Dvorak never became accepted. Everybody had learned [...]
Computer intelligence
Every time I read the news, I get doubts about the general level of human intelligence so maybe Intel and the futurists who predict that computers will soon be smarter than humans are right. At a recent conference, Intel discussed its prediction:
At the Intel Developer Forum here, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner showed off [...]
Joining man and machine
As I have said before, making predictions about future technological developments is generally off the mark. But as long as you don’t take the conclusions too seriously, speculation on the future of technology can be an interesting form of amusement. Intel is observing its 40th anniversary and is playing the game of looking into the [...]
A lesser-known computer pioneer
The New York Times has an obituary of a computer pioneer who was not well-known outside of his native Britain. I certainly was unaware of the work he did in computerizing the famous British teahouse chain Lyons. Already in the 1950s (!) David Caminer set up a business computer system for Lyons. According to [...]
