![Vladimir Lukyanov’s water computer, 1936, “the world’s first computer for solving [partial] differential equations.”
via Pruned](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lydx6odBx01qzf03eo1_400.jpg)
Vladimir Lukyanov’s water computer, 1936, “the world’s first computer for solving [partial] differential equations.”
via Pruned
4 months ago
January 25, 2012
I love using the computer but I try to stay away from it till I’ve done most of the thinking for an idea, looked at it from all sides, because I feel that once the computer is involved things are on an inevitable path to being finished. Whereas in my sketchbook the possibilities are endless.
— Tom Gauld (via austinkleon)
9 months ago
August 24, 2011
reblogged via 
The worlds first computer bug
Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947.
OK, this is not the most beautiful collage ever seen. But this bug, found in the computer room at Harvard by technicians searching around for what was wrong with the damn machine *this time, was extracted from the computations that caused its death and taped to a piece of graph paper, carefully labelled and preserved. It was not the first bug to invade a computer, the glowing tubes of which used to attract them with some regularity. But it was the first bug literally documented by becoming part of the document. And it went on to become not only part of the the document, but part of the documentation: we de-bug things, first computers, and now all sorts of things, as our technological metaphors seem to swarm everywhere and get into everything. Not unlike, well, bugs.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
1 year ago
November 11, 2010
reblogged via 
Core rope memory
Core rope memory is a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers, first used by early NASA Mars probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) designed byMIT and built by Raytheon.
[…]
Software written by NASA programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories. Some NASA programmers nicknamed the finished product LOL memory, for Little Old Lady memory.
via Wikipedia
1 year ago
October 3, 2010
43 Dodgy Statements on Computer Art
15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
2 years ago
April 20, 2010
The Computer Industry Is Making Us Crazy
I genuinely am annoyed at the whole way the industry operates, because planned obsolescence means that I am constantly being forced to “upgrade” things that worked perfectly well, and having to re-learn things that I knew how to do before, because the latest upgrade eliminated or at least altered some function I had grown accustomed to. As a result, I’m constantly saddled with computers and computer-based devices that don’t quite do what I want them to the way I want them to, which elevates my baseline daily irritation level.
The fundamental problem here is the way the computer industry operates: they make money by breaking things that used to work.
[…]
I’m constantly surrounded by technology, which offers all sorts of wonderful and convenient features. None of which quite work they way I want them to, or even the way they used to a few years ago. As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of my time frustrated at the stupidity of something or another, and so do most of the people around me. Everybody starts from a baseline of mild irritation, which makes it no wonder that any discussion of serious issues turns so angry, so quickly. There’s a direct line from Bill Gates to Glenn Beck— if the normal operation of modern technology weren’t so pointlessly frustrating, it wouldn’t be quite so easy to whip people into a frenzy of rage.
Sadly, I don’t have a brilliant idea for a replacement paradigm that would allow people in the software industry to continue to feed their families. I wish somebody would find one, though, because the one we have is making us all crazy.
Also, get the hell off of my lawn.
so… the rise of fox news is related to crappy computers?
2 years ago
February 10, 2010
2 years ago
February 9, 2010
reblogged via 
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