Lines of Longitude. Image from wikimedia, Public Domain. Mary Edwards was a computer, a human computer. Even more surprisingly for the time (the 1700s), she was a female computer (and so was her da…| cs4fn
A historical perspective on tackling new cyber challenges and securing the future of the computing infrastructure.| Communications of the ACM
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command| Coding Horror
What if there was Computer Science in Middle Earth?…Computer Scientists and digital artists are behind the fabulous special effects and computer generated imagery we see in today’s movies, but for a bit of fun, in this series, we look at how movie plots could change if they involved Computer Scientists. Here we look at an alternative … Continue reading Film Futures: The Lord of the Rings→| cs4fn
Which band was the first to stream a concert live over the Internet? The Rolling Stones decided, in 1994, it should be them. After all, they were one of the greatest, most innovative rock bands of all time. A concert from their tour of that year, in Dallas, was therefore broadcast live. Mick Jagger addressed … Continue reading The first Internet concert→| cs4fn
Image from a set of wartime photos of GC&CS at Bletchley Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons A group of enthusiasts at Bletchley Park, the top secret wartime codebreaking base, rebuilt a…| cs4fn
Clip art collections from the early 1990s are today's forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full [...]| Vintage Computing and Gaming
[Benj's note -- I originally wrote this in 2020 and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I [...]| Vintage Computing and Gaming
In August 2022, I joined up with Ars Technica as their AI and Machine Learning Reporter. Of course, even while documenting one of the wildest cutting-edge stories in tech at the moment, my heart never strays far from the subject of this site: vintage technology and the history behind it. In between writing about AI […]| Vintage Computing and Gaming
[ Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 1 in January. –Benj ] Reverse engineering Prodigy is not without challenges. Though the patent describes the communications protocol and the TBOL language well, it lacks detail of the application protocols – that is, the communications […]| Vintage Computing and Gaming
“Now computing can be fun and easy for the entire family.” The Tandy Sensation was an early attempt at a specialized Multimedia PC. In this case, Tandy came up with a 25 MHz 486SX computer with a 107 MB hard drive, built-in CD-ROM drive, stereo sound card, a voice/fax modem, SVGA color graphics, and more. […]| Vintage Computing and Gaming
In the mid-1990s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP 95LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP 95LX (1991) is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM. While looking for 95LX software around 1997 (according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier), […]| Vintage Computing and Gaming