techno-culture

Five Finnish Intel engineers (or actors?! see comments… ) recreate the Intel chime tune by firing themselves at gigantic chimes from five cannons. As you do. This is just about the best company video I have ever seen, I think! Gotta love the Finns… Great quote from one of the engineers (the D [...]

Tags: cannonbells, chime tune, Intel, video

Last month was the 50th anniversary of the launch of one of the most iconic old mainframes, the IBM 1401, in Oct 1959. Not only did one get a cameo role in the film Dr Strangelove, but this was the computer that brought real computing down to the level of small to medium sized businesses. [...]

Tags: IBM 1401, IBM 1401: A User's Manual, Jóhann Jóhannsson, mainframe

Just picked this up off the Guardian site and it is devastating news — the Thursday tech section is not only the main reason I still get the Guardian delivered every day and one of my favourite bits in print, but also gave me an early start on my own career in writing on technology, [...]

Sometimes I love the serendipity of discovery when doing research for a story: you just never know what is going to pop up. Last week, I was looking for some more detail on Condé Nast’s plans to close down venerable cookery magazine Gourmet (and keep Bon Appétit going). I found a foodie discussion board that [...]

I’m also blogging now over on Current Account, the Irish Times business blog. I’ve just posted this item from San Francisco, on the love ‘em/hate ‘em relationships between tech executives who have to share the same ecosystem, in which their customers want to use the products and services of both. That makes for ‘frenemies’ — [...]

Many hours later, I hope I’ve cleaned out the RSS hack that happened sometime in the approximately two months between my last postings. Man, one ugly hack — malicious code in a database table that is actually coded backwards (eg in mirror text — weird!). That’s deleted out (which taught me a bit more about [...]

Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot column is a consistently interesting endeavour  — and also a brilliant concept. Agony aunts might be fun to read, but while I don’t have much to say to Dear Abbey, I’d have plenty to ask a pilot (and I imagine they get grilled at cocktail parties all the time). I would [...]

Tags: planes, turbulence

The NYT has this piece on notebooks, netbooks and the history of portability, and John Naughton blogs it with a couple of pics of his early ‘portables’. I had (actually, still have up in my attic as I can’t bear to part with my old friend) a ‘portable’ Mac SE from around 1990 with a [...]

Tags: Apple, Mac SE, netbooks

Six years ago today I was slumped into a couch in the Shelbourne interviewing William Gibson, for nearly two hours. Well actually, the interview ran for about 60 minutes but then there was a gap before the photographer came and so he suggested we just sit on and gab and drink coffee, which was a [...]

Tags: Pattern Recognition, Shelbourne Hotel, William Gibson

Utterly awesome: old computers, printers and oscilloscopes play a strangely poignant version of Bohemian Rhapsody. Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley for the link.

Tags: Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

A recent paper indicates that social media tools can be more distracting than productive (I know, many will say, DOH!). At least in the case of adding tags — people had poorer comprehension of what they had read when they added them, compared to when they simply read the article. I have always had the [...]

Tags: Mike Butcher, social media, tags, Twitter, William Gibson

This is wonderful — images and stories of the evolution of 10 essential gadgets and technologies. Tweeted by Jack Schofield. Very cool!