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Digital History

Displaying 1 - 8 of 8
Bender
Brian Heater at Engadget • Sat 2012 Jun 30, 7:50pm
Alan Turing would have turned 100 this week, an event that would have, no doubt, been greeted with all manner of pomp -- the centennial of a man whose mid-century concepts would set the stage for modern computing. Turing, of course, never made it that far, found dead at age 41 from cyanide poisoning, possibly self-inflicted. His story is that of a brilliant mind cut down in its prime for sad and ultimately baffling reasons, a man who accomplished so much in a short time and almost certainly would have had far more to give, if not for a society that couldn't accept him for who he was.
Greg Lindahl at PBM.com • Tue 2012 Mar 20, 1:32pm

Real Programmers write in Fortran.

Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name. ...

I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?" [emphasis added — I loved Mel from this sentence!]

gilder.com • Mon 2011 Mar 28, 9:37pm

The reason why we have internet packet switching: The late Paul Baran.

tulsaworld.com • Tue 2009 Jun 16, 3:31pm

National Digital Newspaper Program celebrates the first 1 million pages posted on a free, government-funded Web site.

bizjournals.com • Wed 2009 Jun 10, 7:36pm

After nearly two decades in the business, Microsoft plans to stop selling its Microsoft Money personal-finance software...

dlib.etc.ucla.edu • Sun 2009 May 3, 10:55pm

We invite you to experience Karnak — to learn about an ancient site that still resonates today because of its monumental pylons, towering columns, stunning reliefs and architectural marvels. Enter the temple precinct and discover its rich religious, political and architectural history.

sciencedaily.com • Sun 2009 May 3, 10:51pm

a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the popular ancient Egyptian tourist site near modern-day Luxor, where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, chapels, obelisks, sphinxes, shrines and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C.

education.zdnet.com • Tue 2009 Mar 31, 4:07pm

The encyclopedia is dead. Long live critical thinking. ... I'm not saying Encarta was a bad product. On the contrary, it did a fine job of making encyclopedic articles searchable and accessible on a computer. However, I'm thrilled to see it go because of what it represents. Kids will just go to Wikipedia or the first three hits on Google, now, right? While that remains too true, what it really represents is the absolute challenge to educators to teach kids real Web-based research skills. Leave the encyclopedias behind and dig.