8x8 (10. 612)

scheele’s green: more on the poisonous, synthetic shade—via Messy Nessy Chic 

terroir: BBC’s Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course  

family business: a look at the oldest-continuing operating hotel in the world, by shifting definitions (see also)

contagion: banking stocks drop as investors lose confidence after the failure and intervention for Silicon Valley Bank (previously)  

xerox alto: a half-century on (see previously), we are still living with the legacy of one of the first home computers—via Kottke  

ghostwatch: a BBC mockumentary that spooked viewers

$: the first instance of the dollar sign in print—see previously 

arsenic and old lace: an astonishing murder ring of earlier twentieth-century Hungary

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8x8 (10. 603)

jasper t jowls and the warblettes: Chuck E Cheese pizza and arcade chain still distributes programming for their animatronic acts on floppy disks—via Waxy, see also  

going up: a outstanding tour of Shimadai Electric Manufacturing Company with their wall of pressable elevator buttons  

ᐃᖏᕐᕋᕈᓯᖅ: a beautiful rendition of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” in Inuktiut by artist Elisapie  

bread-winner: rotating sandwiches, no more—no less, via Present /&/ Correct  

partners in crime: a band of thieving turtles and other animal accomplices—via Strange Company 

the stone of scone: another look at the Seat of Destiny on which Charles III. will be crowned—see also  

banksters: US federal regulators take control of Silicon Valley financial institution, the reserve of tech angel investors, due to impending insolvency  

richard halloran owns a home computer: fascinating 1981 news segment on the emergent internet—via Pasa Bon!

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gui (10. 579)

Offered with a portrait-oriented monitor matching a sheet of paper and the first commercially available for lease with a graphical user interface after the desktop metaphor, the Xerox Corporation released its Alto model on this day in 1973. Prohibitive costs ($32 000 for a basic version) meant that only around two thousand units were produced but were ahead of the rest of the market by a decade in terms of its operating system. Apple Computer personnel received exclusive demonstrations from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) in exchange for the company to option Apple stock. Several peripheral devices were created for the Alto, including a mouse, a television camera, a printer and a parallel port.

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numeronym (10. 568)

Whilst the number-based word is an abbreviation as in K9 for canine (and it’s interesting to consider the range of emoji suggested when typing, especially when code-switching a “fee…” produces 🧚‍♂️—from the German—or eliciting a torrent of other non sequitur symbols) is the most common usage, it can also refer to the contraction in the form of omitting the second through penultimate letters of word and replacing them with their numerical count, usually a longer word but not necessarily, for example: h7k for hyperlink, s5n for shorten or g11n for globalisation. The first needful and non-cryptic reduction and redaction was in the assignment of an email address for an employee with a surname too long for the mail daemon to handle so Jan Scherpenhuizen was assigned “S12n” with coworkers coming to refer to him by his truncated name, with such original constrained handles becoming somewhat of a badge of honour in that business’ corporate culture.

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tube theatre (10. 540)

Web Curios directs our attention and appreciation to the hypertext novel “for the Internet in seven cars and a crash” by Geoff Ryman that has recently been resurrected in its original 1996 form coinciding with the anniversary of its inception and a mention in an culture piece on the novelty of interactive television from The Guardian. Recounting the narratives in a manner of constrained writing—which is truly good prose with its strictures and privileging numbers over the vagaries of language—of the passengers (the capacity of seven carriages plus conductor) riding the Bakerloo line from Embankment Station to Elephant & Castle. Each rider is limned for the reader in the same amount of words and linked to their travelling companions by an associative index of vignettes, which one can read in any order. Also published as a book—earning a Philip K Dick Award—differences are highlighted in print form whereas intrinsic similarities come through on the web.

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native client (10. 528)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest, not only are we directed to a collection of emulators of graphing calculators like the example pictured but are moreover educated in the method reproducing these classic interfaces using MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, an open-source tool to re-create hardware as software, previously)—a collaborative bit of programming by Nicola Salmoria to ensure that historic coding isn’t lost to the ages and that virtual consoles can exist within all sorts of operating system and browser environments. More at the Emulation Station at the hyperlinks above. 

 

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7x7 (10. 484)

between two ferns: chats with “historical figures” have been regrettable—see previously

this concludes our broadcasting day: an alternate HBO signoff announcement (see previously) emerges  

nuscale for scale: US authorities approve design for the first generation of small, modular reactors  

all things bright and beautiful: a compelling argument to enjoy the All Creatures Great and Small reboot  

circular sun house: Frank Lloyd Wright’s final completed project (see also) on the edge of the Phoenix Mountains Nature Preserve goes on the market  

closed captioning: as a bilingual family, we always relied on subtitles and appreciated this primer on why we’re not alone  

content mill: CNET magazine suspends automated articles after an embarrassing disclosure

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6x6 (10. 383)

shift happens: a comprehensive history of keyboards by Marcin Wichary—via Waxy  

luni-solar: the people who are living in multiple timelines—see previously  

poly canon: a showcase of strange, experimental architectural students senior projects at scale  

hydraulic press interpretive dance: the impressive choreography of Sarah “Smac” McCreanor—see previously  

nangajo: prominent figures of the Japanese design community present their greeting cards for 2023 (see previously), the Year of the Rabbit 

franklin ace 100: the Apple clone (see previously) with a bizarre users’ guide—via Waxy

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8x8 (10. 321)

yotta, yocto: prolific data generation drives the need for uniform names for extremely large and extremely small numbers—see previously—via Marginal Revolution  

quarantine caper: narrow escape from Jingdezhen just before lock-down  

a classic non-equilibrium thermodynamic reaction: a demonstration of a Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillation in a Petri dish—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links  

don’t copy that floppy: an overview of a few anti-piracy schemes of the late 1970s and early 80s  

jpeg morgan: the rise and fall (and broader fall-out) of crypto bank and exchange FTX 

infantry: Academy Award winning Czechoslovakian animated short Munro (1960) about a four-year old drafted into the army  

fangcang: artist, after being identified as a “close contact” is confined in a remote hospital and transforms room into exhibition space  

euler equations: computers make break-throughs in understanding fluid dynamics

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w³ (10. 297)

Though somewhat overshadowed by the achievements and recognition of colleague Tim Berners-Lee and his proposal for a hypertext system to connect many of the departments and projects of CERN in 1989 and which contained the kernal of the idea, credit for the World Wide Web also goes to fellow computer scientist Robert Cailliau for their joint proposal put forward on this day in 1990 for the World Wide Web. Not only did Cailliau come up with the logo and co-programmed the first web browser (MacWWW) with Nicola Pellow, he was instrumental in taking the concept out of the laboratory and releasing it into wilds, running several parallel projects to ensure interoperability and make the underlying structure more robust and cross-compatible, secured funding and organised a series of conferences and steering committees.

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the commodordion (10. 273)

Fellow Internet Caretaker Miss Cellania directs us to the latest project by Linus Åkesson (see previously here and here) with eight-bit modified accordion made with two Commodore 64s and a bellows made out of floppy disks. We suspect that Åkesson’s next ingenious instrument will be C64 bagpipes after this exercise and master-class. More at the links above.

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buffer overflow (10. 263)

Released on this day in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network (to avoid suspicion at his own university), the eponymous Morris worm (short for tapeworm due to its parasitic lifestyle) was one of the first to be distributed on the internet, written by a graduate student from Cornell named Robert Tappan Morris—the son of a US National Security Agency cryptographer, and exploited a range of vulnerabilities to propagate, and like a fork bomb was able to crash systems by overburndening them. Intended as a white-hat hacking exercise to explore vulnerabilities, Morris had originally programmed the worm to check if a system was already infected but instead instructed it to replicate itself a given percentage of times—leading to a destructive, exponential avalanche of malicious code, leading to his conviction under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Paying a hefty fine and suspended from school, Morris nonetheless would go on to become a professor of computer science at MIT and co-found Viaweb, one of the first web apps and the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, backing the launch of over three thousand internet ventures, including DoorDash, Reddit, Twitch and Airbnb.

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king under the mountain (10. 159)

Courtesy of Things Magazine, we are invited to reminisce about the pioneering illustrated text adventure computer game (see previously here and here) The Hobbit—released forty years ago this month for the ZX Spectrum developed by Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell. It was quite noteworthy and much intimated for its advanced and intuitive syntactic analysis that allowed players to enter complex commands—the language parser called Inglish, a parred down but serviceable vocabulary—and engage with the game in ways that were previously restricted to the imagination. True to the source material (see also) and like the later snowclone ‘All your base are belong to us,’ the refrain from play about dwarf-king ‘Thorin sits downs and starts singing about gold’ carries some pop culture weight as well as the narrative, ‘You wait—time passes’ as one hides in a wine barrel until the opportune moment for escape. Here is an emulator where one can again experience the adventure.

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7x7 (10. 141)

jezero: Perseverance explores a Martian crater  

lingthusiasm: an interview with xkcd author Randall Munroe on hypothetical questions about language and orthography—via Language Log  

achievement unlocked: a radical redesign for Girl Scout badges—see also  

3½, 5¼: an interview with the last purveyor of floppy disks—via JWZ  

emoticons: more on the IPA, EPA (English Phonotypic Alphabet), Issac Pitman and other champions of spelling reform from Shady Characters  

jazz and cats: the life and surrealistic art of Gertrude Abercrombie  

earth below us: outstanding images from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest

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8x8

song birds: a printed circuit bluejay and other avian friends  

industrials: a leitmotif of edifying vocabulary—see previously—from Futility Closet  

occultation: Perseverance rover captures Mars’ lumpy moon Phobos partially eclipsing the Sun 

infinite tapestry: a generated side-scrolling landscape—via Web Curios  

days of rage: a gallery of activism posters curated by the USC Library system—see previously—via ibīdem  

art bits: an archives of HyperCard stacks (see also)—via Waxy  

ghost in the shell: skeletons in video games  

cheeps and peeps: the rich, melodic syntax of birdsong

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8x8

squirrel monkey: imagining Wordle vintage 1985—see also  

мистецтво: Ukrainian art community despairs as invasion advances

rumble: the overlooked musical virtuosity of Link Wray  

snake island: Ukrainian soldiers stand their ground and face off a battleship defending a military outpost on Zmiinyi, the rocky islet where Achilles was entombed 

regression to the mean: a spate of controversial laws passed in the US to curtail discussions in classroom that would make straight, white cis people uncomfortable (previously)

existential crisis: dread creeps into the everyday and makes it difficult to focus on what’s vital and the ultimately inconsequential  

архітектурної: Ukrainian designers and architects fight back against Russian incursion  

acrophobia: sociable early internet word game that solicited wrong answers only plus several contemporaries

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dass modell / computerliebe

The first West German act to chart in the UK in the latter half of the twentieth century, the double single (A-side and B-side) from Kraftwerk (see previously here, here, here and here) first rose to number one on this day in 1982 and held its place for twenty-one weeks.  This success led to the group’s first concert tour.  From their eighth, bi-lingual studio album Computerwelt, the thematic tracks dealt with the effects of technology and computers on society, the songs debuted in May of the previous year with the likes of “Pocket Calculator,” “It’s More Fun to Compute” and “Heimcomputer.”

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elk cloner

Among the first computer viruses released in the wild—that is, not restricted to a single laboratory or network, and contagious in the general population, fifteen year old student Rich Skrenta created on this day in 1982, developed the year prior, self-propagating code as a prank, doing no harm to the host computers, the Apple II models, nor their vector, shared floppy disks with computer games and other software passed around by members of a local computing club, eventually becoming an irksome bug revealing itself after a set number of iterations of running the programmes—having already taken up residence in the host and infecting subsequent disks inserted with the user witlessly spreading it. Cheeky and harmless as it was, this experiment boded of vulnerabilities ahead.

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boss level

Airing for four seasons from 1982 to 1984 on the Turner Broadcasting System and then in syndication, the competitive arcade game show was moderated first by Mark Richards and Geoff Edwards, but for this unaired pilot screened for a test audience, it was hosted by the accomplished Alex Trebek.

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počítačová hra

Via Things Magazine, we discover an emulator archive of computer and arcade games created by the Slovak programming community in the late 1980s—available for download in their original versions or as English translations. More at the links above including all exhibits at the National Design Centre in Bratislava.

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