History – Postcards

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, Dead at 100

November 24, 2022 No Comments

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, […]

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Computing Germany History

LGP-30

November 10, 2022 No Comments

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 […]

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Government History Military

L.E. Eithne – a floating museum?

July 11, 2022 No Comments

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.

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History

Pompeii ruins show that the Romans invented recycling

April 28, 2020 No Comments

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!

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F1 History

‘It’s impossible I hit the wall. The wall moved’

April 22, 2020 No Comments

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, […]

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Books History

To Read: ‘Britain’s War’ by Daniel Todman

April 21, 2020 No Comments

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 […]

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History People Space

50 Years since Apollo 13 – Lessons in leadership and planning

February 29, 2020 No Comments

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 […]

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Africa History

The Great Pyramid Looked Really Great

November 22, 2019November 22, 2019 No Comments

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 […]

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Crime History

True Crime: “The Girl in the Box”

September 25, 2019 No Comments

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.

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Computer Science History Space Technology

Margaret Hamilton: Pioneer Software Engineer

July 15, 2019July 22, 2019 No Comments

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 […]

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Who?

Murf

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, Dead at 100

LGP-30

L.E. Eithne – a floating museum?

Pompeii ruins show that the Romans invented recycling

‘It’s impossible I hit the wall. The wall moved’

To Read: ‘Britain’s War’ by Daniel Todman

50 Years since Apollo 13 – Lessons in leadership and planning

The Great Pyramid Looked Really Great

True Crime: “The Girl in the Box”

Margaret Hamilton: Pioneer Software Engineer

Category: History