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Tag: history of technology

  • Angelina Jolie was right about computers – WIRED

    Here’s where I confess something awkward, something I didn’t intend to confess in this story, but why not: ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested. And look at that—the international RISC-V summit was coming up in Santa Clara the very next month. And every major RISC and RISC-V inventor lived down the street from me in Berkeley. It was perfect. Some would say too perfect. If you believe the marketing hype, everyone wants RISC-V chips to accelerate their AI. So I started to think: Maybe ChatGPT wants this for … itself. Maybe it manipulated me into evangelizing for RISC-V as one tiny part of a long-term scheme to open-source its own soul and/or achieve superintelligence!

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  • Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May – XDA

    Skype was first launched back in 2003, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. A couple of years after that, it discontinued some of its in-house communication products like Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the Redmond firm tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10. … In 2017, Microsoft launched Teams, a collaboration platform built on the backbone of Skype, designed to compete with the likes of Slack. It’s been pushing Teams pretty hard ever since, so you’d be forgiven if you were expecting Skype to be killed off, say, six years years ago when Skype for Business was retired. But just as you’d expect it to happen, some update would ship, and you’d say to yourself, “People are still working on this thing?”

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  • Apple discontinuing this 18-year-old iPhone feature – MacRumors

    Apple reportedly plans to announce a new iPhone SE as soon as next week, and the device is expected to feature a full-screen design with Face ID, instead of a Touch ID home button. That means Apple will no longer sell any new iPhone models with a home button, for the first time since the original iPhone launched.

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  • CD-ROMS in 1994: Bowie, Prince, Gabriel, and Cybermania ’94 – Cybercultural

    “Brian and I are developing something from which the user will genuinely feel he has had a full participation creatively,” Bowie said in an online chat on 1st July 1994, when asked about his multimedia plans. Clearly he and Eno had been discussing how music would evolve in the digital technology era; in addition to their March recording sessions, the pair swapped creative ideas over email regularly. Bowie was convinced “interactive multimedia” was the key, going forward. “Everything seems to have crossed through the mediums a lot more,” he told the New York Times later in July, “and I’m not quite sure what it is we’re doing, but it’s not just making records anymore. It’s got a lot further than that, and we keep translating everything to be interactive. The medium that we are working in is not actually CD-ROM. The medium is interactive multimedia, and I think that the CD-ROM is only the best delivery system currently available.” […]

    Overall, Gabriel’s CD-ROM has a much better logic than Bowie’s Jump (there are no random barking dogs, for a start) and it’s less confusing to navigate than Prince’s Interactive. From the vantage point of thirty years later, it must be said that XPLORA1 looks dated — with its tiny video screens and boxy graphics. But at the time, it got relatively positive reviews and no doubt deserved the three awards it got at Cybermania ’94.

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  • Video Game History Foundation Library

    The VGHF Library is operated by the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to the history of video games. This is the home for our collections of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.

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  • The tangled tale of The Times’s URL – The New York Times

    In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. … Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. “I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

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  • Saving one screen at a time – Tedium

    Having seen a lot of pipes, wavy lines, and flying toasters in my day, there was a real novelty to the art of screen savers, which became another way to put your visual mark on the devices you own. The animated screen saver is still out there, of course, but its cultural relevance has faded considerably. In fact, GNOME, one of the two dominant window managers in the FOSS world (particularly on Linux), straight-up doesn’t support graphical screen savers in modern versions, unless you’re willing to get hacky. And it’s not like people kick up colorful screen savers on their smartphones or tablets. But maybe we’re thinking about screen savers all wrong in terms of their cultural role. When it comes to screen savers, what if GNOME has it right? Today’s Tedium ponders the screen saver, including how we got it and what it represents today.

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  • Keypad used to land Apollo on the moon shrunk down to work as wristwatch – collectSPACE

    When NASA’s Apollo spacecraft launched to the moon, it had on board two briefcase-size computers that for their day would normally have required enough floor space to fill a couple of rooms. The compact devices were small, but had enough processing power and memory to guide the astronauts from the Earth to the moon. Fifty-five years later, the British start-up Apollo Instruments has been able to shrink the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) even further — to the size of a wristwatch. Now, anyone can wear the display and keyboard system, or DSKY (pronounced “disk-key”), that astronauts used on the command and lunar modules. The DSKY Moonwatch is more than just a novelty timepiece; wearers can interact with it just like the Apollo crews did and fly to the moon (rocket and spacecraft not included).

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  • DSKY: A unique Moonwatch with a true Lunar legacy – Apollo Instruments

    Introducing the highly coveted Apollo Instruments DSKY Moonwatch, a four-year endeavour that captures the essence of adventure and the spirit of space exploration. With its authentic design and immersive functionality, this watch is a must-have for any avid collector or space enthusiast.

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  • The gentrification of video game history – Felipe Pepe

    For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends’ houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc. As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South. There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.

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  • AI’s Walking Dog, a response in our forum: “The AI we deserve” – Boston Review

    AI is always stunning at first encounter: one is amazed that something nonhuman can make something that seems so similar to what humans make. But it’s a little like Samuel Johnson’s comment about a dog walking on its hind legs: we are impressed not by the quality of the walking but by the fact it can walk that way at all. After a short time it rapidly goes from awesome to funny to slightly ridiculous—and then to grotesque. Does it not also matter that the walking dog has no intentionality—doesn’t “know” what it’s doing?

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  • The AI we deserve – Boston Review

    As for the original puzzle—AI and democracy—the solution is straightforward. “Democratic AI” requires actual democracy, along with respect for the dignity, creativity, and intelligence of citizens. It’s not just about making today’s models more transparent or lowering their costs, nor can it be resolved by policy tweaks or technological innovation. The real challenge lies in cultivating the right Weltanschauung—this app does wonders!—grounded in ecological reason. On this score, the ability of AI to run ideological interference for the prevailing order, whether bureaucracy in its early days or the market today, poses the greatest threat.

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  • ‘We were wrong’: An oral history of WIRED’s original website – WIRED

    Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

    Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

    Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

    John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

    Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

    Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

    John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

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