While writing this post I actually got an itch to buy a Commodore 64 Ultimate, even though I never owned a Commodore 64 before. (I believe I used one once at friend's house.) Nostalgia by contagion.
I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
Author of the OP here. The "spray" technique was known in the early 80s, if not earlier. It's mentioned in Michael Tomczyk's "Home Computer Wars":
> The solution came in several forms. One way was to embed ferrite balls in the plastic case. Another way was to spray the inside of the case with a metal coating. But the best way was to encase the offending electronics in a small metal box inside the case, which is what was done with the VIC-20. [0]
Why a metal box is the best way, he doesn't say and I don't know. My best guess is that it was more effective/reliable at passing the tests.
I think the GP's point is there is no meaningful nutritional difference between a from-scratch cake and a box cake. Both are pretty unhealthy and should be eaten only as special treats. "Ultra-processed" is not a useful way of separating healthy from unhealthy foods.
It looks like the trend started circa the 1920s in the U.S. Kotex (1920) [0], Kleenex (1924) [1], Kool-Aid (1927) [2], Kool (1933) [3], Krispy Kreme (1934) [4].
Kraft might look like one, but isn't, it's named after James Kraft [5], which presumably traces back to the german word Kraft.
Author here. Yes I could be more accurate here. It was called just "Apple Computer" in some contexts, e.g. this ad [0]. This manual calls it "Apple-1" on the cover [1], but "Apple Computer" in the contents. But you are definitely right that it was often called the Apple-1 in 1976 and into 1977.
Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.
Every time a list like this shows up on HN, multiple commenters will show up to say things like this. Do you really have such a hard time believing that other people sincerely have different taste from you/the general population?
If you ask people about their favorite restaurant, some people will give you the name of a high-end steakhouse, others will say Taco Bell. This is just the reality of human difference.
I did capture there his most choice quote from the interview:
> Kurtz later said that he and Kemeny saw MAC's agenda as totally different from Dartmouth's--MIT was trying to design the theoretically best computer utility, with layers of security "and all that kind of crap."
I interviewed Thomas Kurtz at his home in 2010 for my dissertation on the "computer utility" vision of the 60s and 70s (which foresaw a world of large computer utilities that would function like AT&T or an electrical power company, but for electronic services).
He was long-since retired, but still living in the hills of New Hampshire near Dartmouth. Unfortunately I can't find my interview notes right now, but I do remember that he was very kind and welcoming. What he and John Kemeny did at Dartmouth was truly remarkable. For them the technology (time-sharing and BASIC) was a means to an end of educating and empowering students, and ultimately society as a whole.
The point of citing sources is so that the reader can retrace the evidential basis on which the writer's claims rest. A citation to "Chat GPT" doesn't help with this at all. Saying "Chat GPT helped me write this" is more like an acknowledgment than a citation.
I can't tell if this comment is really serious. In case it needs explanation, you don't ban gambling advertising by having a censor watch every ad and then decide which ones to allow. You pass a law that says "no advertising gambling" and then if someone does it, you prosecute them.
> but I think we can say that it was _designed_ to survive a nuclear strike
On what basis? What is the distinction between being "created" to survive a nuclear strike, and being "designed" to do so?
> that was one of the reason that packet switching was invented (compared to the traditional, at the time, circuit switching).
Yes, but I don't think it's a relevant one. Baran's papers kinda-sorta-maybe had some influence on ARPANET, but ARPANET mostly got packet-switching (and certainly the term "packet") from Donald Davies. If you look at the actual layout of ARPANET it wasn't very survivable (not much redundancy in the links) [0], compared to Baran's proposal [1]. Internetworking and "the Internet" as we know it came much later and was way beyond the point where Baran had any influence.
Author here. Having been neck-deep in steam engine history for years, the possible confusion caused by the title didn't even occur to me. It's obvious in retrospect. I guess I created accidental clickbait.
Author here. Some of the apparent errors here are due to the fact that this is part of a larger series, more of a book in blog form.
> every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam.
I'm aware of this. This is written in the context of the cultural decline of steam power as something people think and dream and write science fiction about, not its physical elimination from the world. See this post [0], particularly the last section, "The Twilight of Steam."
> so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines
I'm aware of this also. But internal combustion engine is a mouthful, so I elected to shorten it, as described this post [1]
> but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
This can't be correct, because internal combustion cars left steam cars in the dust well before the 1910s; it was obvious to most people that internal combustion was winning by 1903.
> The problem is, their online book lending is far from the most important part of the Internet Archive,
I disagree. Archiving information for future researchers is valuable, but giving access to information to people right now is also very valuable. Most people's access to texts for research is very shallow, unless they are part of a research university. Google Books hosts many works that are out of copyright, but there is a century-long dead zone that is inaccessible.
I write a history of technology blog and the Internet Archive lending service has saved me thousands of dollars and many hours that it would have taken to track down the same research materials on eBay. Realistically, I just wouldn't have bothered, and the material I write would be of lower quality or not get written at all.
(That said I do agree that the emergency library was a strategic and legal mistake.)
This is accurate in my experience. My two self-published history books have sold about 400 and 150 copies respectively (combined print an ebook), with no marketing other than my blog, which occasionally makes it to the front page of HN.
Note that this is purely a 'hobby' project at this scale. Both books are still in the red counting just the expenses paid for cover and interior design, illustrations, and editing (i.e. not counting the many hours of my own time). To make a self-sustaining amount of money self-publishing I would have to sell a lot more copies and make books that can be written with much less effort (e.g. genre fiction).
I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon. (http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/)