Visualizing History
Histography is a data visualization project by Martin Stauber, and it’s pretty amazing.
“Histography" is interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions.
The project reminds me of The Fifth Element when Leeloo is researching “War." It’s not the interface, but the way so much information can be visualized in such a compact form – it can be a bit overwhelming.
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
Deep LA Conference at The Huntington
I’ll be presenting a paper at the “Deep L.A.” graduate history conference taking place at The Huntington on October 3rd.
The conference is sponsored by UCLA and USC, with a focus on Los Angeles and Southern California regional history: http://lahistoryconference.tumblr.com
I’m presenting a portion of a chapter in my dissertation, which focuses on mainframes, paperwork, and the electrical utility company Southern California Edison during the postwar era.
(Revised and republished March 28th, 2025)
The Census Has Always Been "Big Data"
The Census has always been “Big Data,” with or without computers and the automation of information.
Census and Sensibility: A Little History of Big Data at IEEE (Wayback Machine link)
Consider just one use of today’s big data with a deep history and a major impact on computational technology: keeping track of a country’s citizenry. This has often been accomplished through a periodic counting, or census. Many references to censuses exist in the ancient world, from Egyptian tomb inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible to, perhaps, most famously, the “worldwide” Roman census described in the Book of Luke in the New Testament.
The Virgin and Saint Joseph register for the census before Governor Quirinius. Byzantine mosaic at the Chora Church, Constantinople 1315–1320 – via Wikipedia
(Revised and republished March 28th, 2025)
Digital Imaginaries at AoIR
Something tells me I should have applied to the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference this year – the theme is “Digital Imaginaries.” The CFP has already passed, but the conference itself is coming up in late October, 21–24th, in Phoenix, Arizona. http://aoir.org/ir16/
The 16th annual Internet Research conference will provide an opportunity to question the ways that networked technologies are imagined and enter into collective imaginaries. In what ways do we culturally apprehend and make sense of digital media? These imaginaries influence our actual and potential uses of technology, as well as how we constrain, encourage, and dream about those uses.
(Revised and republished March 29th, 2025)
The New Video Arcades: Like A Working Museum, with Beer
Great article over at Polygon on new video game arcades: What it's Like Running an Arcade in 2015
It's a costly business, and it's no secret that many arcades have been looking for other ways to supplement that income, including combining arcades and bars together. "[Most people] have illusions that beer and arcades are a perfect gimmick," Wilson says. "If you don't love video games or know anything about repairing them or how to maintain them, you will lose your hat faster than the few minutes it takes to sign the lease on your new spot."
It’s great that they list figures for the businesses too. When you’re in one of these places it seems like the money is just pouring in, but that’s not the financial reality.
Plus, you’ll need to be really good at repairing these old machines, and in ways that retain their authenticity.
“It’s very important to have a very good video game repairman,” Horne says. “It’s very important. Probably the number one thing. And bring your patience when it comes to sourcing the games.”
Prices for the cabinets can wildly vary, on average costing around $1,000 a unit. For example, Mario Kart can run $2,500 to $3,000. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! can run $1,500. Mortal Kombat 2 has doubled in price since Horne started buying machines.
(via kottke.org)
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
People Working in Computer Room
As part of my dissertation I’m working with the Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives collection at the Huntington Library. The photographic collection is now available online at the Huntington Digital Library. A few years ago, when I first came across this collection, it was only available in-person on a single computer.
I stitched the two photos below into an animated gif, showing the transition within computerized space. The images are from “People working in computer room with 1” tape drives" in the SCE collection at the Huntington. These before and after photos taken in 1966 at SCE appear to show how people would fit alongside and interact with the mainframe computer.
Photographs such as these often show many people in the room, mostly trying to look busy, with a few of them staring at equipment or pretending to use the machine. These staged photographs for internal use are similar to those used for marketing. In both cases the images are designed to show how people and computers would work together.
The mainframe in these photographs is a Control Data Corporation mainframe, and it appears to be a CDC 3200 system.
The Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has a brochure for the CDC 3200 mainframe (PDF) available online as well.
(Revised and republished March 29th, 2025)
Univac 494 marketing photographs
I came across this Univac photograph online, showing three people working in a computer room. Using a reverse Google Image Search, it appears that this image and a few others like it were posted online around 2006. From there it looks like the pictures were blogged here and there, recently posted to Pinterest, then making their way to Instagram. I can’t seem to find the original image online, but this one looks like a scan of a partially damaged photo most likely used for marketing. It’s possible that this image could be printed in a brochure other other advertisement.
The image above is a little fuzzy, but the mainframe appears to be a Univac 494. This would date the photograph to 1965 or 1966 or so. The additional photographs below offer a closer view of the mainframe console and its peripherals. There’s also more information on the Univac 494 at Ed Thelen’s website (photos linked below).
(Revised and republished March 30th, 2025)
I’ll See You Online: Teaching Assistants, Google Hangouts, and the Online Classroom
This paper was presented at the Cultural Studies Association annual conference in Riverside, CA in May of 2015.
When asked to be a teaching assistant for a fully online class at UC Riverside, my initial response was “of course…but what do I do?” The transition for teaching assistants into the digital world is an often overlooked aspect of online education, with little attention paid to issues of digital preparation, social media training, shifting labor demands, and digital pedagogy. In the physical classroom, teaching assistants play a vital role by grading papers, leading discussion sections, and most importantly, interacting with students. In the virtual classroom, however, TAs can easily become readers or aides that only grade papers and have little connection with students, or even the professor. In order to remedy this situation, in three online courses over the last two years in which I was a TA, the video conferencing service Google Hangouts was used for synchronous class discussions.
Amazon: The New Consumer's Bible
From November 2013, Derek Thompson writing for The Atlantic: The Amazon Mystery: What America’s Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up To (Wayback Machine link)
Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics machine?...
In a way, this strategy isn’t new at all. It’s ripped from the mildewed playbooks of the first national retail stores in American history. Amazon appears to be building nothing less than a global Sears, Roebuck of the 21st century—a large-scale operation that aims to dominate the future of shopping and shipping.
From October 2014, also Derek Thompson for The Atlantic: What in the World Is Amazon? (Wayback Machine link)
...there is something devilishly seductive to the conveniences of digital capitalism that makes life better for us as consumers and worse for us as workers. Does buying diapers once from Amazon make one morally complicit in the working conditions of its warehouse employees? What about subscribing to Amazon Prime? Having an Amazon credit card?
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
Anything Mechanical, Give it a Good Bash
“Percussive Maintenance,” by Duncan Robson
What a great supercut. Montage videos like this are good conversation starters, and they help run a thread through seemingly disparate genres of film and history.
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
McConaughey Reacts to Star Wars
Matthew McConaughey’s reaction to Star Wars teaser #2 (an Interstellar and Star Wars remix)
I feel the same way, but I cried more.
I love when he puts his hand up, so good. I saw the reaction video a couple of days ago, and it had about 40,000 views. Now it’s close to 5 million.
Here’s the full trailer on YouTube.
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
Whatever You Do, Don't Shout "Cut"
The Story of the Indiana Jones Bridge Scene
The night before I said to Steven [Spielberg], whatever you do, if you stop cameras don’t shout-out “cut,” just shout-out “stop cameras,” because I might go and cut the bridge.
(via Academy Originals)
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
A Constant State of Alarm - The Undersea Network
Excerpts from The Undersea Network, Duke Press, 2015, by Nicole Starosielski.
These excerpts are found in an article on The Undersea Network, at Scientific American:
This vision of autonomous networks is shaped more by Hollywood cinema than by actual cable operations. In reality, our global cable network is always in a sort of crisis and, at the same time, highly dependent on humans to power the steady flow of information transmissions.
It would perhaps be more precise to say that cables are always in a state of “alarm.” An “alarm,” in network-speak, is anything from an indication that the cable has been severed to a reminder about a needed computer update.
Even if our signals continue to pass through cable systems without delay, the undersea network never quite functions perfectly on its own, that is, without alarm and without human assistance.
When I ask operators about the vulnerabilities of today’s undersea network, many express concerns about downsizing and retirements. They fear that carefully sustained industry knowledge will be lost and that there will be nobody to take their place that will adhere to the same standards of reliability. Recruiting the next generation of workers is difficult. There is no direct path to the industry and it remains largely invisible to the public.
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
Undersea Cables and Cybersecurity in Australia
Australia’s vulnerable submarine cables, by Jessica Woodall at The Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Scattered across the ocean floor in intricate webs, submarine cables transfer high data volumes between onshore nodes. Five main international cables connect Australia to cyberspace and global voice networks. They carry 99% of Australia’s total internet traffic, dwarfing the capacity of satellites. Submarine cables are vital to our communications, economic prosperity, and national security. They also tend to break. A lot.
In most regions of the world this isn’t unexpected, or particularly worrying. Submarine cables aren’t much thicker than a garden hose and for the most part sit untethered and unprotected on the sea floor. Inadvertent breakages from ship anchors, nets and natural phenomena such as undersea earthquakes occur frequently, averaging at least one a week. To mitigate this risk, international agreements between cable operating companies are extensive, repair ships are quickly deployed and traffic is usually rerouted through other cables.
Unfortunately, the situation for Australia is more complicated. Sitting in the Southern Hemisphere, we’re largely isolated from the busy network of Transatlantic and North Asian Cable lines. We’re also unable to use overland fibre optic cables from other countries, leaving us reliant upon just a handful of international undersea cables.
Image below: Australian submarine cables at submarinecablemap.com
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
Finding the Death of the Mainframe
I came across a blog post (Wayback Machine link) discussing the 50th anniversary of the IBM System/360, and it mentioned a prediction about the so-called “death of the mainframe.”
I had seen the photo before, of Stewart Alsop literally eating his words “Death to the Mainframe” with a knife and fork, but I had not seen the original quote in print, and I couldn’t find a citation.
Back issues of InfoWorld magazine are online at Google Books, but searches there were not helpful. I kept finding references to the prediction, but not the original statement itself.
Then I happened across this forum discussion about the “Death of the Mainframe” on Google Groups, and one of the members noted that the original statement did not happen in the InfoWorld magazine, but at a conference.
The first reference in print to the death of the mainframe by Alsop is in the February 22, 1993 issue of InfoWorld magazine on page 4. The article reads:
Last week, we held the second InfoWorld Editorial EXPOsure, where 35 vendors from the Northwest showed hot new products to 26 of our editors and reporters and more than 70 of our readers (plus an odd assortment of other insiders and cognoscenti).
We also had a fun panel featuring columnists Cheryl Currid and Brian Livingston, along with four of our staff. The panel gave a lively discussion about the role of the mainframe in future information systems. I predicted that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996. Cheryl Currid was a little kinder and predicted that all remaining mainframes will blow up on December 31, 1999, when their clocks cannot figure out how to make the change to the year 2000.
Reference for the magazine article:
Alsop, Stewart. “Microsoft’s Hermes: key network management system or myth?” Distributed Thinking, InfoWorld magazine. February 22, 1993. page 4. (article available on Google Books)
(Revised and republished March 30th, 2025)
Sea Monsters and Submarine Cables
Vintage-style map of submarine cables by TeleGeography (Wayback Machine link).
This year’s map pays tribute to the pioneering mapmakers of the Age of Discovery, incorporating elements of medieval and renaissance cartography. In addition to serving as navigational aids, maps from this era were highly sought-after works of art, often adorned with fanciful illustrations of real and imagined dangers at sea. Such embellishments largely disappeared in the early 1600s, pushing modern map design into a purely functional direction.
To bring back the lost aesthetic that vanished along with these whimsical details, TeleGeography referenced a variety of resources in the design process. One of the most invaluable was Chet Van Duzer’s Sea Monsters in Medieval and Renaissance Maps book, which provides arguably the most complete history of the evolution of sea monsters and map design from this period. Our final product is a view of the global submarine cable network seen through the lens of a bygone era.
There's an interactive online version of the map as well:
http://submarine-cable-map-2015.telegeography.com
(via Vox)
(Revised and republished April 12th, 2025)
We Don't See Mainframes as Legacy Technology
Half-century milestone for IBM mainframes, by Mark Ward at BBC News, April 7th, 2014.
Most interesting about the passage below, is that they’re referring to mainframes right now, not 50 years ago.
"I don't think people realise how often during the day they interact with a mainframe," he said.
Mr Heptonstall said mainframes were behind many of the big information systems that keep the modern world humming and handled such things as airline reservations, cash machine withdrawals and credit card payments.
The machines were very good at doing small-scale transactions, such as adding or taking figures away from bank balances, over and over again, he said.
"We don't see mainframes as legacy technology," said Charlie Ewen, chief information officer at the Met Office, which has been using mainframes for 40 years.
(Revised and republished March 30th, 2025)
IBM System/360 - 50th anniversary
IBM recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the System/360 mainframe, which was announced on April 7, 1964.
IBM press announcement text for the System/360, 1964 (Wayback Machine link)
IBM System/360 at the Computer History Museum
The System/360, or S/360 is discussed in this IBM video, “IBM Centennial Film: They Were There.”
youtu.be/XrhDaAmn5… (video no longer available)
Also from IBM, System 360: From Computers to Computer Systems (Wayback Machine link):
Most significantly, the S/360 ushered in an era of computer compatibility—for the first time, allowing machines across a product line to work with each other. In fact, it marked a turning point in the emerging field of information science and the understanding of complex systems. After the S/360, we no longer talked about automating particular tasks with “computers.” Now, we talked about managing complex processes through “computer systems.”
(Revised and republished April 1st, 2025)