simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with history

Pingdom have put together a nice gallery of pictures of early computers starting from 1944 (Colossus and Z4) to 1964 (Univac 1108). Lovely.

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The excellent Radio 4 programme In Our Time has a fascinating episode on The Silk Road. Well worth a listen. More on The Silk Road is available from The British Library and Wikipedia.

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The Guardian have put together a decent Flash app illustrating the history of the internet as part of their internet is 40 series.

See also a post from a few days ago history of the internet.

In other news I'm still older than the Internet...

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Fascinating History of the Internet post over at Six Revisions. In which we discover I am older than the Internet. Groan...

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An amazing historic clip has appeared on YouTube (embedded below). It shows London in colour from 1927. Things I noticed: the sky is blue, everyone wears hats and England beat Australia at the Oval. The film, The Open Road, was made be Claude Friese-Greene, who together with his father is one of the early pioneers of colour film. Sounds like a fascinating chap.

See also The Open Road at the BFI and a BBC/BFI documentary DVD.

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More computer TV from the 80s! The US programme Computer Chronicles started in 1981 and ran until 2002. Some of the early episode are now available for online viewing. It's fascinating viewing. Take this operating system episode from 1984 for example. CP/M, DOS, Unix and Xenix all discussed.

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When I was a lad the closet I got to a computer was watching them on TV. The BBC was (and still is) on the forefront of new technology and rightly so! Two programmes that inspired a lot of UK computer talent were "The Computer Programme" and "Micro Live". See two clips embedded below from YouTube. Oh, the way we wore.

BBC Micro Live

BBC Computer Programme

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The Orwell Prize have put George Orwell's diaries on line via Wordpress. So now you can subscribe to the RSS feed to get new Orwell every day. Read them here.

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This won't mean much if you weren't in to computers in the UK in the 80s and 90s. If you were, however, you'll probably be sad to note that PCW - the magazine we all used to read - has ceased publication. Guy Kewney has written an obit for TheReg and here's another from former editor Gordon Liang. Finally, here's a picture of the first issue. Read 'em and weep.

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