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Author Archives: GilPress
Star Photography
Today in 1850, the first daguerreotype of a star (Vega) was taken. Between 1847 and 1852 William Cranch Bond and pioneer photographer John Adams Whipple used the Great Refractor telescope to produce images of the moon that are remarkable in their clarity of detail and aesthetic … Continue reading
Posted in Photography, This day in information
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America’s First Television Theatre
Today in 1938, musical performances in an upstairs area at 568 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, are screened on a television display in the auditorium below, which seats 200 patrons paying 25 cents each. The studio and auditorium are linked by cable. … Continue reading
Posted in Television, This day in information
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The Future of Newspapers
“The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. Social media … Continue reading
Posted in News, Quotes
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On Memory
“Memory is the finest index”–Menahem Zulay (quoted in Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza)
Posted in Lost and Found, Memory, Quotes
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First Mention of Computer Programs?
Today in 1836, Charles Babbage wrote in his notebook: “This day I had for the first time a general but very indistinct conception of the possibility of making an engine work out algebraic developments. I mean without any reference to … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, This day in information
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The Computer as a (Highly Productive) Bible Scholar
“We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method”–Moshe Koppel, Navot Akiva, Idan Dershowitz, and Nachum Dershowitz on the software they developed which, according to the AP, “…analyzes style and word … Continue reading
Junction Transistor Announced
Sixty years ago today, the bipolar junction transistor was announced by its inventor, William Shockley. It was an improvement over the bipolar point-contact transistor which was invented four years earlier by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and became the device … Continue reading
Project Gutenberg Born
Forty years ago today, Michael Hart keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence to the mainframe he was using, all in upper case, because there was no lower case yet. Hart was a student at the University of Illinois … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Digitization, This day in information
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Typesetting, Counting, Sensing
Today in 1886, the first Linotype machine in the U.S. was installed at the Tribune newspaper in New York City. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a Linotype machine could produce five lines per minute compared to the one line per minute typically … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Print, This day in information
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Storage Bottleneck Born
Today in 1945, John von Neumann published “A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” Campbell-Kelly and Aspray call it in Computer “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In The History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi says … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, This day in information
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The Story of Information 