An archive documenting the panic that often greets new technologies.
history
Michael Feeney recreates his 2021 work from home routine on macOS 9, using the tools available at the time, and putting up with the limitations of the time.
The Nokia Design Archive
New, from Aalto University in Finland: It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design […]
The secret life of machines
I recently came across this old BBC show by Tim Hunkin. Tim is a cartoonist, for fourteen years (starting back in 1973) he authored a weekly strip for the Observer titled ‘The Rudiments of Wisdom‘, in which he pored over facts on the inner workings of everything. He’s also an engineer and an artist. He’s […]
A nostalgia trip in Geocities
Brought to you by cameronsworld.net, a website with as many colours as you can get from your monitor. I look forward to the AR version.
On the UI of Internet Explorer 5 for Mac
Twenty years ago (Jan 5th, 2020) Steve Jobs demoed Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. The app was chosen by Jobs for its bold UI, which was developed in complete secrecy within Microsoft but had an uncanny resemblance of the yet-to-be-unveiled Acqua interface of Mac OS X. Maf Vosburgh, one of the developers who worked on […]
A spreadsheet way of knowledge
Steven Levy, writing on Wired around 30 years ago on the rise of spreadsheets: Increasingly, however, businessmen are not telling but letting their spreadsheets do the talking. Because a spreadsheet looks so authoritative – and it was done by a computer, wasn’t it? – the hypothetical models get accepted as gospel. The spreadsheet presentation is […]
Read Only Memory
Read-Only Memory publishes high-quality books that document videogame history.
Hello, is this a modem?
Oona Räisänen: If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean? […] The first thing we hear in this example is a dial tone, the same tone […]
Life at a Bell Labs datacenter in the 60s
A great gallery by Larry Luckham, who captured the daily life at the Bell Labs datacenter he used to work for in the late 60s. What’s immediately noticeable is the number of women who used to work at the place. As a recent New York Times article explains, gender balance in tech used to be […]
A simulation of the first ever web browser, inside your web browser
Jeremy Keith: Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it. Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document […]