The good folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs have unveiled their fantastic HOWTO for recreating a 1958, oscilloscope-based proto-video-game called "Tennis for Two," created by a physicist named William Higinbotham "to improve what was an otherwise lackluster visitors' day at the lab."

Before we start, let's be clear that this is not a tutorial in how to build an oscilloscope. Tennis for Two is supposed to display on a 'scope, so beg, borrow, or buy one if you don't have one handy. Older low-end analog scopes like mine (a Hameg!) usually go for $50-$150, and if nothing else, you can always make a Scope Clock out of it later.

There are three parts to the electronics that we're building. First, there is the AVR microcontroller-- the brains of the outfit. The specific variety that we're using is the ATmega168, the same chip used in (for example) the Arduino platform. Secondly, there are two handheld controllers that connect to the ATmega168 microcontroller. Each handheld controller has a knob and a button. Third, there is the digital to analog converter that takes the output from the AVR and uses it to drive the scope.

Link

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has the exciting news that Apple I BASIC has been extracted from an audio cassette and converted to MP3. It's actually got a pretty good beat.

They very first piece of commercial Apple software — a primordial flavor of BASIC originally released in 1976 that took thirty seconds to load — has been perfectly and authoritatively extracted from a yellowing audio tape and converted into a 38 second MP3, playable in iTunes. Plucky, hyper-intelligent beardos are now dissecting the file and learning its secrets, but their findings are a bit above my head.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

DEFENDER of the Favicon implements the game of Defender using Javascript and the tinsy, teeny space afforded by a Favicon. Supposedly works in Firefox and Opera, though my Firefox just stalls on the splashscreen. Nevertheless: woah. 8-bit arcade game in a Favicon. Woah. Link (via Wonderland)

From the December, 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, a "periscope for bridge kibbitzers":

AT A recent international bridge match the problem of letting people watch the play without interfering with the players was satisfactorily solved by the use of a horizontal periscope with one end suspended over the table and the other fitted through one wall of the room, so that the observers need neither be seen nor heard by the players.

From the observer’s standpoint this method of watching a bridge game is more satisfactory than standing by the table, as it permits a view of the cards held in all hands as well as a better look at those played.

Link

We've had Edith Piaf singing "La Marseillaise" since cock-crow here, so it must be Bastille Day! Go behead some aristos and tell 'em "Edith sent ya!"

On 5 May 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General to hear their grievances. The deputies of the Third Estate representing the common people (the two others were clergy and nobility) decided to break away and form a National Assembly. On 20 June the deputies of the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, swearing not to separate until a constitution had been established. They were gradually joined by delegates of the other estates; Louis started to recognize their validity on 27 June. The assembly re-named itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and began to function as a legislature and to draft a constitution.

In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of the royal finance minister Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain arms for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a prison which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettre de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed. Besides holding a large cache of arms, the Bastille had been known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. As it happened, at the time of the siege in July 1789 there were only seven inmates, none of great political significance.

Link

Wikipedia's image repository includes a photo of the NeXTCube that Tim Berners-Lee ran the first-ever Web server on, at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland:

This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. Today, it is kept in Microcosm, the public museum at the Meyrin site of CERN, in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.

The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of "Information Management: A Proposal," which was Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web.

The label on the cube itself has the following text: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

The BBC's Chris Vallance tells us,

We recorded a long interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, British personal computer pioneer (ZX80, ZX81, ZX spectrum) and we've just posted it, more or less unexpurgated, online. Many of your readers will have grown up playing games on one of Sir Clive's machines. In the interview he talks about everything from from flying electric cars to Eee PC's and and his thoughts on the modern computing industry.

Sir Clive Sinclair [ BBC iPM ]

Mr Jalopy sez, "I bought a vintage Marantz quadraphonic sound amplifier at a garage sale and have drafted a black light tinged ode to the competing 4-channel formats that never really panned out. "

I am not audiophile and I do not have a golden ear, but I am extremely interested in the blunt force trauma of the awesome clarity and unambiguous nature of completely rocking out. There are tons of quadraphonic albums on eBay and it is only a matter of time until I find a quadraphonic 8-track player at a garage sale for $1. Besides, it turns out quad receivers are selling on eBay for less than two rolls of quarters, so from a cost of fun perspective, some quad audio experiments are a pretty good value.

Besides the aforementioned technical snafus, there will be the issue of availability of key releases as I imagine Iggy Pop's "Raw Power" is not available in quad. What about Ziggy Stardust? And Black Sabbath's "Paranoid?" Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, what if a friend excitedly brings over a quadraphonic Yes album and I am not able to keep from ripping it from the turntable to smash it to bits?

Link (Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

This brass and leather Soviet gas-mask is the genuine article, not a steampunk fetish-fashion prop (though, of course, it could be both). Link (via Wired Gadget Lab)

Update: I take it back: it's a sculpture from the Ukraine, on sale on eBay

The March, 1950 Popular Science ad for International Correspondence Schools entitled ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM HIDDEN TALENTS? may well have been the best thing in the entire issue. Link

Jeff Vandermeer sez, "These old Indian comics were one of the three pillars of my childhood reading, the other two being Tintin and Asterix & Obelix. We lived in the Fiji Islands, which had a large Indian population. I’d buy these from the corner Chinese grocery store, about a quarter-mile from the beach." Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Harpo Marx -- my second-favorite Marx brother -- explains the origin of the Gookie, his magnificent, world-beating funny-face (there was a fantastic Animaniacs version of this -- post links to it in the comments below if you know where it lives online!)

Gookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.

I used to stand there and practice imitating Gookie’s look for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, using the window glass as a mirror. He was too hypnotized by his own work to notice me. Then one day I decided I had him down perfect--tongue, cheeks, eyes, the whole bit.

Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.

Link (via Kottke)

Jason, "I just blogged about a wonderfully lurid and pulpish book cover for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1954 by Signet, that I happened to randomly find on Amazon. Significant is the artwork and over-the-top copy on the back, which is quite different from almost every other edition of this novel that I've seen." Link (Thanks, Jason!)

From the Smithsonian's Flickr stream of historic, public domain photos, a shot commemorating the end of being able to ship your children by postal mail:

This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Wilkerson's M21 Flat-Panel TV looks like a two-dimensional version of the huge console TV I grew up watching in my grandparents' basement rec-room. All it needs is one of those ancient Zenith acoustic remotes that used a bunch of buttons poised over miniature tuning forks, which emitted inaudible sounds that caused the channel to change (you could mute the TV by sneezing and turn it off by jingling your keys!). No price yet, but I'm guessing not cheap. What shall we call this 1950s-meets-today design aesthetic? Beaverpunk? Link

Robert D sez,

Today would have been the 96th birthday of cryptologist, mathematician and father of almost everything digital Alan Turing. That he was persecuted for his homosexuality to the point of suicide is a crime and a tragedy.

Remember today the man who, more than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, is the reason you are now sitting at a computer, reading this very sentence.

ALAN MATHISON TURING
23 June, 1912 - 7 June, 1954

Link (Thanks, Robert!)

One of the best things about being an immigrant is that there's an entire nation's worth of wonderful and weird pop-culture to absorb. Case in point: last night, my dinner guests told me about the notorious Fred Dibnah, a British steeplejack who made a career out of televised, dramatic demolitions of giant industrial chimneys, a feat he accomplished without explosions. Dibnah also owned a pair of lovingly restored steam engines, and dug a replica coal mine in his back yard. There's a wealth of Dibnah videos on YouTube -- they're endlessly entertaining.

Having mastered his trade repairing chimneys, Dibnah became aware of the demand for a cost-effective demolition method and offered to remove them without the need for explosives. His technique was to cut an ingress at the bottom of the chimney, support the brickwork with wooden props and then burn the props so that the chimney fell, hopefully in the intended direction. Alongside his demolition work he also continued to work as a steeplejack. He has always maintained that, although most famous for demolishing chimneys, he much preferred to repair and preserve them.

Link to Fred Dibnah's Wikipedia entry, Link to Fred Dibnah videos on YouTube (Thanks, Ben!)

Retrobrick sells "vintage" mobile phones and accessories -- I love the cognitive dissonance I get by typing the words "vintage" and "mobile phone" together, but given that these things have been around for decades, it's perfectly reasonable. My friend Jim Griffin likes to say "anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you're 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed."

We pride ourselves on having the widest stocks of the most collectable and vintage phones. But, in the unlikely event that we don't have what you want in stock, we will do our best to source it for you.

Mobile phone collecting is still in its infancy around the world. These very recent antiques are becoming more and more popular and prices are set to rise dramatically. We predict a very large price increase, so any purchase made now could be a very wise investment

Link (via Beyond the Beyond!)

Scott sez, "I hosted director Greg Maletic and screened his excellent 60-min documentary, "Tilt," last week. In 1998, Williams saw pinball sales going down and their slot machines going up. Pinball was losing ground in the arcades to the new video machines. In a valiant effort to save their livelihoods, a team of great designers from the video and pinball world decide to combine the technologies into Pinball 2000, a platform the seemed like a great new gaming experience. (I've never played it.) Maletic made a film that is part game history, part product design, and part tragic business story. Well worth watching, and the clip on the website gives a good sense of its quality. " Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Jim sez, "Rutgers has an interesting collection of historic maps online, including what appears to be a 1955 tourist map ... of prisons."

The hand-drawn map has normal touristy captions notations like:
- High Point State Park [Highest Point in NJ]
- Lake Hopatcong (largest in NJ) Popular Summer Resort
- Newark's Airport is world's busiest

But the map is dominated by prisons:
- Here maximum and limited security for industrial type prisoner under 30 (Ref't'y Rahway)
- Here minimum custody for older men of common labor type and men nearing time of discharge (Prison Farm Bordentown)
- Here minimum security for men 18-30 trainable in vocational and agricultural work (Annandale Farms)

GIF Link (Thanks, Jim!)

The March, 1931 issues of Popular Science asked the critical question, "Will Autogiro Banish Present Plane?" A provocative notion -- I guess the jury's still out on it.

I HAVE just had the biggest thrill of my twenty years of flying. I have piloted an autogiro. And I have seen this amazing windmill plane “do the impossible.”

It is, I am positive, the flying craft of the future. At Pitcairn Field, fourteen miles from Philadelphia, Pa., James Ray, chief test pilot for the Pitcairn-Cierva Company, explained the design of the strange machine and took me for a passenger hop. We landed at the far side of the field. The spinning windmill over our heads slowed down. Its four yellow vanes, long and slender like blades of grass, drooped to a standstill above the bright green fuselage. Ray climbed from the rear cockpit.

Link

Carl sez, "The Smithsonian is up and running on Flickr Commons ... the photos are all labeled "no known copyright restrictions" and the photos are high-res. I was particularly intrigued by the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, with photos of famous scientists and inventors. We should all congratulate the Smithsonian on a *big* step forward!" Link (Thanks, Carl!)

Marilyn sez, "Dian Fossey's first National Geographic article (1970) has been republished on Nat Geo's website, along with some lovely photos of Fossey frolicking with some of the gorillas in happier times."

Now I pry off the top boards of the playpen and stand back. Two little hands appear from the inside of the box to grip the edges, and slowly the baby pulls himself up. His large brown eyes gaze about the room that is to be his home for the next 68 days. They blink at the sight of familiar mountain vegetation left behind so unwillingly when he was captured almost a month previously.

Then the small black bundle leaps into a pile of nesting material. Hands beat upon the foliage in excitement. But enough of that, there’s a tree to climb! Up he goes, hand over hand, until he reaches the ceiling—certainly an unusual way for a tree to end!

Link, Link to photos (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Kevin Kelly brings us an extraordinary reminiscence of the not-entirely-defunct (?) "edge-notched card," a punchcard hypertext technology that inspired visionaries and weirdos for decades before the PC came along.

Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once. In computer science terms, you could do a "logical OR" operation. This ability of the system to sort and link prompted Douglas Engelbart in 1962 to suggest these cards could implement part of the Memex vision of hypertext.

Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

Paul sez, "torrentfreak.com has an excellent post describing what must be one of the first DRM devices evar. the Lenslok is a foldable optical lens that was required to decipher scambled unlock codes in early 1980's video games. from the torrentfreak post:"

The first game to use the Lenslok DRM was the ZX Spectrum version of the hugely successful wireframe-3D shoot ‘em up, ‘Elite‘. But of course, we’re talking about DRM here so yes, you guessed it, it caused lots of problems for the legitimate users. As each version of the Lenslok device was unique to the game it sought to protect, sending out the incorrect Lenslok device to around 500 buyers of ‘Elite’ wasn’t the best move made by the publisher, ‘Firebird‘. None of these people could play the game, but probably had an interesting experience for a few hours trying to work out how to use the prism. With no Internet forums to voice their anger, there were many complaints in the computer magazines of the day.

The final nail in the Lenslok coffin was its inability to work with anything other than a tiny portable TV, as the on-screen input window would otherwise be bigger than the device itself, rendering it useless.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Kevin Andrew Murphy sez, "I knew that Lady Puabi of Ur had d4s for the game boards found in her tomb, but it turns out the Romans had d20s and a nice green glass one is currently up for sale at Christie's. Only $17,925, for the gamer who has everything." Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Just look at this beautifully faded sign for the Super Museum in Metropolis, Illinois. Four generations of Supermans, scorched by the yellow light of the Terran sun. Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger sez, "Here's a PDF of a 1944 'Simple Sabotage Field Manual' from the US Strategic Services, explaining how to train people to sabotage their workplace. Full of useful suggestions, from the practical to the, um, less so (e.g., bring a bag of mo[n]ths into a theater showing propaganda films). It also recommends doing things through channels, making speeches, and referring matters to committee as techniques of sabotage (cf. page 28). I got this link from a presentation by two CIA folks at the Enterprise 2.0 conference."

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­ sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and considera­tion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of com­munications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reason­able” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris­ diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

PDF Link (Thanks, David!)

The Marginal Revolution blog poses the musical question, "If you were transported back to the middle ages, what would be the top strategy for thriving?" Given that most of us can't make gunpowder from scratch (and don't have up-to-date smallpox vaccinations), dreams of becoming a technological pre-Enlightenment billionaire guru are probably not realistic (stipulating that "realistic" is probably not a good word to use in respect of responses to hypothetical time-travel questions).

First build grubstake by minstrelsy. I hope you remember some three chord Stones songs, or perhaps some blues. Next, I would suggest the magic of fractional reserve banking in a market town. Expand the banking operations to other market towns. Hire bodyguards. Loan money to the king. Loan money to the other king. Start a war. Loan money to the Pope, etc.
Posted by: Rebunga at Jun 6, 2008 12:15:47 PM

Link