Today in 1840, the Uniform Penny Post was established throughout the UK, facilitating the safe, speedy and cheap conveyance of letters. Continue reading
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This Day In Information: Uniform Penny Post
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This Day In Information: 1st Battery-Operated Switchboard
Today in 1894, New England Telephone and Telegraph
installed the first battery-operated switchboard in Lexington, Massachusetts. With what became to be known as the “common battery” (replacing the local battery attached to the telephone), the subscriber could signal the operator simply by lifting the receiver from its hook. According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with this development, “the time occupied by an operator per call was reduced from 50.77 seconds to 16.63 seconds.”
By the way, the 1911 edition also tells us that the term “telephony” was first used 150 years ago by Philipp Reis of Friedrichsdorf, in a lecture delivered before the Physical Society of Frankfurt.
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2011 Information Anniversaries
Wikipedia, 10 years, January 15, 2001
First Beatles performance at the Cavern Club, 50 years, February 21, 1961
MIT, 150 years, Apr 10, 1861
The King James, or Authorised, Version of the Bible, 400 years, May 2, 1611
IBM, 100 years, June 16, 1911
First U.S. television advertisement, 70 years, July 1, 1941
IEEE Computer Society, 65 years, August 7, 1946
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This Day In Information: The Birth of the Photography Industry
Today in 1839, the Daguerreotype process was presented to the French Academy of
First surviving photograph by Daguerre, 1838
Sciences by Francois Arago, a physicist and politician. Arago told the Academy that it was “…indispensable that the Government should compensate M. Daguerre, and that France should then nobly give to the whole world this discovery which could contribute so much to the progress of art and science.”
On March 5, 1839, another inventor Continue reading
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Cloud Computing is Bad for Your Creativity and Freedom
“A mobile phone-cum-computer might be very useful, but we still need our PCs to run our programs, and these PCs will preserve all the possibilities of social creativity. Things could evolve differently, though, due to the possible diffusion of Web 2.0. Its application programs are beginning to migrate from individuals’ computers to centralized webservers. Continue reading
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This Day In Information: Cloud Computing, 1976
Today in 1976, IBM introduced Virtual Storage Personal Computing, “a new program product to allow people with little or no data processing experience to use a computer terminal to solve problems.” The terminals were connected to remote IBM mainframes via telephone lines. From Wikipedia: Continue reading
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This Day In Information: Scientific Journals
Today in 1665, the first issue of the Journal des sçavans (later renamed Journal des savants), was published in Paris. Continue reading
Internet Up, TV Down as Main News Source for Under 30
Pew Research Center: In 2010, for the first time, the internet has surpassed television as the main source of national and international news for people younger than 30. Another 2 years for 30-49 year-olds? Continue reading
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InfoStory Quotes: IT Jobs Forecasts
“As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.” —Paul Krugman, 1998
“Between 1998 and 2008, the number of domestic IT jobs grew by 26 percent – four times faster than U.S. employment as a whole – with IT employment projected to increase another 22 percent by 2018.” — US Department of Commerce, December 16, 2010
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This Day in Information: Machine of the Year
Today in 1983, Time magazine put 
on its cover the PC, calling it “machine of the year.” Roger Rosenblatt wrote: Continue reading
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The Story of Information 