There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence – or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly’s wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
This is far and away the Trek Slash I’ve ever seen… which is sadly quiet a feat.
Source: Topless Robot
1974
Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments presents the world’s first miniature electronic calculator to the Smithsonian Institution for their collection.
1978
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) division reports the doubling of the information storage capacity of the IBM 3033 processor to sixteen million characters of storage.
1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Raymond Mueller, age 21, scores a record-setting 4,722,200 points on Atari’s Gravitar after playing the game for twelve hours and twenty-one minutes at Chuck E. Cheese in Boulder, Colorado. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
1984
Tom Jennings, founder of FidoNet, a non-commercial network of Bulletin board Systems using his own Fido BBS software, publishes FidoNews issue number one, an electronic newsletter with information and news about Fido and FidoNet. It will continue to be publish once a week for five and a half years. At its peak, FidoNews has a readship of several thousand. In his first issue, Jennings explains the format of the newsletter, indicates he would like to make some FidoNet bumper stickers and asks that someone else immediately steps into his position as editor.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
Digital information, unconstrained by packaging, is a continuing process more like the metamorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in shrink-wrap. From the Neolithic to Gutenberg (monks aside), information was passed on, mouth to ear, changing with every retelling (or resinging). The stories which once shaped our sense of the world didn’t have authoritative versions. They adapted to each culture in which they found themselves being told. Because there was never a moment when the story was frozen in print, the so-called “moral” right of storytellers to own the tale was neither protected nor recognized. The story simply passed through each of them on its way to the next, where it would assume a different form. As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish. Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility.
The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
1833
Oberlin College in Ohio becomes the first coed institution of higher learning in the United States, with fifteen women and twenty-nine men enrolled.
1896
Dr. Herman Hollerith incorporates the Tabulating Machine Company, the predecessor of the later International Business Machines (IBM), to manufacture and sell the sorting machine he had invented. The corporation’s main offices are in Georgetown, Washington.
1904
The Jovian moon Himalia is discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine at California’s Lick Observatory.
1922
The first successful Technicolor film, The Toll of the Sea, was released to theaters.
1937
The Dandy, the world’s longest-running comic, is first published. While the Dandy is in no way, shape, or form geeky, its unprecedented popularity greatly contributed to proliferation of comic strips in the early half of the century.
1947
The point-contact transistor is invented by researchers John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain working under physicist William Bradford Shockley at Bell Laboratories. Transistors would go on to replace vacuum tubes and mark the beginning of the “second-generation” of computers. They were cheaper to construct, faster in their operation, and more energy efficient. The first computer to feature transistors would be MIT’s TX-0 in 1956.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
1927
The first Ford Model A automobiles are unveiled and sold at New York City’s Waldorf Hotel and in thirty-five other cities around the US, Canada, and Europe. The Phaeton sells for US$395 and the Tudor Sedan sells for US$495.00.
1942
A team led by physicist Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois as part of the Manhattan Project.
1953
BBC Television introduces a new on-screen logo, which is the world’s first moving logo for a television service.
1954
The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) is presented to the United States Navy at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia by International Business Machines (IBM). The machine was built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace Eckert. At the machine’s inauguration, John von Neumann gives the keynote speech and the machine calculates pi to 3,089 digit as a demonstration of its capabilities.
Read the rest of this entry » » »
508
CSS
XHTML
Website Credits &
Disclaimers