History

542 Articles

Information Density: Microfilm And Microfiche

June 9, 2025 by 18 Comments

Today, we think nothing of sticking thousands of pages of documents on a tiny SD card, or just pushing it out to some cloud service. But for decades, this wasn’t possible. Yet companies still generated huge piles of paper. What could be done? The short answer is: microfilm.

However, the long answer is quite a bit more complicated. Microfilm is, technically, a common case of the more generic microform. A microform is a photographically reduced document on film. A bunch of pages on a reel of film is microfilm. If it is on a flat card — usually the size of an index card — that’s microfiche. On top of that, there were a few other incidental formats. Aperture cards were computer punch cards with a bit of microfilm included. Microcards were like microfiche, but printed on cardboard instead of film.

In its heyday, people used specialized cameras, some made to read fanfold computer printer paper, to create microfilm. There were also computer output devices that could create microfilm directly.

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Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji

June 5, 2025 by 57 Comments

There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. With its last few cycles it can still gather some diagnostic information, attempt to write this to a log or memory dump and then output a supportive message to the screen to let the user know that the kernel really did try its best.

This on-screen message is called many things, from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, to a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku. Over the decades these Screens of Death (SoD) have changed considerably, from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the simplified BSOD of Windows 8 onwards with its prominent sad emoji that has drawn a modicum of ridicule.

Now it seems that the Windows BSOD is about to change again, and may not even be blue any more. So what’s got a user to think about these changes? What were we ever supposed to get out of these special screens?

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High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II

June 4, 2025 by 32 Comments

With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.

There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.

That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.

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The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation

May 20, 2025 by 73 Comments

In the early days of the World Wide Web – with the Year 2000 and the threat of a global collapse of society were still years away – the crafting of a website on the WWW was both special and increasingly more common. Courtesy of free hosting services popping up left and right in a landscape still mercifully devoid of today’s ‘social media’, the WWW’s democratizing influence allowed anyone to try their hands at web design. With varying results, as those of us who ventured into the Geocities wilds can attest to.

Back then we naturally had web standards, courtesy of the W3C, though Microsoft, Netscape, etc. tried to upstage each other with varying implementation levels (e.g. no iframes in Netscape 4.7) and various proprietary HTML and CSS tags. Most people were on dial-up or equivalently anemic internet connections, so designing a website could be a painful lesson in optimization and targeting the lowest common denominator.

This was also the era of graceful degradation, where us web designers had it hammered into our skulls that using and navigating a website should be possible even in a text-only browser like Lynx, w3m or antique browsers like IE 3.x. Fast-forward a few decades and today the inverse is true, where it is your responsibility as a website visitor to have the latest browser and fastest internet connection, or you may even be denied access.

What exactly happened to flip everything upside-down, and is this truly the WWW that we want?

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Remembering The ISP That David Bowie Ran For Eight Years

May 19, 2025 by 15 Comments

The seeds of the Internet were first sown in the late 1960s, with computers laced together in continent-spanning networks to aid in national defence. However, it was in the late 1990s that the end-user explosion took place, as everyday people flocked online in droves.

Many astute individuals saw the potential at the time, and rushed to establish their own ISPs to capitalize on the burgeoning market. Amongst them was a famous figure of some repute. David Bowie might have been best known for his cast of rock-and-roll characters and number one singles, but he was also an internet entrepreneur who got in on the ground floor—with BowieNet.

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Falling Down The Land Camera Rabbit Hole

May 15, 2025 by 24 Comments

It was such an innocent purchase, a slightly grubby and scuffed grey plastic box with the word “P O L A R O I D” intriguingly printed along its top edge. For a little more than a tenner it was mine, and I’d just bought one of Edwin Land’s instant cameras. The film packs it takes are now a decade out of production, but my Polaroid 104 with its angular 1960s styling and vintage bellows mechanism has all the retro-camera-hacking appeal I need. Straight away I 3D printed an adapter and new back allowing me to use 120 roll film in it, convinced I’d discover in myself a medium format photographic genius.

But who wouldn’t become fascinated with the film it should have had when faced with such a camera? I have form on this front after all, because a similar chance purchase of a defunct-format movie camera a few years ago led me into re-creating its no-longer-manufactured cartridges. I had to know more, both about the instant photos it would have taken, and those film packs. How did they work? Continue reading “Falling Down The Land Camera Rabbit Hole” →

Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications

May 12, 2025 by 15 Comments

The world’s militaries have always been at the forefront of communications technology. From trumpets and drums to signal flags and semaphores, anything that allows a military commander to relay orders to troops in the field quickly or call for reinforcements was quickly seized upon and optimized. So once radio was invented, it’s little wonder how quickly military commanders capitalized on it for field communications.

Radiotelegraph systems began showing up as early as the First World War, but World War II was the first real radio war, with every belligerent taking full advantage of the latest radio technology. Chief among these developments was the ability of signals in the high-frequency (HF) bands to reflect off the ionosphere and propagate around the world, an important capability when prosecuting a global war.

But not long after, in the less kinetic but equally dangerous Cold War period, military planners began to see the need to move more information around than HF radio could support while still being able to do it over the horizon. What they needed was the higher bandwidth of the higher frequencies, but to somehow bend the signals around the curvature of the Earth. What they came up with was a fascinating application of practical physics: meteor burst communications.

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