Posts about History (RSS, JSON)

10AM — Questlove on his upcoming documentary on the history of music on Saturday Night Live:

The whole experience is the same as “Summer of Soul.” At first, I said, “Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it.” But I’m not at the place where I’m ready to say: “OK, here’s what you asked for. Where’s my money?” I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.

Funding member of groundbreaking hip-hop group The Roots, member of the Soulquarians, Fallon’s in-house band (neglectable), author of books on music history and creativity and music-history documentary film maker. Questlove is manifesting himself as one of the most important and influential cultural icons of our times.

6PM — “We were wrong.” Early staff of HotWired, WIRED’s original online version, discuss the early days of the site

5PM — A virtual walk through the history of the internet. Starting in 1982 with the Map of ARPANET, it includes many familiar highlights. The tour finishes in 2007 with Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is a fitting end because it all went downhill from there. (via)

6PM — Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational is a “historical record of foundational web development blog posts.” It’s wild how influential A List Apart was in those early days, it was the go-to source for me when I learned how to make decent web sites.

5PM — Kottke revisits the Long Boom, an article published in WIRED in 1997 that forecasted prolonged prosperity and freedom. As we all know, it turned out a little different. The “scenario spoilers,” possible developments that might impede progress, were pretty spot on.

5PM — A history of metaphors for the internet. “Surfing seemed like an odd one, an artifact from a very particular time in the mid-1990s when people used terms like “information superhighway” and “cyberspace” unironically. Where did these metaphors come from, and where did they go?” (via)

4PM — Old School Flyers posts flyers of early-day hip hop parties.

9AM — Thirty years ago CERN put the technology that made the Web in public domain; one of the most important decisions during the early days of the Web and one of the reasons it rapidly became a world-wide success.

7PM — Researchers from the Sorbonne and New York Universities discovered a lost manuscript of Ptolemy describing the design and the use of the Meteoroscope:

Ptolemy’s Meteoroscope was a tool to calculate heights and distances, often in relation to celestial bodies. It is referenced in several ancient texts, including Ptolemy’s own book on mapmaking, the Geography. However, details of its structure and operation were lacking, until now.

[…]

You could then use it for numerous applications such as determining your latitude in degrees from the equator, the exact date of a solstice or equinox, or the apparent location of a planet in the zodiac.

9PM

Spitalfields In Kodachrome is a collection of photographs of the East-London Neighbourhood from a different time. The photos are forty years old, showing how much the area has changed: Working class then, today hotspot for Lonely-Planet tourists and Saturday destination for drunk Essex lads. Naranjan House in the picture above is now an Ottolenghi restaurant.

7AM — This new book by Laine Nooney about the impact of the Apple II on personal computing looks interesting:

The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multi-billion-dollar future. Instead, as historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.

[via]

8PM — A flyer distributed by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at Hypertext 91 Conference outlines the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web.

The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

How different the Web is today from that original philosophy.

[via]

4PM — HistoryMaps explains historic events using text, videos and maps. Incredibly informative and well-designed.

8AM — Shift Happens, a beautifully curated and designed, 1,216-page, two-volume book about the history of keyboards, is now available to support and pre-order on Kickstarter. It’s not cheap, but it looks like the US$150 are worth every penny. (Via: pretty much everyone)

7PM — A Stroll Down Flatbush Avenue

This set of photos taken approximately every 50 feet along a stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn show the bustling street, storefonts, elevated trains, and trolleys.

Like Street View, but the pictures are from 1914.

1PM — For Mozilla’s 25th anniversary, Jamie Zawinski reconstructed some early version of the mozilla.org website from 1998.

5PM — The Computer History Museum recounts the story of Apple’s Lisa, the first personal computer to feature a graphical user interface. Lisa was a commercial flop but paved the way for the GUI-based personal computing we know today.

5PM — Dave Karpf went through the WIRED archives and dug up the best and most interesting stories published in the magazine since 1993, covering the dot-com boom and its bust, the Web 2.0 era, and everything that happened after. (Via Phil Gyford)

3PM — An interactive map by the Violence Research Centre at the University of Cambridge shows murder locations in medieval London. Some of the descriptions are hilarious:

• “Innkeeper Stephen of Lynn murdered after winning at backgammon,”
• “Death among drunk wrestlers,” and
• “Vicious attack for dropping eel skins outside a shop.”

Others could be modern-day headlines:

• “Man lies dead in street from fatal stab wound,” or
• “Luton man stabbed in Sunday evening dispute.”

5PM — Browse the Web like it’s 1991 and you’re Tim Berners-Lee.

2PM — Samuel Pepys, a civil servant who lived in London in the 1600s, wrote a diary for ten years, which is now considered one of London’s main records of life at the time. Pepys’s diary covers monumental events like the Great Plague or the Great Fire of 1666.

In 2002, Phil Gyford started publishing the diary in blog format, one post every day, and repeated the reading from 2012. The third reading starts later today. Each post is extensively annotated with contextual information and is well worth a read.

9PM

In a lovely animated short film, five life-long friends recount life in Brooklyn in the 1970s. (via Waxy.org)

6PM — Henn Tan is the name of the man who gave us the thumb drive. You know, that thing we used back in the day to get the master’s thesis to the printer, to share photos and music that was absolutely legally obtained, before we moved all our digital belongings to someone’s server.

9AM — How to move an obelisk. Via @ftrain:

Here’s an article on how they move obelisks in case you are moving any obelisks today.

5PM — Anna Mancini tells the story of how the Apple archives ended up at Stanford. It’s strange how much major news outlets either recite wrong accounts or rewrite history to fit the narrative of the larger-than-life leader who was just as visionary as he was rooted in history. And how you rarely hear about the people who get done seemingly mundane things such as preserving an archive; because they work in the background and don’t spend much time giving interviews.