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Showing 25 articles by Paul Ceruzzi
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April 6, 2012
Bell Labs
The Computer History Museum recently hosted a forum with John Gertner, the author of a new book about Bell Labs. Here is the link. Gertner discusses the many world-changing inventions and innovations that came out of the Labs, especially during its peak years of innovation from the late 1920s...
March 19, 2012
The Sweet Spot
PC World recently ran an interesting piece about vintage DP equipment still being used on a daily basis, for practical purposes. They even found someone using punched card accounting equipment. I don't go back that far, but the other day I got a chuckle from a co-worker when I needed to do a simple...
September 28, 2011
Another Historic Plaque
By now you must know that I am fond of historic plaques, especially ones that have to do with the District of Columbia or Northern Virginia. Here's another one, from Arlington: The full text reads: The ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense,...
April 22, 2011
Where exactly is the "cloud"?
You have probably heard the news about the failure of Amazon's Cloud computing services, in spite of their claim that it was geographically dispersed, redundant, etc. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but Martin Campbell-Kelly discussed its early genesis in his chapter in our book The Internet &...
March 17, 2011
End of an Era
I was going to title this post "The End of Moore's Law," but that would not be quite right. What is happening is that increases in processor speeds have slowed or even stopped. Without faster processors, it is hard to take advantage of increases in memory capacity. Here is the reference to the...
February 16, 2011
I'm not ready to give up yet
In a couple of months a book entitled Science Fiction and Computing, edited by David Ferro and Eric Swedin will appear. I contribute an essay about the relationship between Artificial Intelligence research and AI's portrayal in science fiction, especially "HAL" in the Kubrick film 2001: A Space...
June 7, 2010
Simplicity Revisited
A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted...
December 2, 2009
The Latest from the Large Hadron Collider
As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you've probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous, given our level of expertise. So he or she or it travels...
September 29, 2009
The Latest from Gordon Bell
A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It's a project called "MyLifeBits," and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall, by Bell and Jim Gemmell. For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan...
April 29, 2009
Geocities
By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the...
January 30, 2009
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
Last week Palm introduced a new smartphone, designed to compete with Apple's iPhone. It is an amazing device, with all sorts of features that you could hardly imagine could fit on something that small. But there's a price--and it is a lot more than the retail price of the phone. In coming out...
January 2, 2009
New Year Thoughts
By now you've all heard about the Microsoft Zune bug that was caused by its software having difficulty dealing with a leap year. On at least one other post I talked about the problems the Gregorian calendar gives computer programmers (actually it was Church officials, which is sort of the same...