Your first computer is (kind of) like your first kiss: exciting at the time, deeply memorable later in life, and yet still potentially embarrassing when recounted in public. For those reasons, watching dozens of computer scientists recall their first (computer) in this video is oddly compelling.
European Space History has just posted this awesome movie poster-like orange-blue launch photo of a historic space event that took place on November 26th way back in 1965.
The Phlico Predicta was a TV that, in design terms at least, was way ahead of its time. But what if it had come loaded with Netflix?
You’ve probably seen NASA’s so-called “meatball logo,” and wondered what it meant. Obviously, the blue sphere represents a planet. What about the red? I’d assumed the chevron stood for aeronautics, and once I heard it represented a certain constellation. But the truth is more interesting.
This stunning image of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank — with its bright blue waters, moody grey seas and fluffy white clouds — looks like the kind of image NASA may publish on any given week. In fact, it was taken on June 4th 1965.
Some of my fondest childhood memories involve booting up my parents’ Macintosh Plus to play Super Munchers or make pixelated masterpieces in MacPaint. Alas, Apple hadn’t gotten into mobile devices just yet, but that didn’t stop Pierre Cerveau from imagining what the tech giant’s very first smartphone might have looked…
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just released in high resolution this amazing historical photo. According to ORNL, in this photograph you can see two scientists as they remove the world’s first radioactive isotope produced for medical use from Oak Ridge’s Graphite Reactor, on August 2nd 1946. In compulsory collar…
On May 10, 1975, Sony took out full-page ads in a bunch of newspapers to proudly announce the arrival of a new product, “The Next Thing”: Betamax.
When a Florida mailman landed a gyrocopter with a USPS logo on the lawn of the Capitol today, I’m sure you were asking yourself the same question I was: Does the postal service really deliver mail via gyrocopter? Not today. But it turns out they did, back in the 1930s.
The early 1980s were a watershed moment for digital technology. Aside from the imminent personal computing revolution, it was clear that video recording could change the way we did everything from watch movies to shop for new clothes. And Sears was on it.
Once upon a time, long before Twitter or Xbox live, you could turn on a TV that looked a lot like this and watch spacemen valiantly defeat their enemies with rayguns and plutonium-powered rockets. We can't travel back to that simpler age, but we can re-create the experience using 3D printing.
Now that the collective eye roll around Apple's $10,000 watch has turned into a blank stare, it's time for a little bit of nostalgia. Apple is not new to this game of selling seemingly everyday gadgets for ridiculous dollar amounts. The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM) wrote the rules nearly 20 years ago.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a piece of modern sculpture. But in fact you're looking one of NASA's old Vanguard satellites, photographed at Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1958.
Piet Mondrian sits well in the world of science and technology, his clear geometric forms so neatly and rationally ordered. But perhaps the earliest example of technology and Modrian intersecting is in these images, created digitally way back in 1964.
Back in the 70s and 80s, there was a little piece of technological magic known as Teletext. Basically, it allowed the broadcast of text, and crude text-art, over unused TV spectrum, so long as you had a special decoder. Very proto-internet. And so of course, it was used for pornography.
If Times Square is too gaudy, crowded, and frankly insane for you, then there is another New York tradition worth your New Year's Eve—one that is, in fact, ending tonight. For the past fifty years, the Pratt Institute has set out its amazing collection of big old steam whistles out on the lawn of its Brooklyn campus.…
Remember the 90s, when we had videos on VHS to teach us about this new thing called the internet? Lucky for us, Andy Baio (@waxpancake) has preserved those tapes for the YouTube generation.
The oldest lightbulb in continuous use was installed before the Wright Brothers took flight, is 110 years old, and is still as beautiful as the day she was born. In fact, it's likely the oldest electrical device in continuous use period. Take a moment and consider just how much the world has changed around this one,…
We've all received that email at least once before. A kind prince/princess/spambot in Nigeria has millions of dollars, and better yet, they want to split it with you. Just hand over your social security code and wait for them to arrive on American soil. As the above newspaper clipping shows, these types of scams were…
