Edible fruit have been on this planet since the Cretaceous, but they know how to move ahead with the times.

See the photo: this pear, recently arrived from our greengrocer, has a barcode on it!

Why does a pear need its own barcode? I could understand putting one on the crate, for easier shipping control and stock management; but nobody scans an individual pear, do they? In fact, people have been eating pears for ages (seven millennia, more or less), and for 99.9% of that time they managed just fine without a barcode, as you can see in this snippet from a botanical illustration from 1771.

And our modern pear has more than a barcode: it has a logo, and it has a catalog number, and – wonder of wonders – it has a Web site! This is nicely done, chock full of pear lore and fun. I’d joke that at this rate it will soon have its own fruity Facebook account, but of course, it already does. And it’s on Twitter, too: @usapears.

These Generation Y pears sure are getting ahead in our hyper-connected world!

Check the new article on my History of Computing exhibit: a century old teaching aid from Germany, with the added twist that it anticipates today’s well known slogan: “To each pupil his own counting machine!”

I was shopping at Office Depot, and next to the checkout line they had this bin full of cheap items on sale. And in it, thrown carelessly with less decorum than potatoes get at the grocer’s, were blister-packaged Flash memory cards.

They had 2.0 GB units selling for a pittance. That’s two billion bytes, or 16 Billion bits. I remember Thirty years ago, when a solid state memory board of 16K Bytes would come very carefully packaged – rightly so, as it cost thousands of dollars. The unit in the blister pack shown has a Million times as much capacity and costs 10 bucks. Of course we all know how Moore’s law is driving densities up and price per bit down, but this infamy of selling Gigabytes like peanuts brings it home with some poignancy.

And Below is a similar case, this from our neighborhood general store. Here the Flash Disk-on-key packs are hanging from a shelf alongside Energizer batteries, chocolates, candy and chewing gum packages.

You can bet the core memory stack I show here was not sold with chewing gum…

I was visiting a print design firm and noticed a pile of freshly printed business cards that had the shape of a rectangle with one corner cut off diagonally. I was delighted: this must clearly be the card of some IT professional who wanted to play on the shape of the IBM punched card, right?

Wrong, of course. I asked the designer and he said this is just a nice shape for someone wishing to stand out from the usual rectangular cards, but he didn’t even recognize that this is the form factor of a punched card. In fact, he’d never even seen such a card, even though they were all too common in his parents’ youth – not only in mainframe computer installations but also in every home, since they were used for utility bills to facilitate later data processing (see here). No one who was even slightly literate in the sciences could have missed the similarity back then.

Yet another iconic shape going away into the mists of oblivion…

A while back I was visiting the wonderful Museum of Business History and Technology in Wilmington, Delaware, which has countless typewriters, that incredible device that will soon be completely forgotten. Among these faithful servants of the authors of yesteryear I saw the device in this photo.

It’s an old Hebrew Remington 92 from around 1930, but what caught my eye was the Hebrew inscription on the frame, which translates literally into “Remington tool of writing type“. Now, the modern Hebrew name for typewriter means literally “writing machine”. And in fact, a little Googling will find you the same old model with this very phrase on it.

So what we’re seeing here is language in the making: the unit in the photo is so early that the term for it hasn’t jelled yet, and different batches were marketed with different names!

Speaking of which, I notice that the name for this machine, in every language I can make out, includes the root “write”, most commonly simply as “writing machine” (machine à écrire, macchina da scrivere, Schreibmaschine, máquina de escribir, etc). Nobody calls it a “printing machine”, even though that’s the immediate action. The important thing is that it is used for writing, in the good old sense that one did with a quill, or a pen, or a pencil, or a piece of chalk. It’s simply an accessory to the creative mind, and all these names – including the discarded one on the Remington 92 above – reflect that fact. Somehow, our computers and keyboards and printers and word processors have lost that linguistic flavor…

In the US, where I just gave a lecture at a conference on Information Load and Overload, and of course I found the time to visit the wonderful Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This is always a delight, but this time they surpassed themselves: they demonstrated the newly built Difference Engine #2 in action!

Charles Babbage’s incredible but never-built 19th century calculating machine was first realized in the nineties by the Science Museum in London, and now Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned this second replica. This one is complete with the printing mechanism; you crank the handle at one end, sequential values of 7th order polynomial functions are computed by the whirring mechanism, and ready-to-use plaster casts for printing the numbers in table form come out the other end, complete with multi-column formatting. The dance of the mechanism is really a thing of beauty; a visit to the museum is very recommended.

I saw it, and I have the photo to prove it!

Flying to the States on a Continental 777, my favorite jetliner, alternating my attention between my notebook and the video screen in the seat back in front of me. The latter is a new model, fitted to every seat in the cabin. The technology has been evolving ever since I stared flying to America back in the eighties.

At first they introduced real movie screens, one at the front of each cabin, with a projector that would show one single movie at a time. Your viewing pleasure was a matter of luck – a tall passenger in front, or a poor seat location, could wipe it out – but passengers loved it: a movie – in the sky? Wow!

Then came TV screens jutting out under the ceiling, giving better viewing to more passengers; still one movie at a time, chosen by the airline. The passengers had no choice of content or screening time.

More recently we got personal screens, with multiple movies to choose from. Typically we’d have a dozen movies, but they all ran in synch – all started at the same time, and if you switched on in the middle you saw half the movie. Of course on a transatlantic flight there was time enough to take in the missing half in the next cycle. So – each passenger now had the choice of which movie to see but not when.

So this flight, they’ve installed larger, wider screens and with them unbelievable choice. There are hundreds of movies and TV episodes to choose from, and each traveler can start any of them at any time, and even pause, rewind or FF during the movie. Perfect choice.

What will they think of next, then?

I met a guy who had an old Swiss chronometer watch, a self-winding mechanical one. As I looked at it, admiring the fine workmanship, I suddenly noticed a detail that used to be taken for granted: the thing had a seconds hand that was moving around the face of the watch.

So what, you say?

So, it was moving, not in the swift jerky jumps we’re so used to in today’s superbly accurate Quartz watches. This hand moved at a constant rate, sweeping around the watch, which is why it used to be called a “sweep hand” back then. I remember this from my father’s watch when I was a small child: I would try in vain to discern any movement in the hours and minutes hands, but the sweep hand moved in its slow, stately march, signaling the inexorable continuity of time.

And it occurred to me that the switch from mechanical to electronic analog watches makes the seconds hand mirror the zeitgeist of their respective periods in history. The jumpy quartz-driven hand is such a great fit to the hectic, jerky pace of our modern life, whereas the sweep hand is a better reflection of the more sedate lifestyle of centuries past…

Yesterday I went to the annual conference of the Israeli Society for History and Philosophy of Science, an eclectic event if ever I saw one. Lectures covered such diverse issues as the possible role of quantum effects in neuronal microtubules in creating consciousness (yes, Penrose’s conjecture); blog writing as a therapeutic tool for adolescents with social and emotional problems; the development of the Theremin; and a lot besides. It was so much fun that I joined the society then and there!

But to the subject of this blog: there was a lecture by Yossi Eliav about The evolution of engineering literacy as seen in Venetian manuscripts about shipbuilding from the 15th century. This mouthful was actually very interesting; but at some point I asked a question about older ships and I was treated to the following insight: these Venetians had large rowing ships (right), galleys, carrying over 100 rowers, which were produced in large numbers and used extensively for centuries; so did the Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks 20 centuries earlier. But the Roman and Greek galleys – triremes, with 3 rows of rowers – were of a completely different, and far superior, construction!

The medieval and early modern ships were built from the inside out: first the keel and ribs were built, and then planks were nailed to this skeleton from the outside. The ancient trireme was built from the outside in: first the shell was built from planks connected to each other with mortise and tenon joints; then the inner skeleton was added as reinforcement. This meant that the trireme had a solid hull that could withstand shearing forces, which the Venetian galleys could not. In addition, the precision of the Greek and Roman work was such that the hull was practically watertight even without caulking!

The picture below shows this amazing technique in detail.
These ancients could sure build!

Photo credits:
Maltese galley: Myriam Thyes, via Wikimedia Commons.
Trireme construction: Eric Gaba, via Wikimedia Commons.

Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the “big iron” era and later.

No less interesting than the equipment on display were the speeches of some veteran managers of the computing division. One gentleman told us how when he first arrived on board as a programmer his first task was to glue shut holes that had been punched in error onto punched cards; a bottle of the liquid used was on display, and here it is.

Also on display were storage devices of yesteryear. In the photo below you see a removable hard disk pack from a Prime computer system of the 1980’s; the dozen 12-inch platters together hold 300MB. For comparison, you see on the glass case another removabe storage unit, namely a 2.0 GB – 2000MB – Disk-on-key from today. We’ve come a long way…