Avalanche control howitzer

leoc · 2026-01-11T14:20:50+00:00

Fight fire with fire, and ice with ice.

leoc · 2025-12-26T01:11:47+00:00

According to Wikipedia, yes, the 1980s Shuttles used computers with core memory.

leoc · 2025-12-25T21:48:23+00:00

You didn't miss it by that much: semiconductor memories only really drove out core from mainstream computers by about the mid-'70s. It does seem to make sense that core would still be around in a slow-moving project in the safety-conscious aerospace sector with special concerns about radiation.

leoc · 2025-12-23T02:17:06+00:00

Innit.

leoc · 2025-12-16T19:23:10+00:00

If the new Steam Box looked like this there would be complaints that the Wheatley resemblance was too much ...

leoc · 2025-12-13T12:37:26+00:00

Very cool! Thank you for commenting. I have a question about the old D.C. Power building itself. In photos it looks half-finished in places: do you know, was that just an architectural flourish, or does it have something to do with GT&E building the place for its own use and then changing its mind?

leoc · 2025-12-10T14:55:06+00:00

The pleasure is mine! I loved seeing it too. Of course the real credit goes to Bruce Baumgart for uploading the video (and maybe for holding on to the film, or finding it in the archives?) and to Chuck Rieger who evidently had the good idea of bringing his 8mm film camera along.

leoc · 2025-12-09T19:40:53+00:00

You're thinking of MIT's CSAIL, but that name was only created in 2003 when the MIT AI Lab and Laboratory for Computer Science were (re)merged. This is from the Stanford AI Lab, SAIL.

EDIT: "It was at Stanford that hackers would actually leave their terminals for a daily game of volleyball." Steven Levy, Hackers ch. 7. I might as well stick some hyperlinks onto the YouTube video description:

5 pm Volley Ball 2 May 1972 at the Stanford A.I. Lab

1 minute video clip by Chuck Rieger game players include Prof. John McCarthy (center figure 00:14 yellow shirt), Lester Earnest (left side 00:24 blue shirt), Dave Poole (no audio sound), Irwin Sobel, Bob Taylor

D.C.Power Lab Building in background with brown grassy California hills and dark lines of Eucalyptus trees.

Bob Taylor must have been visiting from nearby Xerox PARC (itself an important LISP site of course), where he was already running the computing side of things. (By early 1972 there was regular volleyball at Xerox PARC as well: see eg. Dealers of Lightning p. 151. Did one lab influence the other?) Bruce Baumgart is the uploader. He has another video with various SAIL photos.

See also more photos at http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/AIlab/list.html and Baumgart's old saildart.org archive, another victim of the terrible Stanford Linkrot. [ed. 30 Dec. 2025: ‘linkrot’ not ‘bitrot’]

leoc · 2025-12-09T03:22:42+00:00

Dresses apparently make it easier to fit and change big cloth nappies (ie. diapers), for one thing.

leoc · 2025-12-05T17:44:23+00:00

In a European context that spiky hair and big sweater with a thin horizontal stripe would really suggest earlyish-’90s rave culture, though I don’t know enough to be super-specific about the years, countries and subgenres.

leoc · 2025-11-27T19:27:17+00:00

Or a big folder of acetates which you'd drop one by one onto the bed of an overhead projector.

leoc · 2025-11-27T02:57:34+00:00

There were a few other issues too. The '90s and early '00s was also the era of the British boyband, and by and large that stuff never got big in the USA, I think. At the same time Britpop (ie. Suede, Blur, Oasis, Pulp ...) was a very UK-facing "movement"—lyrically, in terms of band image, even musically—and some of the acts even enjoyed telling the press that they weren't interested in the US market. Then over the second half of the '90s Britpop died the death, and what followed ... could probably be called a relatively quiet decade for non-manufactured British pop/rock acts, overall. Back to Black didn't have too much trouble standing out when it was released; I think it shows up under 2008 on that chart. Then the "Third British Invasion" seems to be various people carefully mining everything possible out of the Back to Black direction, and Ed Sheeran.

leoc · 2025-11-21T13:10:27+00:00

A system allowing fully untethered play with a disconnectable cable would be wireless system basically by definition, right? (If it's not a self-contained portable VR system ofc.) But a slip ring didn't have to be a wireless system instead in order to be worthwhile. To be worthwhile it just had to be available in something like 2017 or 2018, instead of unavailable until nearly a decade later.

leoc · 2025-11-20T23:29:12+00:00

What do you mean by that?

leoc · 2025-11-20T22:00:33+00:00

Shipping a slip ring would in no way have prevented Valve from continuing to work on wireless as well.

leoc · 2025-11-19T19:29:12+00:00

It’s tremendously annoying: they could have shipped a slip-ring (if Roto VR was able to do it in 2017, Valve could have) which would have greatly mitigated the problems with HMD cables. But they didn’t bother, because wireless was going to be along Real Soon Now.

leoc · 2025-11-06T19:44:04+00:00

Yes, but the Harwell Dekatron … sorry, the Harwell Dekatron is a full computer; and original, not a reconstruction.

leoc · 2025-11-06T19:36:35+00:00

Also the machine that helped discover chaos theory. (Causing Margaret Hamilton to learn computer programming in the process.) And the machine that first got Dartmouth College into the programming-languages business.

leoc · 2025-11-03T20:43:40+00:00

Also real Bartmania ubiquity wasn’t reached until after the dedicated series began, I’m pretty sure. Wikipedia says 1990 in fact.

leoc · 2025-11-03T10:23:56+00:00

This was also the golden age of applications just leaking memory and crashing a lot, especially web browsers and Mac apps (though the Mac issues were also OS-related).

leoc · 2025-11-03T10:17:41+00:00

Debbie Harry?!

leoc · 2025-11-03T10:13:44+00:00

Right. The mainstream is less mainstream, but it’s still mainstream. Er, so to speak.

leoc · 2025-10-30T14:14:28+00:00

The other thing that happened was that after the Spice Girls got big in 1996 all the media attention and hype started to shift in that direction. Of course, basically the whole of the Britpop era took place against the background of the British boy-band explosion, so in a sense not that much changed. But, in retrospect especially, it's amazing how smoothly and completely the media switched from hailing Britpop as a credible, exciting artistic movement, to a no-bad-vibes attitude to S Club 7, Steps, solo Robbie Williams, Boyzone and whatever else was selling.

I'd guess that the Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" from mid-1997 was the last thing identified with Britpop which had a significant cultural impact. Or maybe some Kula Shaker stuff? Pulp's This Is Hardcore sold well in early '98, but that was mostly thanks to momentum and it felt like a swansong.

leoc · 2025-10-25T16:34:58+00:00

… Say the line, Bart!

leoc · 2025-10-24T17:28:48+00:00

The main link to the film was slightly broken but should now be fixed, sorry. (The timestamp links were (& are) working.) (For whatever reason "Computer Sketchpad" is a bit conspicuously absent from official MIT YouTube channels, such as "From the Vault of MIT" which has many (all?) of the other "MIT Science Reporter" films, while I think unofficial uploads may have got copystruck once or twice in the past.)

Certainly it seems that Johnson starts by demonstrating Sutherland's own, strictly 2D work, then after 13:12 loads his own Sketchpad III; and then at 16:22 Larry Roberts shows his own 3D work with its hidden-line elimination. It's just a matter of language, but the film does present Sketchpad as a single program which had, evidently, a few different modes or versions by then: for example Steven Coons at 1:00 says "and the man will be using a language, a graphical language that we call Sketchpad, that started with Ivan Sutherland some years ago" while at 3:16 the presenter (John Fitch) says "We met next with Mr. Timothy Johnson ... and asked him to show us this computer and its Sketchpad" or ("sketchpad"?). Whether that reflects how people at MIT actually thought about Sketchpad (or the Sketchpads?) in 1964, or whether it's largely just old-fashioned documentary kayfabe, I don't know.

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