To say Europe was in ruins after World War II would be using understatement. Cities were destroyed. Villages were obliterated. Societies themselves would take decades of rebuilding. Out of all that rubble, though, emerged one road in New York that’s often overlooked: the arterial FDR Drive.
Jeff Keacher wanted to get his Mac Plus, now well into its third decade, online. It had been on BBSes and text-only Lynx via dial-up back in the day, but Keacher wanted to go full TCP/IP. And it worked. He even loaded Gizmodo for us!
Before laser-printers were even dreamt of, large companies had to use typesetters to render text if it were to look any good—but they were expensive and tightly controlled. Then, in the summer of 1979, engineers at Bell Labs changed all that.
If you’re tired of modern computing this morning, how about starting your day using an Amiga 500? Thanks to Google developer Christian Stefansen you can do just that, and it’s awesome.
As a watch is handed down from generation to generation, the stories behind its life make it more and more valuable. And as far as past lives go, this Rolex, currently on display at the Beyer Watch and Clock Museum in Zürich, Switzerland, could top them all. It accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on one of the most famous expeditions of all time—to the top of the world.
It might look more like something a street vendor would serve up food from, but, believe it or not, this is one of the first ever artificial hearts.
Russians were pioneers in the development of lasers, today a multi-billion dollar industry. Two of them, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov, won the Nobel Prize in 1964, along with the American Charles Townes, for the invention of lasers and masers. Even much earlier, in the nineteen thirties and forties the Russian scientist Valentin Fabrikant laid the foundations of physical optics and gas discharges that led to the development of lasers.
Videos of glass blowing may be a dime a dozen, but there’s something different about the 1959 Academy Award-winning documentary, Glas. The entire 10-minute short is set to an occasionally eerie mixture of jazz, bebop, and the metallic punctuations of industry at work.
When US-Soviet relationships were at their frostiest in the 1980s, there was no telling what sort of exotic threat was about to come roaring through Russia’s Iron Curtain. That’s where the Defense Intelligence Agency came in.
In the early 1960s, when the Apollo missions were underway and America was hellbent on reaching the moon, NASA researchers faced a nearly endless litany of technical hurdles and engineering obstacles nobody had even dreamed of up to that point. Chief among them: Once you shoot three guys across 238,900 miles across space at an orbiting body with just a fraction of the mass of Earth, how do you put them safely on the surface? That answer: lots and lots of practice in this gangly hardware simulator.