cfmcdonald

This seems like an opportunity to celebrate great children's books created with craft and care by humans.

I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon. (http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/)

While writing this post I actually got an itch to buy a Commodore 64 Ultimate, even though I never owned a Commodore 64 before. (I believe I used one once at friend's house.) Nostalgia by contagion.

I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."

This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.

I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o

Yes, I suck at titles. I'm glad you enjoy the blog.

Author of the OP here. The "spray" technique was known in the early 80s, if not earlier. It's mentioned in Michael Tomczyk's "Home Computer Wars":

> The solution came in several forms. One way was to embed ferrite balls in the plastic case. Another way was to spray the inside of the case with a metal coating. But the best way was to encase the offending electronics in a small metal box inside the case, which is what was done with the VIC-20. [0]

Why a metal box is the best way, he doesn't say and I don't know. My best guess is that it was more effective/reliable at passing the tests.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/the-home-computer-wars/page/205/...

I think the GP's point is there is no meaningful nutritional difference between a from-scratch cake and a box cake. Both are pretty unhealthy and should be eaten only as special treats. "Ultra-processed" is not a useful way of separating healthy from unhealthy foods.

It looks like the trend started circa the 1920s in the U.S. Kotex (1920) [0], Kleenex (1924) [1], Kool-Aid (1927) [2], Kool (1933) [3], Krispy Kreme (1934) [4].

Kraft might look like one, but isn't, it's named after James Kraft [5], which presumably traces back to the german word Kraft.

I'm curious if there are older examples.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotex [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool-Aid [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool_(cigarette) [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krispy_Kreme [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Kraft

Author here. Yes I could be more accurate here. It was called just "Apple Computer" in some contexts, e.g. this ad [0]. This manual calls it "Apple-1" on the cover [1], but "Apple Computer" in the contents. But you are definitely right that it was often called the Apple-1 in 1976 and into 1977.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Ad... [1]: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.19...

Author here. Thank you for the reference, this is very helpful. The name "Colonel Whitney" came from a 1984 Stan Veit article: https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/computer_magazine_madness...

Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.

Every time a list like this shows up on HN, multiple commenters will show up to say things like this. Do you really have such a hard time believing that other people sincerely have different taste from you/the general population?

If you ask people about their favorite restaurant, some people will give you the name of a high-end steakhouse, others will say Taco Bell. This is just the reality of human difference.

It's available on my blog website: https://technicshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/cfm_7...

I did capture there his most choice quote from the interview:

> Kurtz later said that he and Kemeny saw MAC's agenda as totally different from Dartmouth's--MIT was trying to design the theoretically best computer utility, with layers of security "and all that kind of crap."

I interviewed Thomas Kurtz at his home in 2010 for my dissertation on the "computer utility" vision of the 60s and 70s (which foresaw a world of large computer utilities that would function like AT&T or an electrical power company, but for electronic services).

He was long-since retired, but still living in the hills of New Hampshire near Dartmouth. Unfortunately I can't find my interview notes right now, but I do remember that he was very kind and welcoming. What he and John Kemeny did at Dartmouth was truly remarkable. For them the technology (time-sharing and BASIC) was a means to an end of educating and empowering students, and ultimately society as a whole.

The point of citing sources is so that the reader can retrace the evidential basis on which the writer's claims rest. A citation to "Chat GPT" doesn't help with this at all. Saying "Chat GPT helped me write this" is more like an acknowledgment than a citation.

I can't tell if this comment is really serious. In case it needs explanation, you don't ban gambling advertising by having a censor watch every ad and then decide which ones to allow. You pass a law that says "no advertising gambling" and then if someone does it, you prosecute them.

> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike

On what basis? What is the distinction between being "created" to survive a nuclear strike, and being "designed" to do so?

> that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching).

Yes, but I don't think it's a relevant one. Baran's papers kinda-sorta-maybe had some influence on ARPANET, but ARPANET mostly got packet-switching (and certainly the term "packet") from Donald Davies. If you look at the actual layout of ARPANET it wasn't very survivable (not much redundancy in the links) [0], compared to Baran's proposal [1]. Internetworking and "the Internet" as we know it came much later and was way beyond the point where Baran had any influence.

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ARPANET_maps [1]: https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cyberge...

Author here. Having been neck-deep in steam engine history for years, the possible confusion caused by the title didn't even occur to me. It's obvious in retrospect. I guess I created accidental clickbait.

Author here. Some of the apparent errors here are due to the fact that this is part of a larger series, more of a book in blog form.

> every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam.

I'm aware of this. This is written in the context of the cultural decline of steam power as something people think and dream and write science fiction about, not its physical elimination from the world. See this post [0], particularly the last section, "The Twilight of Steam."

> so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines

I'm aware of this also. But internal combustion engine is a mouthful, so I elected to shorten it, as described this post [1]

> but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s

This can't be correct, because internal combustion cars left steam cars in the dust well before the 1910s; it was obvious to most people that internal combustion was winning by 1903.

[0]: https://technicshistory.com/2024/04/25/twilight-of-the-age-o... [1]: https://technicshistory.com/2024/03/21/twilight-of-the-steam...

> The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive,

I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible.

I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all.

(That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)

This is accurate in my experience. My two self-published history books have sold about 400 and 150 copies respectively (combined print an ebook), with no marketing other than my blog, which occasionally makes it to the front page of HN.

Note that this is purely a 'hobby' project at this scale. Both books are still in the red counting just the expenses paid for cover and interior design, illustrations, and editing (i.e. not counting the many hours of my own time). To make a self-sustaining amount of money self-publishing I would have to sell a lot more copies and make books that can be written with much less effort (e.g. genre fiction).

This article is all about how streaming is a big money loser for almost everyone. So it has growth without profitability. I'd rather have profitability without growth.

Author here. I'm by no means an expert on 1848 politics, but I got this information from the cited source (Hamerow, "Restoration, Revolution, Reaction"). Quoting 191-192:

"In industry conservatism could afford to do more than merely outliberalize the liberals. It bid boldly for the support of the urban proletariat by reintroducing corporate regulation of production. Through the association of an economic with a political reaction it hoped to create a mass following for the policy of counterrevolution. Hence the royalist victory in Prussia was followed by the promulgation of the two emergency measures of February 9 revitalizing the atrophied guild system." (etc., it goes on to cite similar post-1848 regulations imposed by other German states.)

Well, the pressure of the atmosphere is not 1 psi, it's ~15psi.

So under the ideal gas law, a gas falling from 20 psi to 15 would expand about 20/15 = 1.33x its original volume, not 20 times. Likewise it would expand about 2x when falling from 30 to 15, not 30x.

IMO the best overall "soup to nuts" survey of the history of computers is Campbell-Kelly, et. al., "Computer: A History of the Information Machine."

Specifically on the relation of telecommunications to computers I will toot my own horn and recommend my book, McDonald, "How the Telegraph, Telephone, and Radio Created the Computer."

Author here. Agree based on looking at other sources, my dating on OC-48 deployment seems to be off by ~a decade (it would be more like late 1990s/early 2000s, e.g. [0] says 1999 for a very early use). I sourced this from Fred Goldstein, The Great Telecom Meltdown, but I don't have the book handy to double-check whether I misread something. It may be confusion over just where in the network OC-48 was being used.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high-speed_Backbone_Netwo...

Italy/Italia was used to designate the peninsula for thousands of years before there was a nation-state called Italy. [0] It was used that way continuously all the way up through the nineteenth century. e.g. Adam Smith, writing in the eighteenth century, referred to "Italy" several times in Wealth of Nations.[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#Name [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3300/pg3300-images.html

I would guess the majority of humans alive today would struggle to solve these problems. Do only people who have a good understanding of middle/high school math count as generally intelligent?

This seems like a ratcheting of expectations for what counts as intelligence in response to an advance of AI. (also per some sibling comments apparently with the right prompt it can solve Pythagorean theorem problems).

This is a good find. However I read through the key portions of the cited Lukasik article about the founding of ARPANET (pp. 10-12), and I can't find any real support for the claim in his introduction. He mentions the Baran RAND proposal and its survivability goals, but I saw no evidence provided that ARPA funded Taylor's ARPANET project because they thought it would help meet those same goals.

It's also important to mention that Lukasik wrote this article in 2011, over 40 years after the fact, and that the claim you quote is contradicted by pretty much everyone else involved at the time, including Lukasik's boss at the time ARPANET was conceived, Charles Herzfeld (as cited in the same wikipedia article.)

Actually a Savery engine (the type of engine the OP's post starts off with) doesn't have a piston at all. And the Newcomen atmospheric engine didn't require a very precise fit to function either. It wasn't until Watt started the drive for more efficient engines that accurately boring the cylinder became important.

For another take on this story, please check out my blog series on the Age of Steam: https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/