Nostalgia fans have been sharing images of their much-loved retro gadgets online, but most of them will be unrecognisable to today's smart phone users, including the pager and Pam Pilot.
Andrew Rader, PhD, is a lot of things. The man is a SpaceX mission manager, MIT-credentialed scientist, game designer, author... And he's also a history fan. In fact, he's so fascinated with the subject, he even created a Twitter account to share the weirdest and most wonderful history-related content he stumbles upon.
Nearly half of poll respondents say they watch TV on devices other than TVs.
Advertising tech company Fluent, surveyed 2,578 adults in the US to gauge the popularity of Apple’s device, which launched in September 2014.
Introduced March 1951 The immediate post-war years saw the first viable commercial and scientific computers hitting the market, such as the LEO I and Ferranti Mark 1 in the UK and the UNIVAC I in the United States. These huge, heavy, power hungry, expensive and slow computers are very primitive by today’s standards, but they found their niche in corporations and laboratories. UNIVAC I in use at the US Census Office Rather like the British LEO I, the UNIVAC I was a business computer made up of around five thousand vacuum tubes, weighed about 8 tons and sucked in 125kW of electricity. Primary memory consisted of 1000 12-character words stored in mercury delay lines (similar to the LEO), but one novel feature the UNIVAC had was magnetic tape drives for secondary storage. These UNISERVO I drives were the first ever commercially available computer tape drives, and they used heavy nickel-plated phosphor bronze tapes. Other rival computers tended to use punched cards, and initially the UNIVAC I lacked this option. It was an eye-wateringly expensive system, costing the equivalent of around $7 million in today’s money. This tended to put it out of reach of many universities and into the realm of government departments and large corporations instead. Given the price and complexity of the UNIVAC I, they wouldn’t always go straight to the customer but would instead be used for a while as demonstrators. UNIVAC I mercury delay line memory Once such UNIVAC I was bound for the US Atomic Energy Commission, but took a detour to detour to CBS to help predict the results of the 1952 US Presidential Election. Programmed by the legendary computing pioneer Grace Hopper, the UNIVAC had a complex model built up of data from past elections. With a sample of 5.5% of the vote, the UNIVAC came up with a prediction – out of the two candidates of Dwight D Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower would win in a landslide. The problem was that the UNIVAC’s prediction was completely at odds with pollsters who were predicting a win for Stevenson. So the UNIVAC’s analysis was downplayed by CBS. Even if you don’t follow US presidential elections of the 1950s, you’ve probably heard of President Eisenhower and not President Stevenson.. that’s because the UNIVAC turned out to be accurate and Eisenhower did indeed beat Stevenson, by a similar margin to the computer’s prediction. Eisenhower might have won the vote, but the UNIVAC won when it came to the star of the election night count. Grace Hopper working on a UNIVAC I console Demand for UNIVAC machines boomed… but Remington Rand were struggling to build them. So ironically, it was rivals IBM who actually benefitted with their IBM 701 mainframe and its successors as they could build them in the quantity customers wanted. As for Remington Rand, they were taken over by Sperry in 1955 which in turn merged with Burroughs to create Unisys in 1986. Unisys is still around today, and it still makes computer hardware such as the Intel-based ClearPath Forward systems among a muddle of consultancy services and resold products. Although the UNIVAC I was only a moderate success in sales terms, it is socially significant for its role in the Presidential Election where it offered a glimpse into the future of computing, only seven years after the end of the Second World War. It’s astonishing to think that all this was still more than a quarter of a century before the launch of micros such as the Apple II… Image credits: U.S. Census Bureau via Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain Tiia Monto via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0 Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0
Technology has come a very long way over the last century, and there is no better proof of that than examining some of the insanely weird and stupid inventions
rocketumbl: “Expanscape Aurora 7 ”
Explore x-ray delta one's 21809 photos on Flickr!
These ads from the 70's and 80's remind us of a time when computers came in briefcases and cost "Under $18,000!"
TV advertisers imagine that one day soon you might see a product on screen — say Don Draper's whiskey glass or Daenerys Targaryen's dress—and pause the program, click on the product and then instantly purchase it. Relatively primitive versions of this technology already exist, but the idea is far from new. Long before…
These weird and wacky creations might be ridiculous, but they’re fun to look and laugh at. 1. Portable TV, 1967 2. The Dimple Maker, 1936 by Isabella Gilbert of Rochester, N.…
The black-and-white images were found in magazines from the late 1880s that were uncovered by Caroline Rochford, an author and family historian from Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Still remember the good ol' days with joysticks and bulky monitors? 1TB hard disks may now be a common sight, but did you know that people used to be
Usually, when you read a history article or story, it's mostly just dry facts and your imagination. But an amazing photo gives something a bit different. It shows you how it all actually looked, letting you understand the historical moment more intimately. Whether it would be a historical landmark, a famous person or random old pictures of the past - they all have fascinating stories behind them, and we're just about to show you.
What did we do before GoPro? When it comes to capturing speed, back in the day, photogs tied themselves to the back of cars, hung off of trucks and then when th
Victorian Spy Camera via Watchismo
Pick one or Picasso 'em all.
Because, of course.
In the past 120 years, these women have all made an impact on our world.
These People Might Have Gone A Little Too Far With Their Plastic Surgery Journeys
These weird and wacky creations might be ridiculous, but they’re fun to look and laugh at. 1. Portable TV, 1967 2. The Dimple Maker, 1936 by Isabella Gilbert of Rochester, N.…
Without a doubt, we’re an extremely curious and inventive species constantly looking for ways to improve our lives. Tools and inventions have evolved with the
“Computer repairman in Boston, 1978. Photo by Spencer Grant.”
1. The first scientist named in history was En Hedu’anna, the chief astronomer-priestess of Ur. She lived around 2300 B.C., was the only daughter of the great empire architect Sargon of Akkad, and is called the Shakespeare of the ancient world as her works were studied for 500 years or more after her death.
The technology, and the world we live in, escalates so quickly that it surpasses our best forecasts for what the future holds.
A bicycle with wings and a Land Rover that turns into a hovercraft are just a couple of British inventions that failed to take off – but there are many more. An archive of weird and wacky innovations has been unearthed by an amateur historian as he trawled through a collection of images spanning the last century
