Link tags: history

Canadian Typography Archives

Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational

A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

Every one of these 42 articles are gold!

It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.

Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart, 1907 – Circulating Now from the NLM Historical Collections

An impressive piece of internationlisation and inclusive design.

35mm scans — writer/editor/reporter

Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.

The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.

AI Hype-Driven Development - Parallels in History -

Simulmatics as a company was established in 1959 and declared bankruptcy in 1970. The founders picked this name as a mash of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, hoping to coin a new term that would live for decades, which apparently didn’t happen! They worked on building what they called the People Machine to simulate and predict human behavior. It was marketed as a revolutionary technology that would completely change business, politics, warfare and more. Doesn’t this sound familiar?!

The man who tried to redeem the world with logic - Big Think

The fascinating—and tragic—story of Walter Pitts and Walter McCulloch whose lives and work intersected with Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann:

Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.

A history of metaphors for the internet - The Verge

No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”

TimeGuessr

Where and when were these photographs taken?

It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.

Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.

A History Of The World According To Getty Images

A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:

The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.

Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub

An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.

50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World - IEEE Spectrum

A profile of the Xerox Alto and the people behind it.

www91.pdf

This is the flyer that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau distributed at the Hypertext 91 Conference—the one where their submission was infamously rejected.

The WWW project merges the techniques of information rerieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. lt aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube

This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.

Vague, But Exciting

Jay has gathered his ten (and counting) chapters on the history of the web into one site.

There’s also a podcast feed of all ten chapters, narrated by yours truly.

Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game

This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.

Shift Happens

Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.

You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.

The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.

Transient Frameworks · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Frameworks come and go. They are transient. Web standards, on the other hand, are the reason the Web is good now and it will become even better in the future.

Word Persons and Web Persons · roytang.net

This resonates with me.