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infovore + history   89

Russell M Davies: History will remember Samuel Pepys' blog (Wired UK)
"We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making." Better keep on making, then. (This is good. Also: well done Phil. It's important to say well done, and this is a lot of effort, and it's been brilliant. Finishing in May! Gosh).
philgyford  pepysdiary  russelldavies  blogs  history  longishnow 
6 weeks ago by infovore
Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen | Photography | Film
",,,he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself." Spectacular photography; what a building.
buzludzha  bulgaria  communism  history  photography  architecture 
10 weeks ago by infovore
a sorted tale of data over time | BEN PURDY
"As amazing as it was to find the disk, the file was corrupt and couldn’t be read; all attempts to view the now 20 year old animation failed. It was part one of a science fiction saga titled “Porth” that our friend Cory had made by stretching the animation tool to the absolute limits. To say the least it was worth putting some effort into saving this file." Data archaeology.
data  animation  history  archaeology 
january 2012 by infovore
Roy's Postcards
"It's 1981. Roy Richardson is a manager at a Los Angeles computer company. A devout Mormon, he has a two-year-old son, with two daughters yet to be born. He has a little over ten years to live.

I was that two-year-old and Roy was my father. I grew up without him, knowing the outlines of his life but not the details. In 2006, at my mother's house, I found three boxes of details." Leonard never fails to surprise and amaze. This is wonderful.
leonardr  postcards  family  history  writing  documentation 
january 2012 by infovore
Unto the Ends of the Earth // Satirical maps of the Great War, 1914-1915
Remarkable satirical maps from the First World War; the Raemaekers is especially brilliant.
maps  satire  firstworldwar  wwi  cartoons  illustration  history 
december 2011 by infovore
Astonishments, ten, in the history of version control < Francis is
"The (for now) final end product seems incredibly obvious. And popular.

Yet it took decades of iterative innovation, from some of the cleverest minds in the field, to make something so apparently simple yet powerful.

And every step was astonishing." This is great stuff from Francis.
scm  vcs  versioncontrol  history  programming  francisirving  writing 
december 2011 by infovore
The Day Alan Turing Came Out
A lovely, sad, tiny story by Leonard.
leonardrichardson  alanturing  history  sf  sciencefiction  writing 
november 2011 by infovore
Dennis Ritchie obituary | Technology | The Guardian
Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.
c  unix  history  computing  dennisritchie 
october 2011 by infovore
A disappearing history. | Groping The Elephant
"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.
multiplayer  history  games 
october 2011 by infovore
Historical Meet-Ups -   Samuel Beckett Playwright, novelist, and Nobel...
"Years later, when recounting his conversations with Beckett (which he did often), André the Giant revealed that they rarely talked about anything besides cricket."
history  wrestling  beckett  cricket 
july 2011 by infovore
Creative Review - The making of a Coca-Cola neon sign, 1954
How ads used to be made. Some beautiful photographs here.
design  advertising  sugarwater  history 
june 2011 by infovore
dan says...
"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.
games  history  internet  networks  timetravel  magic 
june 2011 by infovore
[this is aaronland] Towers of History
"The value of the web is in its history. The value of the web is that it grows over time and that it spiders out making connections, just as often doubling back on itself to find previously unseen patterns and connections. It is not a linear progression through time and space always discarding the near past. Or if it is then I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time because that sounds about as exciting, and about as valuable, as any given season of canned television programming."
archives  history  internet  web 
june 2011 by infovore
HonestGamers - L.A. Noire review (Xbox 360)
"Unlike the movies that influence it, LA Noire takes place in a world where editing hasn't been invented yet." Really good writing from Tom Chick; this was perhaps my favourite quotation. I genuinely wonder how many people playing this game have never played a "proper" adventure game - be it an old Sierra point-and-click, or something from the Phoenix Wright/Hotel Dusk school. Chick's line about the matchbook is exactly the thing adventure gamers got fed up with in the *late nineteen-eighties*. We don't need the bad parts of Sierra coming back to haunt is.
games  lanoire  adventuregames  history  historiography  experience 
may 2011 by infovore
Abandonwear Clothing | The Place for Retro Tech Clothing
"A history of Silicon Valley failure written in T-Shirts." Much as I'm trying to wear fewer T-Shirts, wow, there's a lot here I'd wear in a flash, and not out of hipster irony. SSI! Sierra On-Line! Infocom! Microprose! Accolade! Brøderbund! Brilliant.
clothes  history  technology  tshirts  geek 
april 2011 by infovore
The History of Science Fiction
This large image (4400×2364 pixels) is completely marvellous: a genuine history, reaching back into trends from the dawn of literature, and with a healthy chunk of 19th century gothic/mystery in there. Makes me very happy, especially in terms of fond memories of books I've enjoyed.
art  books  sciencefiction  scifi  literature  history  diagram 
march 2011 by infovore
Maurice Franklin, Wood Turner | Spitalfields Life
"If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship."
woodturning  wood  shoreditch  history  craftsmanship 
january 2011 by infovore
Vintage British Argos 1985 Catalogue - a set on Flickr
The Spring/Summer 1985 Argos Catalogue, in its entirety, on Flickr. A slice of consumer history. Products, industrial design, toys, games, technology, all preserved. Hoping this doesn't get taken down.
argos  products  catalogue  history 
december 2010 by infovore
The Future Is A Blank Canvas Pinned To A Brick Wall « Matthew Sheret.com
"We access that history with tools that were, almost entirely, the props of science fiction my parents might have encountered – if they read it. My phone is my sonic screwdriver, the internet my TARDIS; these are the tools with which I unlock and manipulate time."
future  sf  design  writing  mattsheret  history 
october 2010 by infovore
Open Source is about the differences - Apache Asserts
"One million changes, nearly three thousand developers... At the end of the day, we just sail and log our collective journey through the Sea of Changes to the software commons." Very nice, and as James said: yep, he gets it.
software  change  history  historiography  development 
september 2010 by infovore
Nick Sweeney · what Bagpuss can teach us about the internet
"...the internet’s endless pathways turn our simple discoveries into expeditions that reveal the worlds in which those things have lived, taking the role of archivists and archaeologists of pasts that overlay and intertwine." This is lovely.
bagpuss  archaeology  archives  internet  web  history  historiography 
september 2010 by infovore
On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography | booktwo.org
"..for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future."
stml  jamesbridle  historiography  publishing  internet  history  perspective 
september 2010 by infovore
The Millions : Oral History at the End of the World: World War Z and its Cousins
"...it’s a bit disingenuous to claim, as [World War Z]’s dust jacket does, that Brooks does for zombies what Studs Terkel did for World War II. Yes, his choice of narrative frame refreshes a genre that had already entered its baroque phase. But World War Z never quite manages the same level of moral pique as The Good War and Warday; it is so constrained by its undead subject matter that it can only gesture at modern-day relevance before falling back on the same shopworn themes. Although it has more brains than the average zombie story, it still doesn’t have much of a heart." Really good piece on oral histories, real and fictional. And: I now want to read Warday, if I can find a copy.
history  writing  fiction  oralhistory  worldwarz  nuclearwar 
september 2010 by infovore
The Pac-Man Dossier
Wow. One to return to: a super-comprehensive look at Pac-Man, including its AI routines and collision detection.
games  history  pacman 
august 2010 by infovore
CABINET // A Timeline of Timelines
Brilliant.
history  historiography  timeline  culture  science 
july 2010 by infovore
Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons | Business News for Wichita Kansas | Local Journal of Wichita Business News and Kansas Business News | Wichita Eagle
"National Geographic has closely documented the journey of the final roll of Kodachrome manufactured, down to its being processed. Dwayne's is only photo lab left in the world to handle Kodachrome processing, so National Geographic Television producer Yvonne Russo and National Geographic magazine senior video producer Hans Weise found themselves in Parsons Monday, along with McCurry, with the final roll of the iconic film of the 20th century." Steve McCurry shot the final roll of Kodachrome in the world.
film  slides  kodachrome  photography  history 
july 2010 by infovore
Op-Ed Contributor - Flying with the Dragon Lady - NYTimes.com
"I’ll never forget the adrenaline surge of landing what was basically a multimillion-dollar jet-powered glider on its 12-inch tail wheel from a full stall while wearing a space suit. And I’ll always remember the peace of sitting alone on the quiet edge of space, out of radio contact for hours."
u2  flight  history  surveillance  writing 
may 2010 by infovore
unix-jun72 - Project Hosting on Google Code
"The unix-jun72 project has scanned in a printout of 1st Edition UNIX from June 1972, and restored it to an incomplete but running system. Userland binaries and a C compiler have been recovered from other surviving DECtapes." Blimey, etcetera.
unix  history  computing 
may 2010 by infovore
Family accidentally discover church under home - Odd News | newslite.tv
"An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG
history  buildings  architecture  church  hidden 
april 2010 by infovore
Back of the Cereal Box: Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde: Smarter Than You Think
"In a sense, it is. However, Ashley Davis, a blogger over at Destructoid, put a post up last week specifically on the Pac-Man ghosts and why they got the names that they did. In short, though it might seem like Blinky, Pinky, Inky and the Clyde-Sue-Tim hivemind hover around dot-filled mazes in the exact same way, they don’t. In fact, the way they move is explained by their nicknames." This is brilliant.
pacman  games  ai  history  via:mugla 
april 2010 by infovore
Game Design Advance » The Question I Didn’t Get to Ask
"DOOM doesn’t belong in a museum, not because it’s not worthy, but because it’s rock and roll. It’s too fast, too loud, too hard, and too fucked up to be in a museum. There are some games that will work in a museum and some that won’t ever and that, by itself, doesn’t say anything about their value. We need both." Frank Lantz is right.
games  worthiness  doom  history  rocknroll 
february 2010 by infovore
H. G. Wells on "Metropolis" (1927)
"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.
writing  hgwells  cinema  history  metropolis  sciencefiction  scientificromance  review 
january 2010 by infovore
Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic: case report -- Rogozov and Bermel 339: b4965 -- BMJ
"The Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov’s self operation, undertaken without any other medical professional around, was a testament to determination and the will to life." Rogozov was the surgeon on a Soviet Antarctic expedition, on the ice for a year. When he developed appendicitis, his only choice was to operate... on himself. This remarkable BMJ article draws on his diary to explain what happened. (There are two moderately icky photographs, should you not like that sort of thing).
surgery  science  antarctica  survival  appendicitis  russia  history 
january 2010 by infovore
Rare Important Instantaneous Photograph
Warning: gory 19th century photograph of donkey's head exploding at the other end. But seriously: you've invented an instantly-exposing gelatin plate; what's the fastest thing you can photograph to prove it works? Turns out the answer is: a donkey's head exploding.
photography  history  science  experiment  explosion 
september 2009 by infovore
History Lesson: How Dad Used To Save Files | Cult of Mac
"Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks." A lovely little video. I remember this well from the Mac Pluses at school, and even at seven or eight, it drove me nuts.
history  mac  video  computers  disks  floppydisks 
september 2009 by infovore
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About | GeekDad | Wired.com
A little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of fact, a few reminders of the past. Especially the old Kit-Kat wrappers.
history  culture  technology  children  kids  list  nostalgia 
july 2009 by infovore
A Whole Lotta Nothing: I get by with a little help from 94552 friends
Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.
metafilter  history  internet  community  socialsoftware  online  mathowie  matthaughey 
july 2009 by infovore
The Benefits of a Classical Education - O'Reilly Radar
Tim O'Reilly on what he learned from studying the classics at University. Simply because of competence at the languages, I know more of the Romans than the Greeks, but this is thoughtful stuff. I was often asked at school by peers why I'd study something of "no practical value"; O'Reilly has some smart answers.
education  classics  philosophy  timoreilly  learning  history 
june 2009 by infovore
bitquabit - Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC
"And that is why, in 2009, when developing in Microsoft .NET 3.5 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on a Windows 7 system, you cannot include /com\d(\..*)?, /lpt\d(\..*)?, /con(\..*)?, /aux(\..*)?, /prn(\..*)?, or /nul(\..*)? in any of your routes." Madness.
microsoft  history  os  operatingsystems  dos  windows  fail  insanity 
june 2009 by infovore
The Escapist : Don't Knock the Aztecs
"To justify such an investment in time, a game would not only have to match the content of the course, but provide a learning experience that couldn't be accomplished through reading, writing and class discussion." Todd Bryant on how he integrated playing games into his teaching programmes; some nice ideas in here, notably using MMOs for language tuition, and some commentary on the suitability of various titles for this sort of thing.
games  education  learning  languages  history  play 
may 2009 by infovore
Nick Sweeney · the spoken word, written down
"They preserve them as best they can, perhaps without even knowing that’s what they’re doing, but in the understanding that no archives may be kept, no histories written, and that what sustains their digital lives is the lived-out, written-down, spoken word." Reminds me of the "what five pages would you print out" conundrum, and the end of Fahrenheit 451; walking the woods, chanting entries from Encyclopedia Dramatica
internet  history  archive  writing  nicksweeney  culture  historiography 
may 2009 by infovore
Gamasutra: Greg Costikyan's Blog - Twiggy Game: Will Videogaming's Future Look Like Boardgaming's Past?
"The Twiggy Game is a charming cultural object from a bygone era; it's also a stark representation of what went wrong with boardgames, and a stark warning for what can go wrong with games as a whole -- at least, if we fail to inculcate, in ourselves and in others who love games, an aesthetic that prizes something beyond the brand." Costikyan on the dangers of games having a 'lack of culture'.
culture  criticism  gregcostikyan  games  writing  history 
may 2009 by infovore
Festive 50 - Lists between 1976 and 2000 « www.indiefy.co.uk
John Peel's Festive 50s the Spotify playlist edition. Obviously, there are holes, but nice that it exists.
spotify  music  johnpeel  history  lists  charts  radio  festive50 
may 2009 by infovore
Nixon's Undelivered Moon Disaster Speech [1969]
"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." Bill Safire's speech for Richard Nixon, on the event Armstrong and Aldrin were marooned. A glimpse of alternate history.
history  space  speech  rhetroic  america  alternatehistory 
april 2009 by infovore
YouTube - Telecommunications services for the 1990s
Need to finish watching this, but: for all you can ridicule this, a lot of it isn't half bad; the two modes of videophone (share face/share document) are interesting, if only for how useful the latter is. Also, interesting to see how futurism was represented on film at one point.
video  futurism  predictions  history  communications  telecommunications  telephony 
april 2009 by infovore
Richard Nicholson Photography - 'Last One Out, Please Turn On the Light'
"This project, shot on 4"x5" film, documents London's remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable 'look'. I have lit these often-gloomy spaces to reveal the beauty of the machinery; enlargers are masterpieces of industrial design. And I have sought to shed light on the surrounding personal workspaces (snapshots of family members, souvenirs from globetrotting photographers, guidebooks to Photoshop, out-takes from glamour shoots, lists of unpaid invoices)." Gorgeous.
photography  darkrooms  enlargers  london  history  studios 
april 2009 by infovore
1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : GDC: 13 Years Later, Atlantis Emerges from the Waves of Obscurity
"...the 1996 target date for Project Atlantis and the GBA's 2001 release is quite a gap. Why the delay? My guess is: Pokémon. Game Freak's socially-driven cockfighting RPG was an unexpected end-of-life hit for the Game Boy, and its out-of-left-field success added years to the fading system's life. The popularity of Pokémon might actually have been the first time Nintendo realized that technology and profitability don't go hand-in-hand." That's an interesting way of looking at it. (Also: an interesting piece on the Nintendo super-portable that never was).
hardware  history  games  nintendo  portable  gba  atlantis  gameboy 
april 2009 by infovore
GameSetWatch - The Game Developer Archives: 'Postmortem: Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire'
A wonderful old postmortem - on Shadows of the Empire for the N64. As a launch title, there was lots of working with unfinished hardware, prototype controllers, and SGI workstations; it's long and detailed, and a fantastic portal to a world that seems eons ago, even if it was only 12 years away.
games  n64  development  history  postmortem  starwars  lucasarts  sgi  historiography 
april 2009 by infovore
Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things
"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act." This is good.
history  making  newyork  engineering  construction  building  inspiration 
march 2009 by infovore
One More Go: Majora’s Mask, or How to be your own hero of time - Offworld
"I hate the deep breath I have to take before asking if anyone remembers Jumping Flash or Rescue On Fractalus. I hate being the geeky bore who’s more interested in talking about games from twenty years ago than about BioShock 2 or GTA 5. But even more I hate the waste of modern game development, of watching talented teams burn time and energy reinventing wheels previously perfected by men now in their 60s."
design  play  writing  history  historiography  game 
march 2009 by infovore
What were arcades like? - RPGnet Forums
"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like." And then, 18 pages of wonderful gaming oral history; you'll be smelling the aircon and the chewing gum by the time you're through with this thread.
games  history  culture  society  oralhistory  arcades 
march 2009 by infovore
RIP HotU
"...with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end." Home of the Underdogs is no more; just gone, like that. It wasn't that it had the best games or the worst games, or that they were illegal, or free; it was history, and childhood, and the smell of cardboard and boot disks, all wrapped up in one giant cathedral to Good Old Games. Most things I played on my old DOS machine were there. A shame; I hope they're elsewhere. This is why we need proper game archives.
games  history  computers  archive  nostalgia  abandonware  old 
february 2009 by infovore
Twitter / Genny_Spencer
"This is the real line-a-day diary of a young farmgirl in 1937. It is maintained by @griner."
history  twitter  america  depression  gennyspencer  diary  socialhistory 
january 2009 by infovore
Slow data and the pleasure of automated nostalgia « TEST
"I’m much more interested in automated nostalgia than automated presence - data feeds that gradually acrue in your wake, rather than constantly dragging your focus on to the next five minutes." Yes.
information  narrative  history  data  visualisation  slow  pace 
january 2009 by infovore
Докторрр ин дер ролле Fima_Psuchopadt (с) - 65 лет назад была снята блокада Ленинграда
65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.
photography  russia  history  location  photoshop  war  leningrad  merged 
january 2009 by infovore
On the high seas - a set on Flickr
"We were delighted to have George Oates, ex of Flickr who started and managed the Commons, come to visit us at the National Maritime Museum in November 2008. When she was here she curated some Commons content for us. This set is the first of this content." Some wonderful selections; the full archive must be remarkable.
flickr  history  commons  georgeoates  curation  sailing  marinehistory  nmm 
january 2009 by infovore
The man who invented the doner kebab has died - Telegraph
"Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them." The first of the new snacks was served on March 2, 1971, at Hasir, his restaurant in Berlin. It was called a doner kebab after the Turkish word "dondurmek" which means a rotating roast." So now you know.
history  food  obituary  kebab  doner  donerkebab 
january 2009 by infovore
Justice Will Take Us Millions Of Intricate Moves
Leonard Richardson's talk from QCon, about REST, his work on Canonical's Launchpad and its web service, and some useful history for anyone wanting to contextualise web services as part of the web.
programming  history  development  web  api  webservices  rest  leonardr 
january 2009 by infovore
Box Art
"A scrapbook collection of awesome videogame box art." Added to subscriptions immediately. This is going to be lovely.
games  history  art  gaming  packaging  boxart  boxes 
january 2009 by infovore
Abyss & Apex : Fourth Quarter 2007: Wikihistory
"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"
writing  history  fiction  sf  timetravel 
january 2009 by infovore
Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: now, more than ever
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
science  technology  security  history  futurism  future  prescience 
january 2009 by infovore
Eric Kaltman's blog | How They Got Game
Eric Kaltman is blogging the Cabrinety Collection, and he's doing a great job so far.
games  blog  history  archive  collection  historiography  cabrinety 
december 2008 by infovore
Gamasutra - The Last Express: Revisiting An Unsung Classic
Lovely, interesting article about The Last Express; some nice notes about the production process, the problem with setting games at the turn of the century, and juggling as bonding. Interesting how many lessons from the game still have relevance to modern gaming, and I love the "small space, mapped perfectly" ideal.
games  adventure  lastexpress  production  development  history  narrative 
november 2008 by infovore
BibliOdyssey: Board Games
Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over
games  play  boardgames  history 
november 2008 by infovore
Save the Videogame
"We need a National Videogame Archive. Luckily, we've just started one. We're going to preserve videogames for the nation. For better or worse. Forever. It's going to be brilliant..." Oh, that it is. Jonathan Smith on *every single bloody thing* that's perfect about Micro Machines 2 on the Mega Drive is a highlight so far.
videogames  uk  nationalvideogamesarchive  archive  history  historiography  preservation 
october 2008 by infovore
rodcorp: Maintenance, or the keeping of too much at hand, having delivered too much
"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
service  history  maintenance  servitude  delivery 
october 2008 by infovore
costume detail: Stripes
"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.
history  culture  fashion  clothing  stripes  society  medieval 
october 2008 by infovore
New maps of places in the diary (Pepys' Diary)
"I've just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more." Some fantastic maps-and-pins from Phil and Sam.
history  mapping  geography  geodata  pepysdiary 
august 2008 by infovore
The Artful Gamer · Origin Systems Treasures Unearthed
"I’m excited to pass along the news that a team of dedicated Wing Commander fans and Origin Museum curator Joe Garrity, recently completed their 7-day archiving grind of almost 1 Terabyte of data at Mythic Studios." A remarkable slice of gaming history, and great to know that Mythic want to preserve all this stuff. More like this, please.
games  ea  origin  history  archiving  archive  preservation 
august 2008 by infovore
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Resurrecting Tennis for Two, a video game from 1958
Building your own version of Higinbotham's oscilloscope tennis game, to work on a real oscilloscope.
games  play  oscilloscope  tennis  electronics  hardware  history  archive 
july 2008 by infovore
Cooking With Booze: The Blog — In Vino, Civitas
"I believe there’s a much larger story about how our whole civilisation is based to some extent on our desire for booze - one that goes back even further than human civilisation itself." James on fine form at Interesting.
drink  civilization  mankind  growth  booze  culture  history  society  interesting08 
june 2008 by infovore
Click opera - Lost ways of looking at looking
"What's so remarkable about this series is that it seems more apposite, subversive and thought-provoking than ever". The book certainly shaped some of my own approach to art and criticism when I was at university
art  tv  criticism  johnberger  history  culture  television  waysofseeing 
may 2008 by infovore
TimesMachine - New York Times
"TimesMachine can take you back to any issue [of the NYT between 1851 and 1922]". Some lovely flourishes in the interface, and some remarkable content, as you might expect.
newspaper  newyorktimes  interface  interaction  design  publishing  journalism  history 
february 2008 by infovore
LibraryThing: Happy 1815! Thomas Jefferson is done.
Thomas Jefferson's entire library - and his reviews of books in it - exists as an account on LibraryThing. I'm glad that things like this exist in the world, and that the Internet makes them possible.
awesome  jefferson  librarything  library  books  reading  reviews  culture  history 
january 2008 by infovore
WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier
Quite remarkable, if only for its density and level of detail.
history  blog  ww1  military  blogging 
january 2008 by infovore
Penny Arcade! - "My Grandpa"
Mike Krahulik finally puts up a transcription of an interview with his grandfather about his time in the Navy during the Second World War. it's interesting, notably when Krahulik asks him how he feels about WWII videogames. Also, it's just a great story.
history  oral  interview  wwii  navy  games  america 
december 2007 by infovore
Thoughts: 1992: Nokia's first GSM handset
"Fifteen years ago, Nokia launched its first GSM handset, the Nokia 1011, the model number coming from the launch date: 10 November 1992."
phone  mobile  mobilephone  cellphone  gsm  nokia  hardware  electronics  history 
november 2007 by infovore
24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot - CollegeHumor video
Funny. Obvious at times, but funny.
aol  humour  internet  24  history 
november 2007 by infovore
Vitruvius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vitruvius is most famous for asserting in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas - that is, it must be strong or durable, useful, and beautiful.
architecture  history  vitruvius  creativity  making 
october 2007 by infovore
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
Wonderful paper about the creation and development of Crowther's "Adventure", and also the real Colossal Cave in Mammoth, which almost certainly inspired the geography of the game-cave.
games  adventure  history  if  crowther  paper  textadventure 
august 2007 by infovore
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