Telephone calls haven’t declined because we have become anxious or lazy. They’ve fallen out of favor because using the telephone feels mechanically ungainly as much as socially so.
Tag Archives: history
How a Massachusetts man invented the global ice market
To this day, Europeans rarely put ice in their drinks, but Americans do. Thanks to the low price of ice in the United States, Rees said, people here “developed a taste for cold drinks faster and stronger than anyone else.” This required active involvement from Tudor, who sent operatives to go from bar to bar trying to convince owners to incorporate his product into drinks. To make the sale, Tudor committed to giving some bartenders free ice for a year, figuring that customers would so enjoy the clink in their glasses that other local bars would feel pressure to put in orders. “The object is to make the whole population use cold drinks instead of warm or tepid,” Tudor wrote in his diary. “A single conspicuous bar keeper…selling steadily his liquors all cold without an increase in price, render it absolutely necessary that the others come to it or lose their customers.” According to Gavin Weightman, who wrote a 2003 book about the New England ice trade, Tudor was celebrated for half a century after his death by scholars at the Harvard Business School, who “admired him for creating a demand where it didn’t exist before.”
via How a Massachusetts man invented the global ice market – Ideas – The Boston Globe.
An Interactive COBOL System for PLATO
Rosetta to deploy lander on 12 November
Two robust landing scenarios have been identified, one for the primary site and one for the backup. Both anticipate separation and landing on 12 November.
For the primary landing scenario, targeting Site J, Rosetta will release Philae at 08:35 GMT/09:35 CET at a distance of 22.5 km from the centre of the comet, landing about seven hours later. The one-way signal travel time between Rosetta and Earth on 12 November is 28 minutes 20 seconds, meaning that confirmation of the landing will arrive at Earth ground stations at around 16:00 GMT/17:00 CET.
via Rosetta to deploy lander on 12 November / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA.
The Plane Crash That Gave Americans GPS
The U.S. had already launched into orbit almost a dozen satellites that could help locate its military craft, on land, in the air, or on the sea. But the use of the system was restricted. (It was meant, for instance, to help powerful weapons hit their targets—it wasn’t the sort of tool governments usually want to make publicly available.) Now, Reagan said, as soon as the next iteration of the GPS system was working, it would be available for free.
It took more than $10 billion and until over 10 years for the second version of the U.S.’s GPS system to come fully online. But in 1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer applications. Sort of. The government had built in some protection for itself—”selective availability,” which reserved access to the best, most precise signals for the U.S. military (and anyone it chose to share that power with).
Why the Z-80’s data pins are scrambled
I have been reverse-engineering the Z-80 processor using images and data from the Visual 6502 team. The image below is a photograph of the Z-80 die. Around the outside of the chip are the pads that connect to the external pins. (The die photo is rotated 180° compared to the datasheet pinout, if you try to match up the pins.) At the right are the 8 data pins for the Z-80’s 8-bit data bus in a strange order.
via Ken Shirriff’s blog: Why the Z-80’s data pins are scrambled.
The motivation behind splitting the data bus is to allow the chip to perform activities in parallel. For instance an instruction can be read from the data pins into the instruction logic at the same time that data is being copied between the ALU and registers. The partitioned data bus is described briefly in the Z-80 oral history[3], but doesn’t appear in architecture diagrams.
The complex structure of the data buses is closely connected to the ordering of the data pins.
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy
The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence..
All Circuits Aren’t Busy
Network neutrality came from the telephone business. With electronic phone switching (analog, not digital) it was possible to give phone company customers who were willing to pay more priority access to trunk lines, avoiding the dreaded “all circuits are busy, please try your call again later.” Alas, some folks almost never got a circuit, so the FCC put a halt to that practice by mandating what it called “network neutrality” – first-come, first-served access to the voice network. When the commercial Internet came along, network neutrality was extended to digital data services, lately over the objection of telcos and big ISPs like Comcast, and the FCC is now about to expand those rules a bit more, which was in this week’s news. But to give network neutrality the proper context, we really should go back to that original analog voice example, because there are more details there worth telling.
The True Story of How the Patent Bar Captured a Court and Shrank the Intellectual Commons
In defining the limits of patent rights, our political institutions have gotten an analogous question badly wrong. A single, politically captured circuit court with exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals has consistently expanded the scope of patentable subject matter. This expansion has resulted in an explosion of both patents and patent litigation, with destructive consequences.
Rosetta arrives at comet destination
“After ten years, five months and four days travelling towards our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometres, we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General.
“Europe’s Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet, a major highlight in exploring our origins. Discoveries can start.”
via Rosetta arrives at comet destination / Rosetta / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA.
From: Re-Live the excitement
For those of you who couldn’t follow the live streamed event this morning, here’s a short summary of what happened here at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at the Rosetta Rendezvous event. A full replay of the livestream can be found here.
A couple of pics here.
Previous coverage of it waking up here and of it having its software upgraded here.