Winamp Skin Museum
▻https://skins.webamp.org
▻https://skin-museum-og-captbaritone-webamp.vercel.app/api/og
Ça, si ce n’est pas pour seenthis, je ne sais pas pour qui s’est.
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Microsoft, les cinquante premières années
▻https://theconversation.com/microsoft-les-cinquante-premieres-annees-252827Insubmersible. Même la vague des Gafa n’a pas vraiment atteint Microsoft. Cinquante ans après sa création, soit une éternité dans le monde de la tech, la firme de Bill Gates et Paul Allen est toujours là et bien là. Retour sur ce qu’on appelle outre-Atlantique, une success-story avec quelques échecs.
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2007 : avec l’iPhone, Apple lance l’ère de l’“Homo smartphonicus”
▻https://www.nouvelobs.com/histoire/20241222.OBS98165/2007-avec-l-iphone-apple-lance-l-ere-de-l-homo-smartphonicus.htmlPar Xavier de La Porte
Série En lançant son téléphone connecté à internet, Apple avait conçu un objet désirable mais onéreux. Aujourd’hui indispensable dans la vie de tous les jours, il pose d’innombrables questions à mesure que de nouveaux usages apparaissent.
Pour aller plus loin
La une du 19 décembre 2024.Edition de la semaine La première histoire du XXIᵉ siècle
En accès libre
Dans « Vallée du silicium » (Seuil, 2024), l’écrivain de science-fiction Alain Damasio raconte revenir de son voyage dans la Silicon Valley avec une certitude : « Le smartphone a rebooté Sapiens. » Quand on lui dit qu’il exagère un peu, il n’en démord pas. Pour lui, tous les champs de notre vie – travailler, s’informer, se distraire, aimer… – sont aujourd’hui affectés par cet objet qui nous accompagne plus qu’aucun autre n’a accompagné les humains. Qui aurait pu penser, lorsqu’il a été lancé en 2007 aux Etats-Unis par Apple, que l’iPhone produirait cet effet ? D’autant qu’il existait déjà des téléphones reliés à internet – comme les BlackBerry proposés aux cadres pour qu’ils puissent consulter leurs e-mails dans les aéroports ou les taxis – ; et qu’on s’émerveillait encore d’avoir accès à un nombre chaque jour plus grand de contenus – chaque jour plus vite – sur nos ordinateurs. Pourquoi donc désirer être connectés partout ?
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Abonné
Le génie de l’iPhone ne tenait pas dans la seule connexion à internet. Deux éléments furent décisifs. Le premier fut de rendre l’objet simple d’usage et désirable : un design élégant, un écran tactile, un appareil photo de bonne qualité. Il faisait envie. Le deuxième élément fut l’AppStore, un écosystème d’une ingéniosité diabolique : des acteurs tiers développent des « applications » qu’Apple met à disposition contre rémunération, l’entreprise de Cupertino, en Californie, se garantissant ainsi une rente qui ne fait que croître à mesure que le nombre des usagers augmente et que les start-up du monde entier partent en quête de la killer app (ou application phare, celle qui a le monopole sur un besoin, qu’elle a parfois créé, comme Waze pour la navigation routière en temps réel). C’est ainsi que l’iPhone est entré dans nos vies. Parce qu’il avait des airs d’accessoire, au même titre qu’un joli sac ou une montre chic, et parce qu’il a fait apparaître un secteur économique qui a rivalisé de créativité pour attirer toutes les activités de notre existence dans cet objet.
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Mais voilà, le bijou coûte très cher, encore aujourd’hui. Donc, pour que le smartphone habite vraiment nos vies, pour que les poches du monde entier se déforment, pour que, où qu’on aille sur Terre, en manipuler un soit ce que nous partagions le plus sûrement avec les humains que nous croisons, il a fallu que des concurrents fournissent les mêmes services qu’Apple, pour moins cher. Google, par exemple, domine le marché grâce à un système d’exploitation dont tous les fabricants peuvent s’emparer, ce qui baisse mécaniquement le coût de l’objet. Ainsi, au cours des années 2010, le mobile connecté cesse d’être seulement désirable pour devenir nécessaire. Et paradoxalement il l’est encore plus dans des pays et parmi des populations qui n’avaient pu bénéficier ni du téléphone filaire ni de l’internet par ordinateur. Sa légèreté, son alimentation sur batterie, sa connexion au réseau mondial via les ondes en font l’outil fondamental du paysan africain (qui y lit aussi bien la météo que les cours du sorgho), de la commerçante vietnamienne et des migrants de partout vers partout qui, grâce à lui, restent en lien avec leur famille.
Communiquer, informer, documenter notre vie et la « partager »Le glissement vertigineux qui s’est produit depuis 2007 est une migration progressive de nos activités dans ce rectangle. Nous avons commencé par l’utiliser pour communiquer, puis ce fut pour nous informer, pour documenter notre vie et la « partager ». Aujourd’hui, c’est pour payer une addition, faire des courses, commander et régler un taxi, effectuer un virement bancaire, acheter et faire valider un billet de train par le contrôleur, regarder des films, flirter, se masturber… Le smartphone a remplacé (ou absorbé) le journal, la radio, la télévision, la lampe de poche, l’appareil photo, la montre, l’enregistreur, la calculatrice, la carte de crédit ou le plan de la ville. Même l’expression de « couteau suisse » ne rend pas compte de tout ce qu’il fait pour nous. Il est devenu essentiel pour travailler, s’informer, se distraire, il s’insinue dans tous les temps morts de nos vies. Avec les clés, les lunettes et le portefeuille, il est devenu l’outil qu’on ne peut pas oublier. C’est souvent la première chose qu’on attrape le matin en se levant et la dernière que l’on pose avant de s’endormir. On aurait donc envie de donner raison à Alain Damasio.
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Rencontre En vacances, balance ton tél : « C’est comme un doudou, le lâcher, c’est sortir de sa zone de confort »
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Peut-on dire pour autant que nous avons été « rebootés » ? En 2009, l’artiste Thomas Lévy-Lasne peignait « Au portable », magnifique portrait en pied d’un jeune homme dans la rue, absorbé par son téléphone. Le peintre saisissait là une posture qui n’existait pas avant (ou alors peut-être chez quelques personnages tenant une lettre à la main dans la peinture flamande du XVIIe siècle, mais il y a fort à parier que la scène était moins fréquente dans la vie quotidienne de nos ancêtres, eu égard au faible taux d’alphabétisation). Depuis, beaucoup d’autres postures se sont ajoutées, dont certaines ont été recensées dans un très joli livre, « Curious Rituals », œuvre d’un collectif d’ethnographes et de designers qui ont recensé les gestes de notre modernité numérique : « swiper » (glisser son doigt sur l’écran pour accéder à une nouvelle page), marcher dans la rue en baissant la tête, retirer des écouteurs pour s’adresser à quelqu’un, nous pencher vers notre voisin pour qu’il voie notre écran, donner l’impression que nous parlons tout seul, etc. L’intérêt est de montrer notre aptitude à incorporer l’outil. Non que nous ayons fusionné avec lui, comme le rêvait la SF avec la figure du cyborg, mais nous avons appris à nos corps à s’y conformer. Cela pourrait ressembler à une « reprogrammation ».
Du désir à l’obligationPour autant, le smartphone nous a-t-il changés ? On lui associe désormais toute une série de pathologies, plus ou moins sérieusement documentées : le « fomo » (pour fear of missing out, soit la crainte de rater quelque chose), l’infobésité (pour le trop-plein d’informations auxquelles nous sommes exposés), le trouble de l’attention (à cause des notifications qui ne cessent d’apparaître et nous interrompent à chaque instant), la « bulle de filtres » (les informations, qui nous arrivent par des algorithmes les sélectionnant selon nos intérêts, nous exposeraient à moins d’altérité et à une forme de solitude), jusqu’à l’addiction proprement dite, qui, bien que contestée par certains, est communément admise.
Toutes sortes de traitements sont ainsi apparus : séjours de sevrage numérique, automédication à base de déconnexion volontaire (pendant quelques heures, une journée, un week-end) et même suivi psychologique pour les cas les plus problématiques. On pourrait discuter de l’efficacité ou même de la validité scientifique de ces procédures, mais elles sont révélatrices d’un fait : le smartphone nous pose problème. Et les questions affluent : quel est son effet sur notre sociabilité, même intime ? A partir de quel âge est-il sage d’en doter nos enfants ? Pour quel usage ? Quel niveau de surveillance – ou de permissivité – est-il acceptable ? On est là aux confins du savoir-vivre, de la santé publique et de l’éthique, et le périmètre des questions ne fait que croître avec les nouveaux usages.
Homo SmartphonicusHomo Smartphonicus ALEX VIETI
A ce propos, il faut avoir en tête une rupture, dont nous ne sommes pas complètement responsables : la pandémie de Covid-19. Très grossièrement, on peut considérer qu’avant 2020, avoir un smartphone relevait du désir. Après, de l’obligation. A l’occasion des mesures prises autour de la pandémie (QR code, « distanciation sociale »…) s’est opérée une numérisation à marche forcée, induite par une nécessité administrative, au sens large, dont nous subissons encore les conséquences : pour entrer dans un musée il faut montrer sa réservation, obtenir un billet de train sur papier est devenu compliqué, faire un virement bancaire réclame une « clé digitale » associée à son téléphone, etc. Le smartphone est devenu l’instrument d’une prétendue « simplification » des procédures dont on fait semblant de ne pas voir à quel point elle est injonctive, non discutée, excluante et angoissante. Avec la généralisation du smartphone, la fracture numérique est devenue une ligne de partage de la société presque aussi effective que les classes sociales. Mais elle n’a pas encore son Marx, qui l’aurait convertie en politique.
Dépendance organiséePourtant, il y aurait à faire. Car, en dernier recours, la dépendance organisée au téléphone mobile est une dépendance à un objet technique tout sauf anodin. Il est coûteux écologiquement (sa construction nécessite l’extraction de terres rares, effectuée dans des conditions désastreuses pour l’environnement et les humains, le recyclage est balbutiant, la consommation d’électricité des serveurs croît sans cesse) ; son fonctionnement dépend d’entreprises privées qui imposent leurs règles (à la fois en matière d’obsolescence matérielle, de privatisation du logiciel, de captation des données personnelles via les programmes cachés dans les applications, etc.) ; plus encore que pour tout autre outil de la vie courante, nous ne savons pas très bien comment il fonctionne.
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A mesure qu’il gagne en puissance et en fluidité technique (la rapidité et la facilité avec lesquelles on transfère ses données d’un ancien à un nouveau téléphone sont chaque fois une expérience miraculeuse), il devient plus mystérieux, et plus inquiétant. Car il nous met face à une forme d’impuissance, notamment quand il ne marche plus. D’où l’éclosion d’un autre écosystème : celui des magasins de réparation qui ont fleuri dans toutes les villes de France et du monde et de la circulation des pièces détachées. Bien souvent alloué aux populations les plus récemment arrivées sur le territoire (car le smartphone est un langage complexe mais universel), ce commerce est devenu essentiel : c’est à ce jeune Pakistanais qui parle à peine français que nous venons en urgence confier notre smartphone dont l’écran reste désespérément noir, les mains aussi tremblantes que si nous lui confiions notre vie. Alors oui, cet objet a changé beaucoup de choses. Et pourtant, irrémédiablement, nous continuons à craindre de mourir, de ne pas être aimés, de passer à côté de nos existences, et surtout, à avoir terriblement besoin des autres. Contre cela, malheureusement ou heureusement, la technologie ne peut pas grand-chose.
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The Man Who Killed Google Search
▻https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-googleLa charge est sévère...
Emmerdification de Google par le menu.These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.
These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Heroes and VillainsBen Gomes is a hero. He was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business, joining the company in 1999 — a time long before Google established dominance in the field, and the same year when Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell the company to Excite for $1m, only to walk away after Vinod Khosla (an Excite investor and the co-founder of Sun Microsystems) lowballed the pair with a $750,000 offer.
In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate across departments.
Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.
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How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/23846048/google-search-memes-images-pagerank-altavista-seo-keywordshe first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.
What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.
This year, The Verge is exploring how Google Search has reshaped the web into a place for robots — and how the emergence of AI threatens Google itself.
What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers?
How Google tried to fix the web — by taking it over
The store is for humans, the storefront is for robots
The little search engine that couldn’t
Who killed Google Reader?There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.
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30 years ago this month, the Mosaic web browser officially launched and changed the world - Neowin
▻https://www.neowin.net/news/30-years-ago-this-month-the-mosaic-web-browser-officially-launched-and-changIt’s sometimes difficult to label a product or service that truly changed the world after it was released. However, it definitely can be said that the release of the Mosaic web browser did just that. After a preliminary release in January 1993, version 1.0 of Mosaic was launched 30 years ago this month, on April 22, 1993.
Let’s get this part out of the way: Mosaic was not the first web browser ever released. That honor belongs to WorldWideWeb, which was launched a few years before in 1990 by developer Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN. Later other browsers like Viola and Cello were launched. However, Mosaic was different.
The browser was first developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina when they were graduate students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Unlike earlier web browsers, which showed text and images in separate windows, Mosaic’s biggest innovation was that it was capable of showing both text and images in the same window. It made looking at websites like you were reading a magazine page.
Mosaic also let users click on hyperlinks to go to other pages or sites, instead of manually typing a URL address. It had a user interface design that was easy to understand. The now familiar buttons for going back or forward through sites, or refreshing a page, were in place with Mosaic.
While originally launched for Unix systems, Mosaic versions were released later in 1993 for Windows and Macintosh. The need for a closed internet service like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and the other online services that popped up in the 1980s started to slowly go away. All you needed to access the internet was an ISP and Mosaic installed. The NCSA’s official Mosaic website states that by December 1993 “more than 5,000 copies of the browser were being downloaded a month and the center was receiving hundreds of thousands of email inquiries a week.” Keep in mind this is an era where most homes could only connect to the internet with a 28.8k phone modem.
Starting in 1994, the US National Science Foundation started funding for further development of Mosaic. However, even then the writing was on the wall for the web browser’s shutdown. Later that year, Mosaic’s co-creator Marc Andreessen left NCSA and helped to found Mosaic Communications Corporation.
That company released its first browser, called Mosaic Netscape, in late 1994. The NCSA threatened legal action at the new company for using the Mosaic brand for the browser and company. The browser was finally named Netscape Navigator, and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation.
Netscape quickly became the browser of choice for most Internet users, which meant Mosaic was being downloaded and used less and less. As a result, in January 1997, the NCSA shut down the development of the web browser. Of course, Netscape soon had to deal with Microsoft’s efforts with its own Internet Explorer browser, but that is a whole different story that we may write about another day. Netscape met its eventual end in 2008.
While the NCSA did shut down its development, the organization continues to be proud of Mosaic. 10 years after its official launch, it held a birthday party of sorts for the browser. Rick Rashid, the founder of Microsoft Research was one of the event’s guests.
While Mosaic was ultimately a short-lived computer application, it certainly had a massive influence on the internet in general, and the entire world as a whole. Even in this world of apps and social networks, websites continue to be the primary way we get information online. Mosaic’s features of combining words and images on one web page, its use of embedded hyperlinks, and its standard UI are the basics for all web browsers released afterwards. The National Science Foundation’s article on Mosaic, posted in 2004, sums up its impact.
“Without Mosaic, Web browsers might not have happened or be what they are today,” said Peter Freeman, NSF assistant director for CISE. “The growth of the Web and its impact on daily life shows the kind of dramatic payoff that NSF investments in computer science research can have for all areas of science and engineering, education and society as a whole.”
That impact remains true in 2023, and it will likely continue to be felt for years to come.
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Opinion | The 25 Tweets That Show How Twitter Changed the World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/10/opinion/twitter-all-time-tweets.htmlOn Wednesday, Twitter announced that users who pay extra will be able to send their thoughts into the world in tweets of up to 4,000 characters, instead of 280 or less. A few hours later, the site glitched. Users couldn’t tweet; they couldn’t DM; #TwitterDown began trending. All of it — the muddled sense of identity, the breakdown of basic function — confirmed the sense that Twitter, a site that has hosted the global conversation for almost two decades, had become a rickety shell of itself, that its best days were behind it and that it would never be as significant again.
But what, exactly, is being lost? We wanted to capture the ways that Twitter — a platform used by a tiny percentage of the world’s population — changed how we protest, consume news, joke and, of course, argue. So we set ourselves to the task of sorting through the trillions of tweets sent since 2006 to determine which were just noise and which deserved a place in the history books. And then we asked: Could we maybe even … rank them?
What you see below is our list, compiled with the help of experts, of the 25 most important tweets. Like all such rankings, we hope it can serve as a starting point for discussions and arguments, both on Twitter and off. What was ranked too high? Too low? What did we leave off?
Yes, we know: There’s something a little absurd about this exercise. Twitter contains such a wide range of humanity: How do you rank the tweet that got Justine Sacco canceled against the tweet that ignited #MeToo?
And yet this list tells a bigger story about how 17 years of messy, vibrant, sometimes ugly, always lively conversation has shaped the world. Just where did “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” land compared with “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”? You’ll have to scroll to find out.
How We Did It: To compile this ranking, Times Opinion rounded up a group of panelists with widely varied backgrounds but one thing in common: They know a lot about Twitter. (The full list of panelists is at the bottom of the article.) We asked them to submit tweets they thought were good candidates for the most important of all time, with the only criterion being that the tweets had to be in English. We used these to create a list, then sent that list back out to our panelists with instructions to rank the tweets in order of importance and to share their insights about them: why they thought a tweet was important or why it wasn’t. We then crunched the numbers and compiled their insights, edited for content and clarity, into the list you see here.
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Sur quelles technologies les métavers reposent-ils ?
▻https://theconversation.com/sur-quelles-technologies-les-metavers-reposent-ils-177934Par Pascal Guitton et Nicolas Roussel
En octobre 2021, Facebook a annoncé le développement d’un nouvel environnement virtuel baptisé Metaverse. Cette information a entraîné de nombreuses réactions tant sous la forme de commentaires dans les médias que de déclarations d’intention dans les entreprises. Comme souvent face à une innovation technologique, les réactions sont contrastées : enfer annoncé pour certains, paradis pour d’autres. Qu’en penser ?
De quoi parle-t-on ?Le concept de métavers vient de la littérature de science-fiction. Le terme est apparu la première fois dans un roman de 1992, Le samouraï virtuel de Neal Stephenson, pour décrire un univers généré par ordinateur auquel on accède à l’aide de lunettes et d’écouteurs. D’autres romans avaient auparavant décrit des mondes virtuels plus ou moins similaires sous d’autres termes : simulateur dans un roman de Daniel F. Galouye de 1968, ou cyberespace dans les romans de William Gibson du début des années 1980, par exemple.
Les premières réalisations concrètes de ce concept remontent aux années 1990-1995 pour Active Worlds, aux États-Unis, ou 1997 pour Le deuxième monde, en France. Elles ont longtemps été limitées par les capacités techniques du moment.
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Bill Gates Predicts the Future in a Rediscovered Microsoft Video from 1994 – The New Stack
▻https://thenewstack.io/bill-gates-predicts-the-future-in-a-rediscovered-microsoft-video-from-19The Future
Screenshot from 1994 Welcome to Microsoft video (via Computer History Archive Project’s YouTube channel
In a weird way, Gates misses part of the future, imagining a burgeoning market for software publishing but without foreseeing the ultimate prominence of online applications — and, eventually, data storage and at-scale data analytics. And “It was that ‘computer on every desk’ that led them to miss the smartphone,” quips one YouTube commenter.
Gates seems to be thinking about a world where we gather together in our cozy dens, enjoying space simulators and family-finance spreadsheets. There he is, wearing an earth-toned sweater and sharing a wholesome vision of making products that are enjoyable and useful and “draw in the whole family, so that these devices in the home are really something that are very, very worthwhile.”
There’s a comforting optimism in this moment, as the announcer concludes this segment on the future by saying cheerily that “The Microsoft vision of a computer on every desk and in every home — in this country and around the world — is becoming a reality.” Of course, what the video didn’t mention would be the release of Windows 95 in the following year, which in fact brought Microsoft very close to this goal, a goal that seemed radical then and quaint now.
With breezy corporate enthusiasm, the announcer anticipates, without a hint of concern, a world where “a vast universe of information will be at the fingertips of everyone.”
“I think there’s an absolutely incredible opportunity here,” Gates says. “And I think it’s going to be very exciting.”
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Bringing new life to the Altair 8800 on Azure Sphere - Microsoft Tech Community
▻https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/bringing-new-life-to-the-altair-8800-on-azure-sphere/ba-p/2554337
▻https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/296251iB9FD1335EC54DD9D?v=v2Toujours fascinant le rétro-computing.
I love embedded IoT development and when a colleague asked if I’d be interested in working on cloud-enabling an Altair 8800 emulator running on Azure Sphere then I seized the opportunity. I’m fascinated by tech and retro computing and this project combined both interests and hopefully, it will inspire you to fire up this project, learn about the past and connect to the future.
The MITS Altair 8800 was built on the Intel 8080. The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Intel, clocked at 2MHz, with a 16-bit address bus to access a whopping 64 KB of RAM. This was back in 1974, yes, that’s 47 years ago. The Altair 8800 is considered to be the computer that sparked the PC revolution and kick-started Microsoft and Apple.
You can learn more about the Altair at ▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800.
thumbnail image 2 of blog post titled Bringing new life to the Altair 8800 on Azure Sphere
Altair 8800 image attribution: File:Altair 8800, Smithsonian Museum.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
The first release of the Altair 8800 was programmed by flipping switches, then came paper tape readers to load apps, monitors and keyboards, and floppy disk drive storage, revolutionary at the time. The first programming language for the machine was Altair BASIC, the program written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Microsoft’s first product.
Interest in the Altair 8800 is not new and there are several implementations of the Open-Source Altair 8800 emulator running on various platforms, and if you are keen, you can even buy an Altair 8800 clone. The Altair 8800 running on Azure Sphere builds on Open-Source projects and brings with it something unique, which is to modernize and cloud-enable the Altair. Bringing 21st century cloud technologies to a computer generation that predates the internet.
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This is how we lost control of our faces | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/05/1017388/ai-deep-learning-facial-recognition-data-historyThe largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy.
byKaren Hao
February 5, 2021In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces.
Now a new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent.
People were extremely cautious about collecting, documenting, and verifying face data in the early days, says Raji. “Now we don’t care anymore. All of that has been abandoned,” she says. “You just can’t keep track of a million faces. After a certain point, you can’t even pretend that you have control.”
A history of facial-recognition data
The researchers identified four major eras of facial recognition, each driven by an increasing desire to improve the technology. The first phase, which ran until the 1990s, was largely characterized by manually intensive and computationally slow methods.
But then, spurred by the realization that facial recognition could track and identify individuals more effectively than fingerprints, the US Department of Defense pumped $6.5 million into creating the first large-scale face data set. Over 15 photography sessions in three years, the project captured 14,126 images of 1,199 individuals. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) database was released in 1996.
The following decade saw an uptick in academic and commercial facial-recognition research, and many more data sets were created. The vast majority were sourced through photo shoots like FERET’s and had full participant consent. Many also included meticulous metadata, Raji says, such as the age and ethnicity of subjects, or illumination information. But these early systems struggled in real-world settings, which drove researchers to seek larger and more diverse data sets.
In 2007, the release of the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) data set opened the floodgates to data collection through web search. Researchers began downloading images directly from Google, Flickr, and Yahoo without concern for consent. LFW also relaxed standards around the inclusion of minors, using photos found with search terms like “baby,” “juvenile,” and “teen” to increase diversity. This process made it possible to create significantly larger data sets in a short time, but facial recognition still faced many of the same challenges as before. This pushed researchers to seek yet more methods and data to overcome the technology’s poor performance.
Then, in 2014, Facebook used its user photos to train a deep-learning model called DeepFace. While the company never released the data set, the system’s superhuman performance elevated deep learning to the de facto method for analyzing faces. This is when manual verification and labeling became nearly impossible as data sets grew to tens of millions of photos, says Raji. It’s also when really strange phenomena start appearing, like auto-generated labels that include offensive terminology.
Image-generation algorithms are regurgitating the same sexist, racist ideas that exist on the internet.
The way the data sets were used began to change around this time, too. Instead of trying to match individuals, new models began focusing more on classification. “Instead of saying, ‘Is this a photo of Karen? Yes or no,’ it turned into ‘Let’s predict Karen’s internal personality, or her ethnicity,’ and boxing people into these categories,” Raji says.
Amba Kak, the global policy director at AI Now, who did not participate in the research, says the paper offers a stark picture of how the biometrics industry has evolved. Deep learning may have rescued the technology from some of its struggles, but “that technological advance also has come at a cost,” she says. “It’s thrown up all these issues that we now are quite familiar with: consent, extraction, IP issues, privacy.”
Raji says her investigation into the data has made her gravely concerned about deep-learning-based facial recognition.
“It’s so much more dangerous,” she says. “The data requirement forces you to collect incredibly sensitive information about, at minimum, tens of thousands of people. It forces you to violate their privacy. That in itself is a basis of harm. And then we’re hoarding all this information that you can’t control to build something that likely will function in ways you can’t even predict. That’s really the nature of where we’re at.”
#Reconnaissance_faciale #éthique #Histoire_numérique #Surveillance
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YouTube at 15: what happened to some of the platform’s biggest early stars? | Global | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/feb/16/youtube-turns-15-what-happened-to-some-of-the-platfoms-biggest-early-st
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0385a119995796e0d16c445ec3d52851f020532e/2860_362_4619_2772/master/4619.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-aliAs YouTube celebrates its 15th birthday, we talk to five early adopters about how the all-singing all-dancing platform has evolved
by Chris Stokel-Walker
Sun 16 Feb 2020 12.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 21 Feb 2020 18.40 GMTLate on the evening of 14 February 2005, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen registered the website YouTube.com. Two months later, when the first video (of Karim briefly describing the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo) was uploaded, a platform was launched that has gone on to change the world.
Today, more than 2bn of us visit YouTube monthly, and 500 hours of footage is uploaded every minute. That’s a far cry from the 18-second video that started it all. Its stars are multi-millionaires: YouTube’s highest earner in 2019 was an eight-year-old called Ryan, who netted $26m. The number of creators earning five or six figures has increased by more than 40% year on year. At first, users earned a few hundred pounds for mentioning products in their videos; now they can make hundreds of thousands, and much more through exclusive brand deals. Not many like talking about their income: it makes them less relatable.
The scale of viewership has increased, too. It took eight years for the site to get to 1bn monthly users, and another seven to reach 2bn. There are 65% more channels with more than 1m subscribers than a year ago; the number of channels with more than 1bn views grew five times in the past three years.
As more money and more eyeballs have entered the frame, the level of competition has increased. What was once a site for hobbyists has turned into a mini-Hollywood, with huge teams of staff churning out content for demanding fans.
As the website celebrates its 15-year anniversary, five of its significant early stars explain how their relationship with the site has evolved.
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Windows turns 35: a visual history - The Verge
▻https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9759874/microsoft-windows-35-years-old-visual-historyThe PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint.
Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0 you picked up a mouse and moved windows around by pointing and clicking. Alongside the original Macintosh, the mouse completely changed the way consumers interacted with computers. At the time, many complained that Windows 1.0 focused far too much on mouse interaction instead of keyboard commands. Microsoft’s first version of Windows might not have been well received, but it kick-started a battle between Apple, IBM, and Microsoft to provide computing to the masses.
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YouTube started as an online dating site - CNET
▻https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-dating-siteLong before Tinder made swiping a thing for matchmaking apps, there was a little-known video site trying to play cupid to the Internet generation: YouTube.
That’s not exactly what comes to mind when you think of the world’s largest video site, which welcomes a billion visitors a month. But that’s how the YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.6 billion, got its start, said co-founder Steve Chen.
“We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?” Chen said Monday at the South by Southwest tech, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. “We thought dating would be the obvious choice.”
The idea was for single people to make videos introducing themselves and saying what they were looking for, said Chen. After five days no one had uploaded a single video, so he and the other co-founders, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, reconsidered.
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29 Years Ago Today, The First Web Page Went Live. This Is What It Looked Like | IFLScience
▻https://www.iflscience.com/technology/29-years-ago-today-the-first-web-page-went-live-this-is-what-it-looked-lIn the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee became frustrated with how information was shared and stored at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
He noticed that, as well as being distributed inefficiently, information was being lost at the organization, largely due to a high turnover of staff. Technical details of old projects could sometimes be lost forever, or else had to be recovered through lengthy investigations in the event of an emergency. Different divisions of CERN used software written in a variety of programming languages, on different operating systems, making the transfer of knowledge cumbersome and time-consuming.
In response to these annoyances, he made a suggestion in 1989 that would go on to change the world, titled with some lackluster: Information Management: A Proposal. It described a system where all the different divisions of CERN could publish their own part of the experiment, and everyone else could access it. The system would use hypertext to allow people to publish and read the information on any kind of computer. This was the beginning of the World Wide Web.
The first web page went live 29 years ago today, on August 6, 1991. As such you’ve probably seen people online today linking to the “first-ever” web page.
29 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee posted the first ever web page.
This is it▻https://t.co/MSxAZ2cMZK
— Russ (@RussInCheshire) August 5, 2020If you click the link, this is what you will be greeted with. You’ll probably be instantly confused by the date, as well as the lack of memes and people being incredibly aggressive in the comment section.
CERN archive.While it gives you an idea of what the first web page looked like, we may never know what the actual web page displayed on that day in August, 1991. There are no screenshots, instead what you are seeing is the earliest record we have of that first web page taken in 1992. While we know that when the World Wide Web first launched it contained an explanation of the project itself, hypertext and how to create web pages, the first page of the system designed to prevent the loss of information has ironically been lost, perhaps forever.
Though in retrospect what Berners-Lee had invented was world-changing, at the time its creators were too pre-occupied with trying to convince their colleagues to realize its value and adopt it to think about archiving their invention for future historians to gawp at.
“I mean the team at the time didn’t know how special this was, so they didn’t think to keep copies, right?” Dan Noyes, who ran the much larger CERN website in 2013 told NPR. He believes the first incarnation of the world’s first web page is still out there somewhere, probably on a floppy disk or hard drive hanging around in somebody’s house.
That was how the 1992 version was found.
“I took a copy of the entire website in a floppy disk on my machine so that I could demonstrate it locally just to show people what it was like. And I ended up keeping a copy of that floppy disk,” Tim Berners-Lee told NPR.
Unfortunately, despite CERN’s best efforts, the first page itself has not been found. It may never be.
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William English, Who Helped Build the Computer Mouse, Dies at 91 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/william-english-who-helped-build-the-computer-mouse-dies-at-91.html?campaigWilliam English, the engineer and researcher who helped build the first computer mouse and, in 1968, orchestrated an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today, died on July 26 in San Rafael, Calif. He was 91.
His death, at a medical facility, was confirmed by his wife, Roberta English, who said the cause was respiratory failure.
In the late 1950s, after leaving a career in the Navy, Mr. English joined a Northern California research lab called the Stanford Research Institute, or S.R.I. (now known as SRI International). There he met Douglas Engelbart, a fellow engineer who hoped to build a new kind of computer.
At a time when only specialists used computers, entering and retrieving information through punched cards, typewriters and printouts, Mr. Engelbart envisioned a machine that anyone could use simply by manipulating images on a screen. It was a concept that would come to define the information age, but by his own admission Mr. Engelbart had struggled to explain his vision to others.
ImageAt a time when only specialists used computers, entering and retrieving information through punched cards, typewriters and print-outs,
At a time when only specialists used computers, entering and retrieving information through punched cards, typewriters and print-outs,Credit...via English familyMr. English, known to everyone as Bill, was one of the few who understood these ideas and who had the engineering talent, patience and social skills needed to realize them. “He was the guy who made everything happen,” said Bill Duvall, who worked alongside Mr. English during those years. “If you told him something needed to be done, he figured out how to do it.”
After Mr. Engelbart had envisaged the computer mouse and drawn a rough sketch of it on a notepad, Mr. English built it in the mid-1960s. Housed inside a small pinewood case, the device consisted of two electrical mechanisms, called potentiometers, that tracked the movement of two small wheels as they moved across a desktop. They called it a mouse because of the way the computer’s on-screen cursor, called a CAT, seemed to chase the device’s path.
As they were developing the system, both Mr. English and Mr. Engelbart were part of the government-funded L.S.D. tests conducted by a nearby lab called the International Foundation of Advanced Study. Both took the psychedelic as part of a sweeping effort to determine whether it could “open the mind” and foster creativity.
Though Mr. Engelbart oversaw the NLS project, the 1968 demonstration in San Francisco was led by Mr. English, who brought both engineering and theater skills to the task. In the mid-1950s he had volunteered as a stage manager for a Bay Area theater troupe called The Actor’s Workshop.
For the San Francisco event, he used a video projector the size of a Volkswagen Beetle (borrowed it from a nearby NASA lab) to arrange and project the live images behind Mr. Engelbart as he demonstrated NLS from the stage. He had been able to set up the wireless link that sent video between the Menlo Park computer lab and the auditorium after befriending a telephone company technician.
Image
Mr. English helped orchestrate an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today.
Mr. English helped orchestrate an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today.Credit...via English familyThree years after the demonstration, Mr. English left S.R.I. and joined a new Xerox lab called the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. There he helped adapt many of the NLS ideas for a new machine called the Alto, which became a template for the Apple Macintosh, the first Microsoft Windows personal computers and other internet-connected devices.
#Histoire_numérique #Souris #Bill_English #SRI_international #Xerox_park #Mother_of_all_demo
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25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere • The Register
▻https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/08/25_years_of_phpFeature On 8th June 1995 programmer Rasmus Lerdorf announced the birth of “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)”.
The PHP system evolved into one that now drives nearly 80 per cent of websites using server-side programming, according to figures from w3techs.
Well-known sites running PHP include every Wordpress site (WordPress claims to run “35 per cent of the web”), Wikipedia and Facebook (with caveats - Facebook uses a number of languages including its own JIT-compiled version of PHP called HHVM). PHP is also beloved by hosting companies, many of whom provide their customers with PHPMyAdmin for administering MySQL databases.
Lerdorf was born in Greenland and grew up in Denmark and Canada. He worked at Yahoo! (a big PHP user) and Etsy. He developed PHP for his own use. “In 1993 programming the web sucked,” he said in a 2017 talk.
It was CGI written in C and “you had to change the C code and recompile even for a slight change,” he said.
Perl was “slightly better”, Lerdorf opined, but “you still had to write Perl code to spit out HTML. I didn’t like that at all. I wanted a simple templating language that was built into the web server.”
The Danish-Canadian programmer’s original idea was that developers still wrote the bulk of their web application in C but “just use PHP as the templating language.” However nobody wanted to write C, said Lerdorf, and people “wanted to do everything in the stupid little templating language I had written, all their business logic.”
Lerdorf described a kind of battle with early web developers as PHP evolved, with the developers asking for more and more features while he tried to point them towards other languages for what they wanted to do.
“This is how we got PHP,” he said, “a templating language with business logic features pushed into it.”
The web’s workhorseSuch is the penetration of PHP, which Lerdorf said drives around 2 billion sites on 10 million physical machines, that improving efficiency in PHP 7 had a significant impact on global energy consumption. Converting the world from PHP 5.0 to PHP 7 would save 15B Kilowatt hours annually and 7.5B KG less carbon dioxide emissions he said – forgetting perhaps that any unused cycles would soon be taken up by machine learning and AI algorithms.
PHP is the workhorse of the web but not fashionable. The language is easy to use but its dynamic and forgiving nature makes it accessible to developers of every level of skill, so that there is plenty of spaghetti code out there, quick hacks that evolved into bigger projects. In particular, early PHP code was prone to SQL injection bugs as developers stuffed input from web forms directly into SQL statements, or other bugs and vulnerabilities thanks to a feature called register_globals that was on by default and which will “inject your scripts with all sorts of variables,” according to its own documentation.
There was originally no formal specification for PHP and it is still described as work in progress. It is not a compiled language and object orientation was bolted on rather than being designed in from the beginning as in Java or C# or Ruby. Obsolete versions of PHP are commonplace all over the internet on the basis that as long as it works, nobody touches it. It has become the language that everyone uses but nobody talks about.
“PHP is not very exciting and there is not much to it,” said Lerdorf in 2002.
Regularly coming fourth as the most popular language in the Redmonk rankings, PHP has rarely got a mention in the analysis.
That said, PHP has strong qualities that account for its popularity and longevity. Some of this is to do with Lerdorf himself, who has continued to steer PHP with wisdom and pragmatism, though it is a community project with thousands of contributors. It lacks corporate baggage and has always been free and open source. “The tools are in the public domain distributed under the GNU Public License. Yes, that means they are free!” said Lerdorf in the first announcement.
The documentation site is a successful blend of reference and user contributions which means you almost always find something useful there, which is unusual. Most important, PHP is reliable and lightweight, which means it performs well in real-world use even if it does not win in benchmarks.
25 years is a good run and it is not done yet. ®
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How Bill Gates described the internet ’tidal wave’ in 1995
▻https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/how-bill-gates-described-the-internet-tidal-wave-in-1995.htmlAs a pioneer of the personal computer revolution, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spent decades working toward his goal of putting “a computer on every desk and in every home.”
So it’s no surprise that, by the mid-1990s, Gates was among the earliest tech CEOs to recognize the vast promise of the internet for reaching that goal and growing his business.
Exactly 25 years ago today, on May 26, 1995, Gates wrote an internal memo to Microsoft’s executive staff and his direct reports to extol the benefits of expanding the company’s internet presence. Gates, who was still Microsoft’s CEO at that point, titled his memo, simply: “The Internet Tidal Wave.”
“The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as [an] incredible challenge,” Gates wrote in the memo.
The point of the memo was that the internet was fast becoming a ubiquitous force that was already changing the way people and businesses communicated with each other on a daily basis.
“I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of [the internet’s] importance,” Gates told Microsoft’s executive team in the memo, which WIRED magazine re-printed in full in 2010. “Now I assign the internet the highest level of importance.”
Gates goes on to pinpoint his foremost goal for the memo: “I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business.”
1:37
Watch 33-year old Bill Gates explain his hiring processIn the memo, Gates explained a bit about how he saw the internet being used in 1995, with both businesses and individuals publishing an increasing amount of content online, from personal websites to audio and video files.
“Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content,” Gates wrote. “It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets.”
Gates saw that as one area where Microsoft would have to seize the available opportunities to serve its software customers. He notes that audio and video content could already be shared online in 1995, including in real-time with phone calls placed over the web and even early examples of online video-conferencing.
While that technology provided exciting opportunities, Gates says, the audio and video quality of those products at the time was relatively poor. “Even at low resolution it is quite jerky,” he wrote of the video quality at that point, adding that he expected the technology to improve eventually “because the internet will get faster.”
(And, he was certainly correct there, as video-conferencing software has been in increasingly high demand in recent years and is widely in use now by the millions of American workers currently working remotely due to coronavirus restrictions.)
Gates writes that improving the internet infrastructure to offer higher quality audio and video content online would be essential to unlocking the promise of the internet. While Microsoft’s Office Suite and Windows software were already popular with computer users, Gates argued that they would need to be optimized for use online in order “to make sure you get your data as fast as you need it.”
“Only with this improvement and an incredible amount of additional bandwidth and local connections will the internet infrastructure deliver all of the promises of the full blown Information Highway,” Gates wrote before adding, hopefully: “However, it is in the process of happening and all we can do is get involved and take advantage.”
The then-CEO of Microsoft also pushed the need to beef up Microsoft’s own website, where he said customers and business clients should have access to a wealth of information about the company and its products.
“Today, it’s quite random what is on the home page and the quality of information is very low,” Gates wrote in the 1995 memo. “If you look up speeches by me all you find are a few speeches over a year old. I believe the Internet will become our most important promotional vehicle and paying people to include links to our home pages will be a worthwhile way to spend advertising dollars.”
Gates told his employees that Microsoft needed to “make sure that great information is available” on the company’s website, including using screenshots to show examples of the company’s software in action.
“I think a measurable part of our ad budget should focus on the Internet,” he wrote. “Any information we create — white papers, data sheets, etc., should all be done on our Internet server.”
After all, Gates argued, the internet offered Microsoft a great opportunity to communicate directly with the company’s customers and clients.
“We have an opportunity to do a lot more with our resources. Information will be disseminated efficiently between us and our customers with less chance that the press miscommunicates our plans. Customers will come to our ‘home page’ in unbelievable numbers and find out everything we want them to know.”
Of course, in 1995, it wasn’t just Gates’ fellow executives at Microsoft who needed convincing that the internet was the future. In November of that year, Gates went on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” to promote his book “The Road Ahead” and Microsoft’s then-newly launched Internet Explorer, the company’s first web browser.
Gates touted the possibilities of the World Wide Web in his interview with Letterman, calling the internet “a place where people can publish information. They can have their own homepage, companies are there, the latest information.”
The comedian wasn’t particularly impressed. “I heard you could watch a live baseball game on the internet and I was like, does radio ring a bell?” Letterman joked.
That same year, Gates gave an interview with GQ magazine’s UK edition in which he predicted that, within a decade, people would regularly watch movies, television shows and other entertainment online. In fact, 10 years later, in 2005, YouTube was founded, followed two years later by Netflix.
However, Gates missed the mark when the interviewer suggested that the internet could also become rife with misinformation that could more easily spread to large groups of impressionable people. The Microsoft co-founder was dubious that the internet would become a repository for what might now be described as “fake news,” arguing that having more opportunities to verify information by authorities, such as experts or journalists, would balance out the spread of misinformation.
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Steven Levy : Streaming celebrates its 25th birthday. Here’s how it all began
▻https://link.wired.com/view/5cec29ba24c17c4c6465ed0bc0nqt.1f2j/12bb6811So it’s a good time to say happy birthday to streaming media, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Two and a half decades ago, a company called Progressive Networks (later called Real Networks) began using the internet to broadcast live and on-demand audio.
I spoke with its CEO, Rob Glaser, this week about the origins of streaming internet media. Glaser, with whom I have become friendly over the years, told me that he began pursuing the idea after attending a board meeting for a new organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1993. During the gathering, he saw an early version of Mosaic, the first web browser truly capable of handling images. “A light bulb went off,” Glaser says. “What if it could do the same for audio and video? Anybody could be a broadcaster, and anybody could hear it from anywhere in the world, anytime they wanted to.”
Glaser believed it was time for a commercial service. When he launched his on April 25, 1995, the first customers were ABC News and NPR; you could listen to news headlines or Morning Edition. It wasn’t the user-friendliest—you had to download his Real Audio app to your desktop and then hope it made a successful connection to the browser. At that point, it worked only on demand. But in September 1995, Progressive Networks began live streaming. Its first real-time broadcast was the audio of a major league baseball game—the Seattle Mariners versus the New York Yankees. (The Mariners won.The losing pitcher was Mariano Rivera, then a starter.) The few who listened from the beginning had to reboot around the seventh inning, as the buffers filled up after two and a half hours or so. By the end of that year, thousands of developers were using Real.
Other companies began streaming video before Glaser’s, which introduced RealVideo in 1997. The internet at that point wasn’t robust enough to handle high-quality video, but those in the know understood that it was just a matter of time. “It was clear to me that this was going to be the way that everything is going to be delivered,” says Glaser, who gave a speech around then titled “The Internet as the Next Mass Medium.” That same year, Glaser had a conversation with an entrepreneur named Reed Hastings, who told him of his long-range plan to build a business by shipping physical DVDs to people, and then shift to streaming when the infrastructure could support it. That worked out well. Today, our strong internet supports not only entertainment but social programming from YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and others.
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The History of the URL
▻https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-urlOn the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.
Plus encore que l’histoire des URL, cet article présente tous les divers choix qui ont jalonné l’évolution de l’internet concernant le nommage (des emails, des pages web ou des serveurs).
The Web Application
In the world of web applications, it can be a little odd to think of the basis for the web being the hyperlink. It is a method of linking one document to another, which was gradually augmented with styling, code execution, sessions, authentication, and ultimately became the social shared computing experience so many 70s researchers were trying (and failing) to create. Ultimately, the conclusion is just as true for any project or startup today as it was then: all that matters is adoption. If you can get people to use it, however slipshod it might be, they will help you craft it into what they need. The corollary is, of course, no one is using it, it doesn’t matter how technically sound it might be. There are countless tools which millions of hours of work went into which precisely no one uses today.
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Fred Turner, Aux sources de l’utopie numérique. De la contre-culture à la cyberculture, Stewart Brand un homme d’influence
▻https://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/8619Fred Turner revisite l’histoire des origines intellectuelles et sociales de l’internet en suivant le parcours de Stewart Brand, un « entrepreneur réticulaire » (p. 41). L’ouvrage s’ouvre sur une interrogation : comment se fait-il que le mot révolution soit sur toutes les bouches à l’évocation des technologies numériques alors qu’elles étaient le symbole d’un système inhumain qui a mis le monde au bord de l’apocalypse nucléaire ? Pour y répondre, l’auteur s’attache à retracer les origines de l’utopie numérique dans la trajectoire de Stewart Brand, au croisement des mondes sociaux, des idéologies et des objets technologiques.
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George Laurer, co-inventor of the barcode, dies at 94 - BBC News
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50726950George Laurer, the US engineer who helped develop the barcode, has died at the age of 94.
Barcodes, which are made up of black stripes of varying thickness and a 12-digit number, help identify products and transformed the world of retail.
They are now found on products all over the world.
The idea was pioneered by a fellow IBM employee, but it was not until Laurer developed a scanner that could read codes digitally that it took off.
Laurer died last Thursday at his home in Wendell, North Carolina, and his funeral was held on Monday.
How the barcode changed retailing
Inventor of barcode dies aged 91
Are barcodes the way to protect dementia patients?It was while working as an electrical engineer with IBM that George Laurer fully developed the Universal Product Code (UPC), or barcode.
He developed a scanner that could read codes digitally. He also used stripes rather than circles that were not practical to print.
Media captionAaron Heslehurst explains how the barcode became a million dollar ideaThe UPC went on to revolutionise “virtually every industry in the world”, IBM said in a tribute on its website.
In the early 1970s, grocery shops faced mounting costs and the labour-intensive need to put price tags on everything.
The UPC system used lasers and computers to quickly process items via scanning. This meant fewer pricing errors and easier accounting.
The first product scanned, in Ohio in June 1974, was a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington.
Fellow IBM employee, Norman Woodland, who died in 2012, is considered the pioneer of the barcode idea, which he initially based on Morse code.
Although he patented the concept in the 1950s, he was unable to develop it. It would take a few more years for Laurer to bring the idea to fruition with the help of low-cost laser and computing technology.
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The Earliest Unix Code: An Anniversary Source Code Release - CHM
▻https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-earliest-unix-code-an-anniversary-source-code-release2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs. As Ritchie would later explain:
“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied from remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.”1
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Jeu de 7 familles de l’informatique - Interstices
►https://interstices.info/jeu-de-7-familles-de-linformatiqueL’informatique est une science diverse ! Ce jeu est l’occasion de présenter des figures importantes qui ont travaillé et travaillent à façonner la discipline et à la faire évoluer au cours du temps.
Le format « jeu de 7 familles » permet de mettre en lumière 42 (+1) personnalités, et de montrer que l’Histoire de l’informatique ne se résume pas à celle des ordinateurs. L’informatique se développe à travers une communauté scientifique qui fait vivre la discipline et interagit avec d’autres. Nous proposons dans ce jeu de découvrir 7 de ses grandes thématiques.
La première famille s’intéresse à « Algorithmes & programmation », concepts à la base de la pensée informatique. La seconde famille présente le lien avec les mathématiques, « Mathématiques & informatique » étant des disciplines intrinsèquement liées. L’informatique, c’est aussi la protection de l’information avec la troisième famille « Sécurité & confidentialité », ainsi que la construction de l’information et sa diffusion, représentées par la quatrième famille « Systèmes & réseaux ». L’informatique n’existe pas sans les machines qui réalisent les calculs, machines que l’on retrouve dans la cinquième famille « Machines & Composants ». Par ailleurs, développer des solutions automatiques en s’inspirant de l’humain, c’est le défi relevé par la sixième famille « Intelligence Artificielle ». Enfin, pour faire de l’informatique, des interfaces facilitant l’accès sont nécessaires, c’est ce qui intéresse la septième famille « Interaction Homme-Machine ».
Ce jeu a la particularité de posséder un Joker en la personne d’Alan Turing (qui de par la pluralité de ses recherches a sa place dans toutes les familles).
Dans chaque famille, vous découvrirez six personnalités, classées (en représentation binaire, voir ci-dessous) par ordre croissant d’année de naissance. Nous avons inclus chacune d’elles pour de multiples raisons. Des grands anciens précurseurs, des fondateurs de la discipline, des scientifiques en activité, en passant par les incontournables, nous proposons une vision forcément parcellaire. Mais si vous avez envie de découvrir la science informatique et pourquoi pas rejoindre ses différents acteurs, le pari sera gagné.
Les personnalités ont été sélectionnées sur la base de plusieurs critères : créer un équilibre entre la représentation des hommes et des femmes, en essayant de ne pas limiter notre panorama à la seule histoire occidentale même si les Français sont bien présents, tout en cherchant à donner une perspective historique de la dynamique scientifique. En effectuant nos choix, nous avons croisé bien d’autres figures importantes souvent méconnues. 7 familles ne sont pas suffisantes pour couvrir toutes les problématiques de l’informatique. Pour cela, il faudrait au moins une extension du jeu avec de nouvelles familles !
Nous vous invitons à vous amuser avec le jeu et à découvrir toutes les personnalités (ainsi que les objets qui les accompagnent, comme illustration de leurs travaux).
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Britain’s £50 Note Will Honor Computing Pioneer Alan Turing - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/alan-turing-50-pound-note.htmlLONDON — Alan Turing, the computing pioneer who became one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, has been chosen by the Bank of England to be the new face of its 50-pound note.
The decision to put Mr. Turing on the highest-denomination English bank note, worth about $62, adds to growing public recognition of his achievements. His reputation during his lifetime was overshadowed by a conviction under Britain’s Victorian laws against homosexuality, and his war work remained a secret until decades later.
“Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today,” Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said in a statement. “As the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as a war hero, Alan Turing’s contributions were far-ranging and path breaking.”
“Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand,” Mr. Carney added.
The central bank announced last year that it wanted to honor someone in the field of science on the next version of the bill, which was last redesigned in 2011, and Mr. Turing was chosen from a list of 227,299 nominees that included Charles Babbage, Stephen Hawking, Ada Lovelace and Margaret Thatcher (who worked as a chemical researcher before entering politics).
“The strength of the shortlist is testament to the U.K.’s incredible scientific contribution,” Sarah John, the Bank of England’s chief cashier, said in a statement.
The bank plans to put the new note into circulation by the end of 2021.
Bank of England bills feature Queen Elizabeth’s face on one side, and a notable figure from British history on the other. Scientists previously honored in this way include Newton, Darwin and the electrical pioneer Michael Faraday. The current £50 features James Watt, a key figure in the development of the steam engine, and Matthew Boulton, the industrialist who backed him.
Mr. Turing’s work provided the theoretical basis for modern computers, and for ideas of artificial intelligence. His work on code-breaking machines during World War II also drove forward the development of computing, and is regarded as having significantly affected the course of the war.
Mr. Turing died in 1954, two years after being convicted under Victorian laws against homosexuality and forced to endure chemical castration. The British government apologized for his treatment in 2009, and Queen Elizabeth granted him a royal pardon in 2013.
The note will feature a photograph of Mr. Turing from 1951 that is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery. His work will also be celebrated on the reverse side, which will include a table and mathematical formulas from a paper by Mr. Turing from 1936 that is recognized as foundational for computer science.
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