On this day in 1964 John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz ran the first BASIC program. Designed to be an easy-to-use programming language for students, BASIC has stood the test of time and is probably the first language many of us mastered in our early geek years. The two also created the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, which is pretty much the basis for every multi-user operating system in existence. Thank… → Read More
The year was 1860. Abraham Lincoln was taking the political world by storm, South Carolina had decided it needed a break from the rest of the Union, and the first ever audio recording was made in France by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on his latest invention; the phonautograph (left). The device worked by “scratching sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil… → Read More
Break out your astrolabes and charge up your Leyden jars, fellow scienceographers! Wired has a nice round-up of some of the greatest gadgets from antiquity including the Antikythera Computer — yes, it was a 1st century B.C. computer — and the seamless globe. These gadgets helped our ancestors explore the earth and engineer great marvels. What did your iPod do for you so far? → Read More
I never thought about it this way, but it seems we — us bunch of nerds — have slowly changed the porn landscape. Regina Lynn at Wired points out sites like AbbyWinters.com and Kink.com [feel free to cut and paste but rest assured NSFW] feature models who are a far cry from the pneumo-bots of yore or even the charming ladies of mainstream lad mags. The industry of image has diverged… → Read More
Yeah, I know it’s an annoying GIF, right? I never got into the whole Aibo/Pleo/Robosapien thing but TC headquarters just sent me a Pleo to talk about for the Crunchies and I turned it on for my 2-year-old son. He was immediately entranced. To my jaded eyes, Pleo looks like another attempt at creating a “life form” that can convince you to love it and care for it. Furby was like… → Read More
[photopress:wiredmagiphone.jpg,full,center] Wired easily has the best article on the iPhone you’re ever going to read on this day or any other. It’s about the history and development of the device, from Steve Jobs sensing that his iPod business wasn’t as secure as his stockholders would like (wireless providers and their MP3-playing cellphones were a big concern) to the… → Read More
Bored this afternoon? Boss out of the office? Grab some coffee and read through this fascinating history of Atari from 1971 to 1977. This is a 20-pager, so rock some emulators to get you in the mood before digging in. The History of Atari: 1971-1977 [GamaSutra] → Read More
SiliconUser has a great piece on the history of the Compact Disc. The most popular music medium to date, the CD actually has quite a complex history that makes for a great read. Turns out the idea for the Compact Disc was born in the 1960s and eventually evolved into a combination of emerging technologies. By 1979, a working prototype was shown off in both Europe and Japan with Sony and Philips… → Read More
Today, we must pay homage to a device we take for granted on a daily basis. The Automatic Teller Machine turns 40 years old today and did you know that it started out across the pond before making its way to the US? Creator Shepherd Barron got the idea while sitting in a bathtub, idly pondering how he could get his own cash anywhere in the world or UK. He got the idea of the ATM from a chocolate… → Read More
I don’t know how many of you watched the HBO series “Rome,” but if you’re anything like me, you watched and loved it. Why not take a virtual tour of the city that entertained us for weeks on end? Well, you can’t, really, but you can read about. Scholars from Italy and the U.S. have created Rome Reborn, a 3D model of the ancient city that’s rivals anything… → Read More
We now know the iPhone will be released on June 29. For better or worse, June 29 will from then on be one of those dates that you just know, like July 4, December 7 and any Friday the 13th. So, what else happened on June 29, you know, before the iPhone’s launch? → Read More
Programmers may have no need for the computer mouse, but the rest of us do. Wired went through the trouble of going back in time some 45 years to see how the mouse has evolved from this hulking wooden device to an LCD-laden modern day clicker. Look for future mouse innovations like motion sensitivity (à la the Wiimote) and automatic color changing. The Evolution of the Computer Mouse… → Read More
You can have your Legos, Asimos, and Transformers. I’ll take this 100% analog scripting automaton called the Writer. This little ragamuffin was completed in 1772, and its movements are based on the complex clockwork of Switzerland’s Jacquet-Droz. It’s entirely mechanical, and is powered by a wind-up spring mechanism. Caged kinetics was one of the only portable power sources of… → Read More
In this era of 60-hour video games and Cell processors, it’s easy to forget a small band of dedicated geeks who kept us from touching ourselves too much in high school. People like Richard Garriott created computerized worlds that not only paved the way for games like World of Warcraft and Custer’s Revenge but singlehandedly built the computer gaming industry into the cultural and… → Read More
. But we still like to keep it old school. The Push Button Manor in Jackson, Michigan is about as old school as the concept can get. The modern (for the time) house was equipped with analog mechanics of the “future”, things like windows that close automatically during rain, remote control drapes, and automated dressing table lighting. What’s great is that the home’s owner… → Read More
You can take your Treos, iPods, Laptops, HDTVs, xBoxen, PSPs, and Cellphones and forget them. Do you know where they’ll be in 100 years, or even 10? No way. How about in 2156 years? Yah, that’s what we though. That’s because these gadgets, no matter how practical and ubiquitous, are things we rightly take for granted, they’re the state of the art. None of them are ahead of… → Read More
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