Tag: history

Old, abandoned websites that still work

Here is a nice collection of old websites that were abandoned, but still work.  Most of these were last updated in mid-90’s.  And, though I haven’t seen most of them back in the day, the overall atmosphere and common elements of those time bring a nostalgic tear to my eye.

MSIE is evil

Off the whole selection, my obvious favorite one is Internet Explorer is EVIL! of course.  Back in 1998, 15 years ago, way before any of the modern Web 2.0 or whatever version we are running now, some people knew the truth and were not afraid to say it.  In the most expressing matter – including satanic stars, fires of Hell, and a face image of Bill Gates.

Some things never change …

 

One way to make sense of the change in the way we …

One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.

In short, we gave up our netizenship.

The death and life of great Internet cities

Realistically colorized historical photographs

Weekly digest email from StumbleUpon frequently has some good stuff.  In this week’s edition, there was a link to 36 realistically colorized historical photos, which does have quite a few images worth your time.  My best three picks would be these:

Abraham Lincoln

 

Abraham Lincoln’s portrait from 1865 – colorized version does make it seem like a much more recent photograph.  The black and white one is cool too, but I don’t find it as engaging as the colored one.  It’s hard to believe that it was taken almost 150 years ago.

Japanese archers

 

A photograph of Japanese archers from 1860, which coincidentally shows one of the techniques for holding multiple arrows at once, that was mentioned in the recent video I’ve shared.

And also this photograph from Washington D.C. in 1921, which is just cool and looks like a frame from a gangster movie.

Washington DC

 

Have a look at the rest of them – there are some really good ones.

 

Go celebrates 4th birthday

I haven’t yet had my hands on the Go programming language, but I’ve kept a bit of an eye on  it.  It sounds interesting especially for those tasks that would benefit from concurrency – things like web spiders, email processors, etc.  The language had recently celebrated the 4th birthday, and there is a nice retrospective on the project’s blog that shows how fast it is getting accepted and which projects and companies are using it.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The number of high-quality open source Go projects is phenomenal. Prolific Go hacker Keith Rarick put it well: “The state of the Go ecosystem after only four years is astounding. Compare Go in 2013 to Python in 1995 or Java in 1999. Or C++ in 1987!”