26 posts tagged ‘History’
The Original iPhone Demo
mjtsai,
Fred Vogelstein (2013, via Hacker News): The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the […]
Dave Cutler Interview
Dave Plummer (via Hacker News): Dave Cutler is a seminal figure in computer science, renowned for his contributions to operating systems. Born in 1942, he played pivotal roles in the development of several OSes, most notably VMS for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Windows NT for Microsoft. Cutler’s design principles emphasize performance, reliability, and scalability. […]
Half-Life retrospective documentary
Boing Boing,
Half-Life is 25 years old, and its makers posted a documentary about its development, covering everything from the early days of Valve to the game's genre-defining success. Dave Riller, lead designer, says that when they founded the company, only three people there had even shipped a game. — Read the rest
A Short History of Recovery in macOS
Howard Oakley: For the first ten years of Mac OS X, its closest substitute was Single User Mode, or SUM, entered by starting the Mac up with the Command and S keys held down. OS X then booted into the command line, where you could for example repair your startup volume[…] […] With Mac OS […]
Where you can see original prints of Hokusai's Great Wave
Hokusai's 1831 masterpiece The Great Wave off Kanagawa had a print run of thousands, and many—but not so many—survive. Where can you go look at one right now? Matt Sephton created a website, Great Wave Today, so you can find out. — Read the rest
Ridley Scott Cares Diddly Squat About France’s Feelings
Vulture,
The Napoleon director isn’t trying to win over the Académie des Beaux-Arts here.
Fantastic "Dice Man" illustration and more carnival costumes from 1590
Yes, that's the 16th century, not a typo! I love this illustration of a man in a dice-covered suit from 1590. The illustration is from Schoenbartbuch (Nürenberg Carnival Book), which contains many other whimsical and wacky costumes from Nuremberg's Schembart Carnival. — Read the rest
The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Jeff Johnson: This famous keynote slide was, to put it euphemistically, a bit of product marketing. Non-euphemistically, it was a big lie. Snow Leopard had quite a few new features, including significant changes “under the hood”, so to speak. In fairness, though, 10.6 was a smaller update than 10.5, 10.4, 10.3, or 10.2, and its […]