Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Would you pay to get a phone call if an aurora is visible locally? What if there is a good probability of finding one assuming your local seeing is good? Five bucks a month. 8:36:55 AM     War without end. The current issue of the New Yorker has a piece by David Remnick on the hawkish view of dealing with the MidEast. Recommended, but frightening, reading. 8:05:41 AM     People liked the video links in Brewster's archives... The future as seen by AT&T during the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. See the introduction of a few new features like three way calling and call forwarding. The young couple is incredibly obnoxious to the point of being a feature of the film. ___ It turns out the public had to be taught how to deal with communication technologies. This large download is the AT&T's dial phone training film. These films were shown before movies and this one came out during the same year as the first "talkie" - 1927 6:15:52 AM     The cold war spent a huge amount of the nation's treasure and intellectual capital on technology - it seems clear that electronics and computation would not be well developed without this basic push. One major project Semiautomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system was an enormously expensive undertaking by IBM, AT&T and MIT to build a linked computer and radar network beginning in the late 1950s. An enormous number of innovations sprouted from this and I remember visiting one of the installations at Malmstrom AFB in Montana as a kid. (For some links type SAGE into my search window.) If you can afford a 100+ MB download, IBM made a period film that shows some SAGE features along with IBM airborne computers. Whoever made the movie seems to have had a particular fascination with testing. 6:15:34 AM

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