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Check out the new article in the History of Computing section of my Possibly Interesting Web site: Five Intel chips that changed the world.
These are the five “Firsts” that Intel introduced during its first four years as a small start-up: the first chip in each of four key memory types, and the first microprocessor. Between them they made the personal computing revolution possible, ushering in the world we know today.
I wrote recently about the batch of WW1 postcards left by my great-uncle Ettore… and while the cards described in that article focus on hate propaganda, there was also one postcard that is quite endearing, and here it is:
This postcard was issued 100 years ago by the Third Regiment of Telegraph Operators – basically, a unit of the Signal Corps of the Royal Italian Army. Click it to get a closer look!
The endearing scene shows some classic Italian city (looks like Florence), a bunch of cute cherubs using a very early telephone, a war goddess (?), and various electrical gear – antennas, telegraph lines, and unidentified apparatus that no doubt would be familiar to Guglielmo Marconi.
Those ancient telegraphers were really proud of their trade; they could see how wonderful, how outright angelic, the ability to talk at a distance was. Today we have instant connectivity, anytime, anywhere… but that early innocent sense of wonder is gone, and I can’t think of one internet provider that uses angels in their advertising.
Those were the days…
New on my Possibly Interesting site: Heroes and Barbarians, Propaganda postcards from the Great War.
Showcasing a collection of postcards issued to Italian soldiers in the first world war, in order to urge them to fight in that tragically senseless conflict.
An illuminating, if disturbing, lesson in how to craft hate propaganda.
So here is a wonderfully useful tool from Shachihata: the Artline 710 Long Nib Marker.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Not if you’re a handyman, you don’t!
This funky looking tool is designed to fill a very specific need: marking through deep holes, as when you have to drill holes in the wall to hang some bulky object. Without this tool, you must bend over backwards to find a way to do this, for instance by trying to scractch the wall with a nail inserted through the object, while trying to keep it level. With this marker, this frustrating challenge becomes a piece of cake.
Good idea, Shachihata!
Was in Germany and saw these in a supermarket. The thing is called Bischofsmütze – which means Bishop’s hat, although there’s something vaguely oriental (Islamic oriental, I mean) about it.
This is the weirdest fruit I remember ever running into – it looks like it’s a mashup of two different species, with the poor attention to finish seen in Frankenstein’s monster…
My first reaction was, that settles the heated controversy: surely no intelligent design can be seen in this ridiculous fruit! But then I had to admit: even the most meticulous designer may express a sense of humor now and then… 🙂
Here we have two glove compartments. The one on the left is from the Renault Clio; the other from a Mazda 3. They serve the same simple function and – not surprisingly – look pretty much the same, if you ignore the nice touch in the Mazda’s, that places the latch closer to the driver.
To be precise, they look pretty much the same from the outside. When you open them you see a world of difference.
Here is the one from Renault:
It goes pretty deep under the dashboard, so you can stick a lot of stuff in there – an advantage for sure. But the angles and the door design are such that the moment you open it, everything is liable to spill out in a mess.
And here is Mazda’s design:
Here, there is a deep section behind, and a door designed like a separate deep tray; and the geometry ensures what you put in the inside part stays there, and what you put in the door remains in the door, ready for you to reach in and take what you need.
Two designs for the same function: a poor one and a superb one. And they cost the same to produce, no doubt…
You may have heard of the Aquatic Ape theory, which deduces from our hairless skin that our ancestors had gone through an ocean-dwelling phase. Well — here is my new theory: that the common cat, Felis catus, evolved from a flying creature!
Consider the cat’s ear. Whenever I scratch a cat behind the ears I can’t help but notice the way the external ear is split near its base, forming a narrow hollow. This seemingly useless feature always reminds me of the wing root air intake seen on some jet fighters, like the Hawker Hunter seen in the photo.
So why would the cat have this vestigial structure? Obviously, because in some earlier part of its evolution it was a flying creature, using flight to catch small birds in midair, which remain a favorite source of food with modern cats as well. Then some proto-cat discovered that it’s far easier to charm the evolving human race into feeding it, and the wings were lost over the generations, becoming the ears we see today.
Oh well, not really…
Here is an item I saw on the wonderful Nostalgia Online site. They have a large collection of vintage kitchen utensils, most of which I do recall from my childhood, and many of which I run into as I rummage in flea markets in search of computing history items. However, this one I’ve never seen before, and the ingenious way it solves a real problem simply blew my mind.
This, folks, is a milk heater. The problem it solves is that whereas a watched pot doesn’t boil, the moment you turn your back on it it’s liable to boil over, which in the case of milk makes a real mess.
The solution is this: you put the milk in the outer pan, and a little water in the central cylinder. Since the water will boil a little before the milk (remember your chemistry!), it will activate the steam whistle at the top and alert you that the milk will boil in a moment.
I remember when raising a baby I also wanted to solve the boiling problem for baby formula, but as an electro-optics student my thoughts were along lines of detecting the steam above the liquid by its optical absorption (I never realized that over-complicated scheme). But the whistling pot seen here is way better, I think – and it did get used, evidently!
You can see this, and lots more retro items, here. If you can read Hebrew you can even read all about them! 🙂
Many, many years ago when I was a teenage geek, I was green with envy at the Coil Winding Calculator that an older friend had access to in his university lab. It was an extremely useful device – a cardboard slide chart that allowed you to compute the parameters for winding a coil of a given inductance (trust me, when you homebrew your own ham radio gear, that’s something you really need to do).
So, I went and reverse engineered the thing and cloned it with a Xerox copier and some cardboard and glue. I ended up with a device that was far uglier (in those days copier technology was still pretty poor) but it worked just like the original. It served me for years, then went into my computing device collection. Over the years I forgot the original completely, to the point that I had no idea what color it had been before I recreated it in smudged gray…
So a few weeks ago I had a stroke of serendipity when I ran into the “Allied RF Resonance and Coil Winding Calculator” in the Vintage Instruments online store of Dick Rose – it was the same device! Dick shipped it over, and now I remember: it was indeed orange in color. So now I have the two devices in my collection, side by side; and here you can see them in the photo. Not that I wind any coils these days (though I’m still a happy geek), but it’s nice to close a loop across the decades and finally have the original device I so coveted back then…
For the full story on the Xeroxed calculator, see here.
See the hilarious street sign.
Why is it hilarious? Well, if you can read Hebrew you don’t have to ask. For the rest of you, here is the story.
Palermo, where this sign hangs, was home to a large and lively Jewish community in the middle ages. Then, in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella, those of Columbus fame) found the time on their busy schedules to decree that all Jews be expelled from all their dominions, Sicily included, and that was that – even today the only Jews to be seen on this lovely island are tourists. Moslems didn’t fare much better, having been expelled in the 13th century.
And it is to this history that we owe the sign, which marks one of the streets of the medieval Giudecca – the Jewish Ghetto. Someone had the neat idea of adding Hebrew and Arab names to streets in that area, in acknowledgement of their history. So far so good.
The joke, however, is that with not a single Jew living there, the Sicilian sign makers evidently relied on someone sending them the Hebrew version of the street name – which they then diligently proceeded to copy, without any idea of how to read the Hebrew script. The result is a hilarious mess of typos, most notable the replacement of the letter Yod with an apostrophe, no less than six times in this example.
I have no idea if the Arabic is any better…
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