FYI: Apple officially released iOS7, the latest operating system for the iPhone and iPad, on September 18. Almost simultaneously, Stanford began offering a course teaching students how to design apps in the new environment. Although the course is still in progress, the initial video lectures are now available online, you guessed it, on iTunesU.
Note: If you’re having difficulties getting this software running in your browser give Firefox a try. It seems to work the best.
Movies, commercials, radio shows, even books: we’ve enjoyed the ability to effortlessly pull up things we remember from our childhood on the internet just long enough that it feels strange and uncomfortable when we can’t. Up until now, though, we haven’t had an easy way to re-experience the computer software we remember using in decades past. In my case, of course — and likely in a fair few of yours as well — I spent most of my computer time in decades past playing games and not, say, building balance sheets. But whichever you did, the Internet Archive’s newly opened Historical Software Archive makes it easy to re-live those old days at the keyboard without having to buy a vintage computer on eBay, track down its software, remember all its required commands and keystrokes, and hope the floppy discs — or, heaven help us, cassette tapes — boot up correctly. They’ve made these wealth of games, applications, and oddities freely available with the development of JMESS, a Javascript-powered version of the Multi Emulator Super System, “a mature and breathtakingly flexible computer and console emulator that has been in development for over a decade and a half by hundreds of volunteers.”
They say a bit more about the technology behind all this on the Internet Archive Blog, and the Historical Software Archive’s front page offers recommendations for which “ground-breaking and historically important software products” to try first, including 1.) Jordan Mechner’s Karateka (top), a hot game in 1980 and the most popular item in the archive today; 2) Sierra On-Line’s Mystery House (above), which gave rise more or less by itself to a vast genre of graphic adventures; 3) three adaptations of Namco’s Pac-Man (one for the Atari 2600, one remade for that same console, one lawsuit-inducing knockoff for the lesser-known Odyssey2); 4) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a “1982 adventure video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600 video game console;” and 5) Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s Visi-Calc (below), the granddaddy of all spreadsheet programs, and arguably the single application that turned computing from hobby into necessity. Or how about 6) WordStar, the early word processing program? Just click on the “Run an in-browser emulation of the program” link to fire up any of these and, if you’re under about 30, experience just what computer users of the late seventies and early eighties had to deal with — and how much fun they had.
In early 1990 Steve Jobs granted a very rare interview to the makers of a PBS NOVA miniseries called The Machine that Changed the World.
The producers of the series had a tough time getting Jobs to talk with them. They had already interviewed Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and most of the other founding fathers of the personal computing revolution, but the reclusive Jobs brushed off all requests. “As we started the series,” writes Nancy Linde at the NOVA Web site, “we were warned time and time again. ‘You ‘ll never get Steve Jobs on camera.’ ” After multiple requests, Jobs finally replied with a terse “No, thank you.” Linde continues:
But we had an ace up our sleeve by the name of Robert Noyce. A legend in the computer world as the co-inventor of the microchip and co-founder of Intel, Bob Noyce was a strong supporter of The Machine That Changed the World and served on our advisory board. Like most in Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs revered Bob Noyce, and a one-paragraph letter from Noyce changed Jobs’ “no” into a “yes,” giving our series one of a limited number of interviews Steve Jobs gave in his short lifetime.
At the time of the interview, Jobs was 35 years old and about midway through his 11-year exile from Apple. He was working with NeXT, the computer company he founded after being pushed out of Apple in 1985. In keeping with the theme of the miniseries, the interview deals mostly with the big picture. Jobs talks about the role of the computer in human life, and about the emergence and evolution of personal computing. He tells the story of how he and his early friend Wozniak (referred to in the interview as “Woz”) turned a hobby into a business and developed the Apple I and Apple II computers. He very briefly touches on the first two drivers of the personal computing revolution — spreadsheets and desktop publishing — before talking at length about the revolution that was yet to come: networked computing. The World Wide Web had barely been created in 1990, and Jobs is fairly prescient in his predictions of how the linking of computers would change the world.
In 1972 the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, or Landsat, launched into space with a mission to circle the planet every 16 days and take pictures of the Earth. For more than forty years, the Landsat program has created the longest ever continuous record of Earth’s surface.
Now those images are available to everyone. And thanks to Google Earth Engine, it’s possible to download and analyze them.
Five years ago NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey rewrote their protocols and made the images available for free, trillions of them, a ridiculously massive collection of pictures taken from more than 400 miles away, some of them unrecognizable.
Is that green patch in the Amazon basin a forest or a pasture?
But with a little help from Google’s cloud, this data has amazing power. It used to be that only a big institution, like a university or a country, had the processing power to download the data. With a single CPU it would take months to suck down the images. Now, it only takes a few hours. With that freedom, small environmental watchdog agencies and monitoring groups have access to the same data that the big guys have had for years. All they need to do is write the algorithms to help interpret what they’re seeing.
And best of all, we can all see the results.
Watch Las Vegas grow from a dusty casino town into suburban sprawl.
See the Palm Islands bloom into being off the coast of Dubai between 1984 and 2012.
One of the most devastating is to watch the herringbone of roads develop in the Amazon over just 28 years.
Download GoogleEarth’s free plugin to view precomputed datasets, like this one rendering the few remaining places on the Earth that are more than a kilometer from the nearest road.
Last week, I traveled to New York City to gaze into The Starry Night. Obviously I’m not talking about the skies above Manhattan, not when my hotel was based in Times Square. No, I’m talking about Vincent van Gogh’s post-impressionist masterpiece that hangs in the MoMA on 53rd Street. Although van Gogh seemingly felt ambivalent about his 1889 painting, many now consider it one of the most important works of art produced in the 19th century. And like any other great painting, it has become a fetishized object, sometimes in ways that we can find endearing. Take this little project for example. Last year, Alex Parker, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, created a mosaic of Starry Night using 100 Hubble photos. He downloaded the photos from the European Space Agency’s website, popped them into a free digital art software package called AndreaMosaic and, voila, produced the image above. You can — and should — view it in a larger, high-res format here.
In 1932 George Eastman, the 77 year old entrepreneur who established the Eastman Kodak Company, popularized the use of roll film, and brought photography to the mainstream, found himself in declining health. Suffering from lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that can lead to considerable back pain and difficulty walking, Eastman was depressed and increasingly disabled. On March 14th, he committed suicide by firing a single gunshot through his heart. An act as brief, and to the point, as the note he left behind. It read:
To my friends
My work is done
Why wait?
GE
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It’s a reality of big city living that one occasionally stumbles upon some famous person behaving like a mere civilian, out walking the dog, buying a latte, or taking the kids to some child-centric event. I’m bad at recognizing these luminaries out of context, which may be why I’m great at mistakenly believing some random citizen standing beside me at an intersection is in fact a noted author or beloved character actor. I have thus far never labored under the delusion that the guy across the aisle on the F train to Brooklyn is a one-eared Dutch post-Impressionist who died over a hundred years ago, but that could change.
Or not. According to Lithuanian architect and photographer Tadao Cern, the friend who served as the model for his digital recreation of Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic self-portrait doesn’t resemble the painter all that much beyond his ginger hair and beard. After taking his picture, Cern devoted a day to adjusting colors and exposure in Lightroom and fine tuning a host of details in Photoshop. Suddenly, the similarities were uncanny.
And since every Frankenstein needs a bride, Cern has cobbled together a Mona Lisa to keep Van Gogh company.
Ayun Halliday is posting from the wilds of Cape Cod, where she once spotted John Waters riding his bicycle to Safeway in a yellow slicker and matching all-weather pants. Follow her @AyunHalliday
If you’re a New Yorker, you know this stretch of subway inside and out. You’ve schlepped from Union Square to Grand Central Station on the 4, 5, or 6 trains how many times? Probably more than you care to count. But don’t worry, you’re in good company. New Yorkers have been making this journey since 1904, and here we have some vintage video to prove it. Shot on May 21, 1905, seven months after the IRT subway line opened, the video shows a train moving uptown. And then, during the last minute, you can see the New Yorkers exiting the train, svelte and dressed to the nines.
If you’re wondering how this clip was shot, let me add this: A camera was mounted on a subway train following another train on the same track. Lighting was provided by a specially constructed work car on a parallel track.
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