26 posts tagged ‘History’
Vintage travel guide accidentally becomes masterpiece of tourist horror fiction
Boing Boing,
Is Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France (1937 edition) the most pessimistic phrasebook ever published? What was meant as a practical tool for British tourists instead became an accidental masterpiece of travel anxiety literature, suggesting that a trip to France was less about seeing the Eiffel Tower and more about navigating a gauntlet of pickpockets, stalkers, and blood loss. — Read the rest The post Vintage travel guide accidentally becomes masterpiece of tourist horror fiction appeared first on Boing Boing.
25 Years of the Dock and Aqua
mjtsai,
James Thomson (Mastodon): On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo. […] The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s […]
The HFS Pixel
Encyclopedia Macintosh (p. 65, via Alex Rosenberg, rezmason): HFS and MFS disks can be distinguished by the presence or absence of the HFS pixel. You can tell if a drive or disk is formatted as HFS or MFS by looking for the “HFS pixel” in the upper-left corner of any window from the drive or […]
Scott Knaster Occasionally Misses Expectations
Scott Knaster: I worked in Silicon Valley for many years with brilliant people at amazing companies that changed the world. A lot of my stories are about those people and places. But some of them are about something unexpected I saw on a walk around my neighborhood. Stuff like that.I tell stories face to face, […]
Donald Bitzer, RIP
Dag Spicer (via Hacker News): Bitzer studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), obtaining a PhD in 1960. Following graduation, he joined the UIUC faculty, where he learned of efforts to bring lessons to students over a closed-circuit television network. While a committee of engineers, psychologists, and educators were unable to […]
Microsoft at 50
Steven Levy: [Nadella] tells a story from a few years ago, when a group of tech analysts came from China to take the measure of Silicon Valley. They attended all the key developer’s conferences: Apple’s WWDC, Google I/O, AWS Re:Invent, and of course, Microsoft’s own Build. “They said, ‘God, you know what? For anything that […]
Apple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires
John Gruber (Mastodon) has gone through the list of Apple acquisitions: The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users of that app remain happy. That might mean just keeping the app going, like with Logic. Or it […]
Unreal on Internet Archive
Timothy Geigner: But it just doesn’t have to be like this. Companies could be willing to give up their iron-fisted control over their IP for these older games they aren’t willing to support or preserve themselves and let others do it for them. And if you need a real world example of that, you need […]