Obit in the Reg: Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100. […] As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called Contracted Notation. This language, […]
What a find: On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous […]
https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-navy-decommission-eithne-orla-ciara-5805258-Jul2022/ Now, that’d be a nice bit of history. We don’t have much naval history on show for an island nation. The Eithne was the last naval ship built in Ireland, so it’s a piece of history in itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/26/pompeii-ruins-show-that-the-romans-invented-recycling Reduce, reuse, recycle the Roman way. Yet another thing the Romans did for us!
This is a brilliant story from the classic days of F1. I love it because it shows both the incredible precision and relentless consistency that an expert at the top of their game can bring to their chosen profession. In this case, the expert was three-times F1 World Champion Ayrton Senna. Pat Symonds, technical director, […]
I find that no matter how many books I read on the second world war, there’s always something new to discover, usually the result of a fresh perspective on old facts. Daniel Todman’s dual volume work on Britain’s War looks well worth adding to the ‘to-read’ pile: .. historians of Todman’s generation are right to […]
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/29/apollo-13-how-teamwork-and-tenacity-turned-disaster-into-triumph In approaching this crisis, their delegation of authority and deference to expertise is almost total. In the face of high-stakes scenarios, it is tempting to wrest control from more junior colleagues. But in 1970 the approach of mission control was quite different. They empowered their most junior team members, giving them total ownership of […]
Back in the day it probably looked absolutely amazing in it’s polished limestone facing: ” The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and weathering. But when it was first built, there was a smooth layer of fine […]
Not knowing is a hard thing to deal with. Fascinating unsolved crime long read in the Guardian: On 15 September 1981, 10-year-old Ursula Herrmann headed home by bike from her cousin’s house. She never arrived. So began one of Germany’s most notorious postwar criminal cases, which remains contentious to this day.
Enjoyable, if brief, interview with Margaret Hamilton, who lead the software team for the Apollo moonshots. I can’t help but notice how few men are ever asked how their lives as parents ever collides with their work. Q: Did your life as a software engineer and a mother ever collide? A: Often in the evening or […]