Tag: history
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The Legend of the Homicidal Fire-Proof Salamander
Wired wrote an article about the mythology surrounding salamanders, and it reminds Dan of other animal myths.
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Evolving Computer Words: "Hacker"
Of all evolving computer words, "hacker" is perhaps the most-loaded and controversial. Dan explores how it's changed and whether it can ever return to its original meaning.
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Evolving Computer Words: "GIF"
People think of GIFs as animations for the Web, but that's only a fraction of their story.
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Evolving Computer Words: "Broadband"
Dan continues to examine words whose popular meaning have diverged from their technical definition; today, he looks at "broadband".
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Evolving Computer Words: "Virus"
Of all the computer words that have diverged from their original meaning, "virus" has perhaps diverged the furthest. Dan explains how, and why it matters.
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Ancient Roman 'Pen' Was a Joke Souvenir
The tradition of buying cheap, joke souvenirs for your loved ones while travelling dates back at least two millennia.
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How the Knights Hospitaller 'accidentally' became a major European air power
Let's talk about the point after WW2 where the Knights Hospitaller, of medieval crusading fame, 'accidentally' became a major European air power.
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Metropoloid: A Metropolis Remix
Yaz Minksy and Joe Blair use classic videogames to produce a contemporary soundtrack for epic 1927 silent film Metropolis.
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remysharp comments on "Bringing back the Web of 1990"
A MetaFilter comment I somehow missed in which Remy Sharp acknowledges my debugging of the CERN hackathon to reimplement WorldWideWeb. Squee!
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Yet Another JavaScript Framework
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It is impossible to answer all of these questions simply. They can, however, be framed by the ideological project of the web itself. The web was built to be open, both technologically as a decentralized network, and philosophically as a democratizing medium. These questions are tricky because the web belongs to no one, … -
What Does AJAX Even Stand For?
...Jesse James Garett of Adaptive Path finally gave this use of Javascript a name. He called it Asynchronous Javascript and XML (thankfully shortened to Ajax). Ajax wasn’t a single method or technology, but a group of principles based on the work being done at Google that described how to handle JavaScript in more demanding web …
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Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game
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Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if … -
Debugging WorldWideWeb
His Geek Flag held high, Dan proposes a minor bugfix to some software that almost nobody cares about.
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WorldWideWeb, 30 years on
To celebrate the Web's 30th birthday, some of Dan's favourite geeks reimplemented the very first browser.
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Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”
It was presented to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we …