Bookmarks tagged with “history”
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A short history of body copy sizes on the Web
I would like more histories of specific features of web design over the decades. (via Adactio)
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Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) (Kicks Condor)
“…my notes on the book We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture … a pretty decent compilation of blog posts from … mostly 1999-2002.” Great. Fascinating excerpts and commentary.
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Graphing Calculator Story
I don’t think I knew this before, and it’s much better than I expected “How the Mac’s graphing calculator was made” to be.
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Help me make a world history syllabus out of novels - books | Ask MetaFilter
I don’t often read historical novels, but I like this idea.
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GeoCities Oral History #3. Jennifer Pursley | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
I love these. This interview is with the “ringmaster” of the Anti-Titanic Webring.
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An oral history of “Silicon” Roundabout | Forward Partners
One that sounds familiar to me! Well, a lot of it does anyway. I’d still like to read one of these that starts earlier - it wasn’t a wasteland before 2008.
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The 1959 Project
I’m liking this blog, one post per day, about some things from that day in the world of jazz in 1959. Nicely done (aside from the lack of any navigation). (via Kottke)
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The oral history of the Hampsterdance: The twisted true story of one of the world’s first memes | CBC Arts
I was looking up Hampsterdance two days ago but didn’t see this article. A bit bonkers. And nice GIF illustrations. (via b3ta newsletter)
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The Online Photographer: The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36
Really good history of why “full frame” digital cameras have a sensor size of 24mm x 36mm, dimensions set in 1913.
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Berners Street hoax - Wikipedia
What larks. (via Things Magazine)
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General Magic: Oral History of the Influential Tech Company
“Oral history” seems to mean “interviews broken into tiny snippets to give the impression of a conversation” but this excerpt of a book is still good. I remember that interface from an early Wired article.
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Making
Detailed and fascinating look at the issues with trying to make the time HTML element work for dates hundreds or thousands of years old. (via:tominsam)
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Cinema Treasures
Such a nice site that keeps turning up in my searches for cinemas I went to years ago, many of them closed, split, renovated or simply renamed.
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How Civilization Started | The New Yorker
John Lanchester on re-evaluating the ease of life for hunter gatherers vs settled societies. (via @cityofsound)
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Walton’s Telephone Exchange | Walton Tales
Nice reminisces of an Essex telephone exchange in the 1960s.
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Why Growth Will Fall | by William D. Nordhaus | The New York Review of Books
On how the rate of increase of standard of living and economic growth in the US was greatest from 1870-1970 and will never be the same again.
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Stephen Wolfram Blog
Nice summary of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. I realised how little I actually knew about them. (via @cityofsound)
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The Agas Map
Really nicely done zoomable, clickable, searchable perspective map of London from the 16th century. Very good.
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Employee #1: Amazon · The Macro
On building the first Amazon website. (via Kottke)
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A Visit to the Treasure Vaults
Some good stuff about how Kodak was often too early with digital camera technology, not too late, and was no good at marketing it.
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Home - London’s Silent Cinemas
“It documents the early lives of over 700 cinemas across London and its suburbs” from 1906 to around 1930. The map’s really good.
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oldweb.today
Browse pages archived on archive.org using period browsers and operating systems. Amazing, although the screen sizes seem a bit large to me, for the period. (via Waxy)
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Histography - Timeline of History
Nice explorable timeline of different categories of things pulled from Wikipedia. A few annoying interface things, inevitably, but fascinating. (via Kottke)
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Insurance Plan of London Vol. VI: sheet 135 – 1887 – Chas E Goad Limited – Chas E Goad Limited – Visualize
After a lot of clicking through lists of sheets I found this 1887 map of where we live. So many buildings. Book marblers! Feather warehouse! Umbrella factory! Tranters Temperance Hotel! Nicely done, British Library.
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Fire insurance maps and plans
The dull title, and initial interface, doesn’t do this collection justice. Really, really detailed old maps of towns - lots of London - showing individual buildings and usage, each sheet carefully overlaid onto Google maps. It’s an effort to find a particular area though.
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Steven Mithen reviews ‘Earth’s Deep History’ by Martin Rudwick · LRB 30 July 2015
On the history of how we’ve explained the history of Earth and life on it. (Also subscribers only)
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AltaVista: Main Page
22 October 1996 (via @jah)
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What We Wore — A People’s Style History
I do love some of these photos. (via Put This On)
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A Brief History of Money - IEEE Spectrum
Seemed like a good overview.
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The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic
This was good. More about the case for having a discussion about the case for reparations. It was more affecting to me than, say, ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, which was too easily put in the “that’s just history” or “one person’s experience” buckets.
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Archeological Desk Based Assessment of 141-47 Whitecross Street (PDF)
Interesting to see the what they need to assess before redeveloping even quite a small site like this, with information going back to Palaeolithic times.
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Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York: On Spike Lee & Hyper-Gentrification, the Monster That Ate New York
A look at the gentrification of New York. Lots of good stuff, and interesting. But it feels a little too biased towards the author’s personal experiences of the recent wave. It may well be true that this is more important and destructive than previous waves but this needs more objective data.
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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
(June 2011) Really good look at corporations in a very broad sense, from East India Company, Smithian Growth, Mercantilist Economy (1600-1800), to Schumpterian Growh, Industrial Economy (1800-2000), and now Coasean Grown and the Perspective Economy. (via Interconnected I think)
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Citation Needed – blarg?
Got round to reading this, about why arrays are indexed from zero, which is also an illustration of how history can be effectively lost when old academic papers cost a lot of money to read.
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Oral History: Sex! Drugs! Apps! SXSW Interactive At 20 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
Mainly for the 2000 era memories, the Weblogs Roundtable, etc. I only felt like an observer - I wasn’t blogging and didn’t know anyone really - but I’m happy I was able to be there.
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Unlikely simultaneous historical events
Some great stuff there. Also makes me think a site that just summarises interesting Reddit pages would be great (does it exist?) because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the source page itself for more examples.
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Locating London’s Past
Amazingly good versions of the 1746 Rocque map of London, and the first (1869-80) OS map. All fully tiled, zoomable searchable, etc. The mapping methodology page makes me glad I never tried this. (via @agpublic)
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Oxford Bags (Put This On)
Blimey, look at the size of some of those 1920s trousers! They make, say, “Madchester” baggy jeans look like drainpipes.
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Richard J. Evans reviews ‘The People’s Car’ by Bernhard Rieger · LRB 12 September 2013
Lots of interesting nuggets in this history of the Volkswagen Beetle. (Subscribers only)
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Britain from Above | Rescue the Past
This is amazing. Prepare to lose some time to looking up places you know. Over 47,000 aerial images of Britain from between 1919 and 1953.
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Internet of Dreams - Time and Edges
StreetView showing the same street both pre- and post- gentrification, giving a hint at its historical importance. Imagine being in the 22nd century and being able to use today’s StreetView. (via New Aesthetic)
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xkcd: The Pace of Modern Life
Quotes from 1871 to 1915 about the increasing pace of modern life. (via Kottke)
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Terrorist or Martyr? by Christopher Benfey | The New York Review of Books
Solely for this incidental quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, after commenting on the “gloom” of Harper’s Ferry: “Yet there would be a less striking contrast between Southern and New-England villages, if the former were as much in the habit of using white paint as we are. It is prodigiously efficacious in putting a bright face on a bad matter.” (Subscribers only)
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David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Old maps overlaid on their modern Google Maps. I want to add something like this, using a 17th-ish century map of London, to the Pepys site. Somehow. (via Kottke)
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The Last Places
Henry VIII’s wine cellar, once part of Whitehall Palace, still exists under the Ministry of Defence. Although the entire cellar was moved, in one piece, when the MoD was being built. (via ?)
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How London’s Silicon Roundabout really got started — European technology news
Brilliant - really glad this got written up. Matt Biddulph’s timeline of how “Silicon Roundabout” became a thing.
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Leningrad Siege: Now and Then | English Russia
Very simple, a blending of old and new photos, but very effective.
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What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? by Jared Diamond | The New York Review of Books
Diamond reviewing ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’. an interesting read. Social change etc. I love that stuff.
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Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
Really nice visualisation of how different states have voted over time. (via The Functional Art)
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Tower of London
The Tower of London’s Facebook timeline goes back to 1066. (via Londonist)