Your Undocumented Project May Also Baffle People Someday

November 26, 2024 by Donald Papp 49 Comments

What’s life without a little mystery? There’s one less rolling around after historians finally identified a donated mystery machine that had been in storage for years.

Feeding dough through this machine may have been faster, but probably not safer.

The main pieces of the machine are about a century old and any staff who may have known more about the undocumented device were no longer around to ask. The historical society finally posted pictures and asked for any insights, which eventually led to solving the mystery.

The machine is in all likelihood a beaten biscuit maker, which was a type of dense baked good popular in the American south. Making them called for a long and labor-intensive process of pounding and working the dough, and the society says this machine was likely created by a fellow trying to help his aunt streamline her business, offloading the labor of working the dough to a machine.

The machine had no branding of any sort and lacked any identifying marks. Its purpose was doubtlessly obvious at the time, but no records remained and quite possibly none existed in the first place. Sound familiar? Perhaps someday our own undocumented projects and prototypes will mystify people. It’s certainly happened in the case of mysterious Roman dodecahedrons, which remain a head-scratching mystery.

Historical map of The Netherlands overlayed with clouds

Hacking Global Positioning Systems Onto 16th-Century Maps

November 25, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 9 Comments

What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchants navigated the sprawling city with woodcut maps. Or sailors plotting Atlantic crossings with accuracy unheard of for the time. This whimsical intersection of history and tech was recently featured in a blog post by [Jan Adriaenssens], and comes alive with Bert Spaan’s Allmaps Here: a delightful web app that overlays your GPS location onto georeferenced historical maps.

Take Antwerp’s 1565 city map by Virgilius Bononiensis, a massive 120×265 cm woodcut. With Allmaps Here, you’re a pink dot navigating this masterpiece. Plantin-Moretus Museum? Nailed it. Kasteelpleinstraat? A shadow of the old citadel it bordered. Let’s not forget how life might’ve been back then. A merchant could’ve avoided morning traffic and collapsing bridges en route to the market, while a farmer relocating his herd could’ve found fertile pastures minus the swamp detour.

Unlike today’s turn-by-turn navigation, a 16th-century GPS might have been all about survival: avoiding bandit-prone roads, timing tides for river crossings, or tracking stars as backup. Imagine explorers fine-tuning their Atlantic crossings with trade winds mapped to the mile. Georeferenced maps like these let us re-imagine the practical genius of our ancestors while enjoying a modern hack on a centuries-old problem.

Although sites like OldMapsOnline, Google Earth Timelapse (and for the Dutch: TopoTijdreis) have been around for a while, this new match of technology and historical detail is a true gem. Curious to map your own world on antique charts? Navigate to Allmaps and start georeferencing!

On The Nature Of Electricity: Recreating The Early Experiments

October 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney No comments

Bits of material levitating against gravity, a stream of water deflected by invisible means, sparks of light appearing out of thin air; with observations like those, it’s a wonder that the early experiments into the nature of electricity progressed beyond the catch-all explanation of magic. And yet they did, but not without a lot of lamb’s bladders and sulfur globes, and not a little hand waving in the process. And urine — lots and lots of urine.

Looking into these early electrical experiments and recreating them is the unlikely space [Sam Gallagher] has staked out with the “Experimental History of Electricity,” a growing playlist on his criminally undersubscribed YouTube channel. The video linked below is his latest, describing the apparatus one Francis Hauksbee used to generate static electric charges for his early 18th-century experiments. Hauksbee’s name is nowhere near as well-known as that of Otto von Guericke or William Gilbert, who in the two centuries before Hauksbee conducted their own experiments and who both make appearances in the series. But Hauksbee’s machine, a rotating glass globe charged by the lightest touch of a leather pad, which [Sam] does a fantastic job recreating as closely as possible using period-correct materials and methods, allowed him to explore the nature of electricity in much greater depth than his predecessors.

But what about the urine? As with many of the experiments at the time, alchemists used what they had to create the reagents they needed, and it turned out that urine was a dandy source of phosphorous, which gave off a brilliant light when sufficiently heated. The faint light given off by mercury when shaken in the vacuum within a barometer seemed similar enough that it became known as the “mercurial phosphor” that likely inspired Hauksbee’s electrical experiments, which when coupled with a vacuum apparatus nearly led to the invention of the mercury discharge lamp, nearly 200 years early. The more you know. Continue reading “On The Nature Of Electricity: Recreating The Early Experiments” →

Want To Help Capture Some Digital Ephemera? Break Out Your VHS Player

September 26, 2024 by Jenny List 16 Comments

Do you live in the UK, have a VCR and capture card, and an interest in Teletext? [James O’Malley] needs your help! Teletext was, for many people around the world, their first experience of an electronic information system. The simple text and block graphics were transmitted on rotation as data bursts in the frame blanking periods of analogue TV broadcasts, and in an era of printed newspapers, they became compulsory reading. The UK turned off its old-style teletext over a decade ago with the switch to digital, but fragments of the broadcasts remain and can be painstakingly revived from period video recordings with the appropriate software.

This is where [James’] problem begins. Having recovered a very large archive of 1980s and 1990s VHS tapes, he’s come to the realisation that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and that the archive needs to be in the hands of an individual, entity, or organisation which can give it the resources necessary to archive both the teletext and the programming that it contains. Can you help? Give the article linked above a read.

Meanwhile, you can wallow in a bit of nostalgia by browsing the archive of recovered pages, and while you’re at it, take a minute to envy the French.

How Sony Mastered The Transistor

September 4, 2024 by Al Williams 35 Comments

When you think of Sony, you probably think of a technology company that’s been around forever. However, as [Asianometry] points out, it really formed in the tough years after World War II. The two people behind the company’s formation were an interesting pair. One of them was a visionary engineer and one was a consummate businessman.

While it is hard to imagine today, securing a license to produce transistors was difficult in the early days. What’s worse is, even with the license, it was not feasible to use the crude devices in a radio.

Continue reading “How Sony Mastered The Transistor” →

The Famous Computer Cafe Has Now Been Archived Online

August 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

You might think that TV stations or production houses would be great at archiving, but it’s not always the case. Particularly from the public access perspective. However, if you’re a fan of The Famous Computer Cafe, you’re in luck! The beloved series has now been preserved on The Internet Archive!

If you’re not familiar with the show, it was a radio program broadcast from 1983 to 1986. It was pumped out of a variety of radio stations in southern and central California in the period. The creators making sure to keep a copy of each episode in reel-to-reel tape format. For years, these tapes were tragically lost, until archivist [Kay Savetz] was able to recover some of them from a recent property sale. From there, a GoFundMe paid for digitization, and the show has been placed on The Internet Archive with the blessings of the original creators.

This is quite the cultural victory, particularly when you observe the list of guests on the show. Timothy Leary, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, and even Douglas Adams made appearances in the recovered recordings. Sadly, though, not all the tapes have been recovered. Episodes with Gene Roddenberry, Robert Moog, and Ray Bradbury are still lost to time.

If you fancy a listen, 53 episodes presently exist on the archive. Take a trip back in time and hear from some technological visionaries—and futurists—speaking their minds at the very beginning of the microcomputer era! If you find any particularly salient gems, don’t hesitate to drop them on the tip line.

Three different keyboard devices with greyscale LCDs on top are on a white table. In the back left is a beige one with grey keys, front and center is a black model, and to the right is a translucent blue model with black keys being held up by a hand.

A Brief History Of AlphaSmart

July 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us through the history of the AlphaSmart word processor which started as an educational tool, but finds itself in many a writer’s bag today.

The original AlphaSmart bears more than a passing resemblance to its Apple contemporaries since the company was founded by two Apple engineers. The Cupertino company didn’t see the value in the concept, but didn’t lean on any non-competes to keep the pair from pursuing the idea on their own time either. What resulted was a dead simple word processor that could be had for 1/5 of what a new computer typically cost in the era, which was particularly attractive for the target market of schools.

After several successful years, the pressure of PDAs and then smartphones from one side and cheaper laptops from the other meant school districts no longer wanted single-purpose devices when they could have a fully-fledged computing experience for students. We wonder if that was the right call, with so many now wanting distraction-free devices, but it was the end of the road for the company either way.

Our own [Kristina Panos] and [Tom Nardi] have shown us the guts of the Neo and of one of its competitors, the Writer, respectively. If you have a Neo of your own in need of replacement keycaps, you can print them.

Continue reading “A Brief History Of AlphaSmart” →