Tag: history
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The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms
Design You Trust
Click through for many, many more. -
RFC-20
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The choice of this encoding has made ASCII-compatible standards the language that computers use to communicate to this day.
Even casual internet users have probably encountered a URL with “%20” in it where there logically ought to be a space character. If we look at this RFC we see this:
Column/Row Symbol Name
2/0 SP Space … -
Edge may be becoming Chromium-powered, and that's terrible
It's rumoured that Edge might switch to Chrome's rendering engine. This would be really, really bad for the web, and it takes a 90s/00s web developer to remind you why.
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The peculiar history of the Ordnance Survey
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The history of the organisation known as OS is not merely that of a group of earnest blokes with a penchant for triangulation and an ever-present soundtrack of rustling cagoules.
From its roots in military strategy to its current incarnation as producer of the rambler's navigational aid, the government-owned company has been checking and rechecking all … -
Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
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Now, it’s Saturday morning and you’re eager to try out what you’ve learned. One of the first things the manual teaches you how to do is change the colors on the display. You follow the instructions, pressing CTRL-9 to enter reverse type mode and then holding down the space bar to create long lines. You … -
People don't change
Peter Gasston / Front End London (YouTube)
Fundamentally, people haven't changed much in tens of thousands of years. If ancient Egyptians had smartphones, you know full well that they'd have been posting cat pictures too. What can we learn from this and how should we look at our role when developing front-end Web experiences? -
Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz
A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph
AltNevil Maskelyne – doing it for the lulz?
LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theatre in … -
The Web That Never Was
YouTube (youtube.com)
Dylan Beattie (YouTube)
Underappreciated video presentation on how only a few small changes to the timeline of the Internet and early Web results in a completely different set of technologies and companies becoming dominant today. Thought-provoking. -
How analog TV worked
How analog TV worked (datagenetics.com)
Today, just about all monitors and screens are digital (typically using an LCD or Plasma technology), but a decade or two ago, computer displays were based on the analog technology inherited from TV sets.
These analog displays were constructed around Cathode Rays Tubes (commonly referred to as CRTs). … -
Taking Stock, Fraud
Taking Stock, Fraud Article (Inc.com) Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud. Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud.
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Gerard J. … -
Oxford's Long-Lost Zoo and Wild Wolves
For the first time in a long while, Dan's been setting up new geocaches. Also: did you know that Oxford used to have a zoo? In Kidlington‽
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Maps Showing California as an Island The Public Domain Review
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/maps-showing-california-as-an-island/ (publicdomainreview.org) If California were a country its economy would be the fifth largest in the world (just ahead of the UK). Yet the tech boom is not the starkest way California has ever stood apart from its neighbours. That would surely be the maps depicting it as an island, entire of itself. Below we …
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Lunar Lander
Back in 1997 Dan made a "Lunar Lander" game in Turbo Pascal. Twenty years on, he's re-implemented it in Javascript.
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TFW a Twitter bot solves a video game mystery
TFW a Twitter bot solves a video game mystery | The Video Game History Foundation on Patreon (Patreon) Official Post from The Video Game History Foundation: Something pretty fun happened yesterday that I wanted to share with you all: a bot on Twitter accidentally provided the clue that finally solved a 28-year-old mystery about a …
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Report: 80's kids started programming at an earlier age than today's millennials
Report: 80's kids started programming at an earlier age than today's millennials (The Next Web) Thanks BBC Micro! HackerRank has published its 2018 Developer Skills Report. The paper looks at a number things essential to understanding the developer landscape, and explores things like the perks coders demand from their workplaces, the technologies they prefer to …