Farewell, Ceefax: TV teletext service dies; nonsense pages immortalized in...
As Rob noted in an earlier Boing Boing post, the UK television teletext service known as Ceefax ("See Facts") has been terminated. So sad! It began in 1972. I remember staring at the chunky pixelly...
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1951 digital computer restored and rebooted
This is the Harwell Dekatron, aka Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation (WITCH), a 61-year-old machine that was rebooted yesterday to become "the world's oldest original working digital...
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Doug Engelbart (RIP): "The Mother of All Demos"
In memory of computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart, who died last night, please watch this 1968 video of his "Mother of All Demos." Thank you Doug for helping augment human intellect. "The key thing...
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Altair 8800 clone
The Altair 8800 computer cost $621 when it was introduced in 1976. The Altair 8800 Clone is also $621, but it comes with 64k of static memory for free (in 1976, 1k of static memory for the Altair 8800...
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“The Queen of Code,” new short documentary on computing pioneer Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper invented the world's first compiler. This wonderful video directed by Community's Gillian Jacobs is a brilliant introduction to her career and position in the history of computing. My...
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The IBM 1620, an affordable “scientific computer” from 1959.
The IBM 1620 was released by IBM on October 21, 1959, touted as an inexpensive "scientific computer." Some users gave it the acronym CADET: "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try." After a total production of...
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"The Computer Girls," 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine article on women working...
"The Computer Girls," a 1967 Cosmopolitan piece about a weird new field, programming, that was dominated by women. Previously: Miniskirts and Mainframes. [via Clive Thompson]
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Watch: How "oldschool" computer graphics worked back in the eighties
YouTube personality TheiBookGuy produced an easy-to-watch, easy-to-understand explainer piece on how computer graphics worked in the 1980s. In part one of a multi-part video series, he digs into the...
View ArticleMan orders a pizza using a talking computer (1974)
In 1974 a man with a communications disorder made history when he ordered a pizza over the phone with a talking computer built by Michigan State University's Artificial Language Laboratory. He tried...
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This sketch from 43 years ago shows kids playing a video game on their "iPad"
I was going through my copy of Stewart Brand's 1974 book, II Cybernetic Frontiers (1974) when I came across this sketch by computer scientist Alan Kay, who conceived of a tablet computer in 1972 called...
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The Computer History Museum just published the sourcecode for Eudora
Eudora -- first released in 1988 -- was the first industrial-strength email client designed to run on personal computers like IBM PC and the Macintosh; though there are still die-hard users of the...
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"IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from...
Adversarial interoperability is what happens when someone makes a new product or service that works with a dominant product or service, against the wishes of the dominant business. Though there are...
View ArticlePodcast: "IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from...
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my essay "IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization, published today on EFF's Deeplinks; it's another installment in my...
View ArticleKitty: a wonderful early computer animation from Russia (1968)
From Etudes.ru (Google translation): More than 40 years ago in 1968 ... A team led by Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov creates a mathematical model of the motion of the animal (cat). The BESM-4...
View ArticleVisualizing the evolution of the Nvidia GPU (VIDEO)
This is a simple but wonderful little original video that shows each incarnation of the Nvidia GPU, from 1995 to 2019. The company's GPUs, or graphics processing units, are iconic for gamers because...
View Article"Myst" co-creator, Rand Miller, tells "War Stories" about pushing the...
I love the Ars Technica "War Stories" series where they interview designers of some of the most iconic and popular computer/video games on the challenges they faced. This episode features Rand Miller,...
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A guide to Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Heritage Trail
Over at The Startup on Medium, David Laws, semiconductor curator at the wonderful Computer History Museum, has prepared a fascinating guide to Silicon Valley's "high-tech heritage trail exploring...
View ArticleLarry Tesler, the father of cut, copy, paste, has died
Larry Tesler, the Xerox PARC computer scientist who coined the terms cut, copy, and paste, has died. Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study computer science at Stanford University, and after...
View ArticleExplainer video about the digital computer onboard Apollo 11
In the late 1960 NASA engineers were tasked with developing a digital flight computer that took up just one cubic foot of space on the Apollo 11 capsule and the software to guide the crew to the...
View ArticleTrailer for "Insert Coin," a new documentary about the creators of the...
"Insert Coin" is a new documentary about Midway, the Chicago-based videogame developer that transformed the industry with Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and other coin-op...
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