"So, that’s my long and winding history of a little postcard from the Upper West Side of Manhattan!" Suzanne Vega writes about writing the hit song Tom's Diner, coping with its numerous remixes, and its part in the birth of the MP3 music compression format.
posted on Sep 24, 2008 - View this thread

The Early Television Foundation and Museum Website covers the nascent days of the nation's pastime, with interesting items like mechanical TVs and programming schedules from 1939.
posted on Sep 9, 2008 - View this thread

Al-Jazari is the best-known Islamic inventor of the Middle Ages, famous for his waterclocks and automata. The wonderful History of Science and Technology in Islam has articles on him as well as other subjects. A medieval manuscript of Al-Jazari's masterwork, a book generally known in English as either Book of Knowledge of Mechanical Devices, can be perused in its entirety in flash form. It includes 174 illustrations. If you want to see working copies of his most famous automaton, the Elephant Clock, you can go either to the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai (Flickr pictures), the Musée d'Horlogerie du Locle in Switzerland (Cabinet of Wonders post about visiting the museum) or Institute for the History of Arab-Islamic Science in Frankfurt (article about the institute from a feature in Saudi Aramco World magazine called Rediscovering Arabic Science).
posted on Aug 6, 2008 - View this thread

The Victorian Web is your one-stop resource for England in the Victorian era (1837-1901). The site is much too extensive to give but a flavor. It is divided into 20 categories, including Technology, Gender Matters, Economic Contexts, Authors, Political History, Theater and Popular Entertainment, Science and Genre and Technique. Here are a few examples of the articles inside: Inventions in Alice in Wonderland, The Role of the Victorian Army, Earth Yenneps: Victorian Back Slang (and a glossary of same), Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Philosophy of Androgyny, Hermaphrodeity, and Victorian Sexual Mores, Evolution, progress and natural laws and, of course, Queen Victoria.
posted on Jul 28, 2008 - View this thread

Hellenica is an encyclopedia of Greek culture, from classical Hellas, through the Byzantine Empire until the modern day, though its focus is on antiquity and especially the science and technology of Ancient Greece. Featuring technical diagrams and explications, there's no better site if you seek information on gigantic galleys, now obscure great Greek mathematicians, the last still working Ancient lighthouse and gears and how they were used by Archimedes and other ancients. This is not to denigrate other sections of the site, such as the page on the Olympics (including a Google Map of the site of the games), biographies of ancient, Byzantine and modern Greeks, the warring and healing of the Byzantines or the overview of Greek literature, taking in antiquity, the medieval era and modern times. That said, Hellenica is at its finest when treating science and technology.
posted on Jul 18, 2008 - View this thread

The first known recording of a digital computer playing music, recorded by the BBC in 1951. The music played on a Ferantti Mark 1, one of the first commercial general-use computers, and was entered via punchtape and played on a speaker usually used for making clicks and tones to indicate program progress.
posted on Jun 18, 2008 - View this thread

An Illustrated History of Digital Cameras until 1998.
posted on Apr 25, 2008 - View this thread

Illustrated Histories of Various Recording Technologies
posted on Apr 22, 2008 - View this thread

Hitler Speaks

Using advanced speech recognition technology, researchers and voice-over actors have been able to put a soundtrack to long-silent video relics of Adolf Hitler: Eva Braun's infamous home movies filmed at the Berghof, private filmed meetings between Hitler and various Reich cronies, as well as the last known footage of him taped before an awkward bunch of Hitler Youth at the Reichstag in the final days of the war made famous in Downfall. Chilling stuff.

Via.
posted on Mar 22, 2008 - View this thread

Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright A fascinating illustrated historical tour, looking at how different technologies have shaped how we think about copyright and intellectual property.
posted on Jan 31, 2008 - View this thread

'Race' graphically illustrated - "most Europeans" vs. Ashkenazim (previously; see also IQ & Gladwell, viz. ;)
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

The History of The Discovery of Cinematography
posted on Aug 23, 2007 - View this thread

Telephone Central Office Histories - A fascinating collection of personal anecdotes and histories about telephony from the US and around the world, from The Telephone Exchange Name Project. Coral Cache links -1- -2- (via)
posted on Jun 9, 2007 - View this thread

Japanese Bicycle History Research Club With a nice gallery of photos, illustrations, and ukiyo-e of vintage bicycles in Japan.
posted on Jun 2, 2007 - View this thread

The dark ages of western Europe – nasty, brutish, and short -- did nevertheless produce technical innovations in metallurgy, agriculture, and, as identified in the Utrecht Psalter, a groundbreaking simple machine: the crank.
posted on Mar 8, 2007 - View this thread

LA6NCA's WW2 German Radio Collection Pictures and a little history on many WW2 German radios including a cute as a button spy radio and the Lichtsprechgerät 80, an incoherent light audio transceiver. Also featured are a few photo essays of the equipment in use (Enigma, Luftwaffe Signals unit redeploying). [dorian
posted on Feb 8, 2007 - View this thread

The Spark Museum John Jenkins' collection of vintage wireless, radio, scientific and electrical equipment, including Crookes and Geissler tubes, Barlow wheels and other early electric motors, loudspeakers and many more oddball electrical devices. [via TeamDroid]
posted on Nov 13, 2006 - View this thread

History of the Button, a weblog devoted to 'tracing the history of interaction design through the history of the button, from flashlights to websites and beyond'. This presentation [4.5MB .pdf] provides a quick-fire pictorial history of the things we push to do stuff.
posted on Sep 22, 2006 - View this thread

Timeline of Trends and Events (1750 to 2100). Large image, lots of info. Via digg
posted on May 27, 2006 - View this thread

Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness Email Roulette (which we've seen before) is my favorite application of email. TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted on May 18, 2006 - View this thread

The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich has some excellent online collections related to maritime history and technology, including telescopes, marine chronometers, sundials, and a whole lot more. Some stuff I've been looking at: John Harrison's chronometers (described in Dava Sobel's book Longitude), polyhedral sundials, and pocket globes.
posted on Mar 15, 2006 - View this thread

The Virtual Typewriter Museum Including: the 'Holy Grail,' the 1870 Swedish Hansen Writing Ball - weird and wonderful pre-Cambrian typewriters such as an 1887 Miniature Pocket Typewriter, the Cooper circular, and an early wooden Spanish typewriter - early advertising trade cards and postcard (1 2 3) - and typewriter erotica. The end of the typewriter history is the gorgeous 1970s Olivetti Valentine.
posted on Nov 13, 2005 - View this thread

European Wine Fighting For Survival
posted on Nov 7, 2005 - View this thread

Ignition sequence starts ... A spoken word documentary album of the flight of Apollo 11 to the moon. Dramatic - evocative - the right stuff. Provided by Hepcat Willy.
posted on Sep 13, 2005 - View this thread

Some technological histories - including Edison's Electric Pen, a History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy, and Cox's 1907 Gold Changer.
posted on May 23, 2005 - View this thread

Buying Rare Race Records in the South. Music That Americans Loved 100 Years Ago. The Cheney Talking Machine. Just three among dozens of amazing articles about early recording machines and American popular music at the astonishingly detailed site of Tim Gracyk, author of Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895-1925. Scroll down for bios of forgotten stars, including Nora Bayes - who performed in the Follies of 1907, before Flo Ziegfeld's name became part of the title, George W. Johnson - "the most important African-American recording artist of the 1890s," and piano player Zez Confrey, whose sheet music for the 1921 hit "Kitten on the Keys" sold over a million copies and became "the third most-frequently recorded rag in history."
posted on May 17, 2005 - View this thread

California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll (Reg. req'd) Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960's, Myron Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of consuming LSD. So he set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his project in classic methodical fashion.

But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, approaching drugs as they might any other potentially helpful tool or device - from a soldering iron to a computer chip - was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60's: the world would be remade, the natural order of things reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity. Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied and improved.

Judging by the record presented in What the Dormouse Said, it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who contributed to the birth of personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters, commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly, long-haired hippie freaks.
posted on May 7, 2005 - View this thread

The Cathode Ray Tube Site Electronic glassware: history and physical equipment.
posted on Mar 8, 2005 - View this thread

A clickable genealogy charting the lineage of visual interactive computing systems and user interfaces, by Bruce Damer. Some quirky/broken links, but plenty of interesting stuff there, too.
posted on Mar 2, 2005 - View this thread

"Puntate. Clic." 1000Bit archives images of vintage computer adverts, magazines, manuals, and brochures, many in Italian. Also of interest: old-computers.com, the Obselete Technology Web, Rune's PC-Museum, and Dave's Old Computers. [via]
posted on Mar 1, 2005 - View this thread

Vintage Technology :: I like the bric a brac best.
posted on Jan 7, 2005 - View this thread

The Douglas Self Site is an eclectic mix of web oddities including The Museum of RetroTechnology, some less than successful audio projects and the truth about Roswell. The RetroTech Museum is full of forgotten mechanical devices like monowheels, pneumatic networks, gyrocars, and optical telegraphs. (via dm)
posted on Jul 24, 2004 - View this thread

The Bakken: A social history of electricity The Bakken is a growing center "for education and learning that furthers the understanding of the history, cultural context, and applications of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences and their benefits to contemporary society." The site includes an illustrated collection of artifacts ranging from static electricity generators and Leyden jars to Victorian therapeutic magnetic belts, and exhibitions on Mesmer and Mesmerism and Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. The institute was founded by Earl Bakken, the co-inventor of the pacemaker.
posted on May 30, 2004 - View this thread

How To Make Friends By Telephone :: a useful how-to book from the 1940's
posted on May 27, 2004 - View this thread

Victorian Light and Magic Thomas Weynants' Early Visual Media site describes and illustrates a range of nineteenth century technologies for producing and projecting images and illusions, including phantasmagoria, Pepper's ghost, optical toys such as anamorphoses, steroscopes and stereo photographs, imaging techniques such as the physiontrace, and genres such as diableries (visions of hell) . (Links in site labelled 'nudes' or 'risque' NSFW in a Victorian risque kind of way.)
posted on Apr 25, 2004 - View this thread

The Early Office Museum :: check out communications technologies used by our Grandparents, as well as Punched Card Tabulating Machines and much, much more!
posted on Mar 3, 2004 - View this thread

The Computer History Museum is hosting this years Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, California. Featuring live demonstatrions of a Xerox Alto as well as an auction for a Commodore 64 prototype, this year promises to be fun for geeks of all ages. (via Wired)
posted on Oct 7, 2003 - View this thread

Engines of Our Ingenuity is a web site run by John Lienhard of the University of Houston. The site includes almost 2000 short, three minute talks on the history of science, technology, and engineering. The talks are in the form of RealAudio files, with accompanying transcripts which often give you more links and references. The transcripts themselves are indexed by keywords and are also fully text-searchable. A simple idea but very effective, and kind of addictive. I've been finding out about Jacquard and Babbage, German women astronomers of the seventeenth century, and the deisgn of the zipper. There's also other cool stuff: what did people say about books in 1498?
posted on Sep 7, 2003 - View this thread

Obsolete computers 1975-89. There's my first baby.
posted on Aug 22, 2003 - View this thread

Badgirs (Farsi) or barjeels (Arabic) are windcatchers that work as low-tech air conditioners. The city of Yazd, Iran is probably best known for them. Badgirs are built so that they can be opened to catch the wind from different directions, the air is then cooled as it travels down the tower, and in turn cools the rooms below. When there is no wind, air in the tower is heated and rises, which draws cooler air from the courtyard into the house. (There is no URL to link to for the search result for “badgir” on Encyclopaedia Iranica, but I recommend checking out their definition and diagrams even though you’ll have to go through three different PDF pages.) Badgirs have been around in some form “since the New Kingdom (1500- 300 BC) in Egypt”, but global warming might make them ineffective.(scroll down to #16-#18) Variations, such as malqafs, can be found from Egypt to Pakistan. You can get a modern one for your own house. You can win an award shaped like one for advancements in sustainable development. Or you could just stay in the Fairmont Dubai Hotel which is shaped like a huge badgir. So even after all this, I still don't know what those sticks sticking out of the sides are for.
posted on Jul 10, 2003 - View this thread

While there are a number of sites devoted to the history of computer and information technologies, their invention, design and manufacture is also a human story. So I'm glad that there are sites devoted to computing history and culture that also look at the lives of those involved. The Charles Babbage Institute and Center for the History of Information Technology, includes oral histories of engineers and 500 photographs of the Burroughs Corporation form the 1890s on. The Smithsonian Museum Division of Information Technology and Society is a gateway to a large number of 'real life' and online Smithsonian exhibitions related to the history of science and technology, including more oral histories and PDFs of the original DoD press releases for ENIAC. The Oxford University Virtual Museum of Computing includes tributes to information science pioneers, as well as much other stuff. Finally, the Silicon Valley Cultures Project is using anthropology to document the lives of many of those in the Valley.
posted on Jun 22, 2003 - View this thread

Everything you ever wanted to know about telephones. Really. I went to the list of History of the Telephone links first.
posted on Jun 11, 2003 - View this thread

Newly Digital is an electronic anthology of sorts. Due to the technological advancement of these things we call "computers", it's a subject ripe for nostalgia. As seen here by bloggers writing about their first . . .
posted on Jun 2, 2003 - View this thread

The Scopitone was a French video jukebox that made its debut in 1960 and was imported into the US in 1964. Although they usually featured high production values, catchy melodies, and lots of gratuitous cheesecake, the singers were often relative unknowns and the music was square even by the standards of the day. Consequently, they never caught on in a big way outside of Europe, and many of the original Scopitone jukeboxes and films were destroyed. Fortunately for us, a few Scopitone enthusiasts have catalogued the songs, scanned the advertisements, and even preserved a few Quicktime clips of the original French and American Scopitone films.
posted on May 4, 2003 - View this thread

The shoestring (string and shoe holes) was first invented in England in 1790. But there is nothing so simple that man cannot complicate, and so some calculate the optimal way to tie a shoe, some seek zen enlightenment through shoe-tying, and others craft Shoelace Parables to improve psychological health. Contrarians find their peace by eschewing the tying altogether.
posted on Dec 4, 2002 - View this thread

In 1924 George Antheil caused a riot with his ballet score for 'percussion orchestra, two pianists, seven electric bells, 3 airplane propellors, a siren, and 16 synchronized player pianos'. In 1933, Hedy Lamarr caused a sensation by appearing nude on film. In 1942, Antheil and Lamarr jointly filed a patent for a secret communications system, having thought up 'an interesting scheme to control armed torpedoes over long distances without the enemy detecting them or jamming their transmissions' over dinner.
posted on Oct 15, 2002 - View this thread

In August, we had Pyramid Rover. Now we know what's behind that door. Another door.
posted on Sep 17, 2002 - View this thread

Airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning , the fax machine - in 1870 " Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Faith Popcorn: all of them famous prognosticators. Yet each comes off a piker when compared to the true master of industrial clairvoyance, Jules Verne."
posted on Apr 1, 2002 - View this thread

Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000 On the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, thousands of people, of all ages were asked to take part in a project to create a digital version. The result was a couple of laserdiscs which could be read on a specially modified BBC Micro. It was quite a success and again there was record of what the world was like in the mid-Eighties. But in the intervening years, technology has moved on and now the discs have become inaccessible without that obsolete technology. So ironically, the original millenium old manuscripts have more usability. In the rush to digitise everything, isn't there a danger that we're going to repeat this mistake over and over again?
posted on Mar 3, 2002 - View this thread

Hugh's Ominous Valve Works. When I get nostalgic for vacuum tubes, I wind up here. I also enjoy his rants and I think his valve dance page beats the hell out of the hamster dance.
posted on Feb 18, 2002 - View this thread

www.computerhistory.org is the virtual incarnation of computer historian and collector Michael Williams' phat-ass computer museum. My favourite, BTW, is the timeline, searchable by year or topic. What technological milestones occured in the year of your birth?
posted on Feb 15, 2002 - View this thread

Anyone else remember Wired's theory of The Long Boom from 1997? I guess they were wrong.
posted on Sep 30, 2001 - View this thread

Tapez 3615 Pour Fair Votre Resérvation sur Minitél... Long Ago, before the Web, there was France's Minitel teletext. The French consider it a succès; I'm not so sure, since a Minitel terminal was never demonstrably more useful than than a touchtone phone in North America. In any case, Minitel may offer some lessons as to what type of Web commerce are and are not commercially viable.
posted on Jun 2, 2001 - View this thread

Soviet Computer Technology circa 1988 (Google Cache).
posted on Apr 22, 2001 - View this thread

The Story of Mel - Almost everyone's seen the Story of Mel on USENET or via email... the story of the guy who wrote programs for a particular ancient drum computer by using the characteristics of the drum to handle memory allocation and time delays. In a footnote on the Jargon File, it seems that his last name is known... An interesting footnote to an interesting and probably true story.
posted on Apr 7, 2001 - View this thread

The US Government should buy it and make it a national monument. PARC up for sale? I didn't realize that Xerox was hurting so badly.
posted on Oct 19, 2000 - View this thread

I never understood folks who were into this until I equated them with antique car collectors.
posted on Sep 14, 2000 - View this thread

Do the time warp Surf with the browsers of yesteryear...
posted on Jul 31, 2000 - View this thread

I wondered who invented the Internet. Some people would say Al Gore, but even after reading parts of the history of the Internet (first link), I can't figure it out. I think the "USSR" prompted us to do it when they launched Sputnik. Is this really the case?
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

The Netscape Time Capsule is an amazing site that brings back lots of memories. I distinctly remember firing up the Mosaic versions that used this splash screen, and I remember seeing the original mcom.com site that featured these graphics and these tutorials. If you're having trouble reaching the original site, I also setup a mirror.
posted on Dec 28, 1999 - View this thread