Interesting Snippets

Strange to relate, Colossus was made largely out of standard Post Office parts, and when they were stripped down, the parts went back into the spares bin at Dollis Hill. It may be that one of the older exchanges may still be using some of these parts, salvaged from one of the world’s first computers

Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928. During World War II, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz… Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947.

In America, Tramiel started a typewriter repair business. … his typewriters morphed into calculators, and later computers. In 1982, Commodore International launched the Commodore 64, which went on to the best-selling personal computer of all time.

Linux started just as Intel’s processors were getting ready for prime time. Long before company employees were sneaking iPads and smartphones into the office, there were Linux freaks sneaking Intel machines into corporations to build prototype new programs and build cheap websites and file and print servers.

Linux began life as an underdog project. Torvalds started it while he was a student at the University of Helsinki because he wanted to improve Unix on his Intel 386 computer. But it soon became an antidote not only to the massive Unix servers built by the likes of Digital Equipment Corp and Sun Microsystems, but to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Throughout the ’90s and on into the next decade, the fight was fierce on both fronts, but now, so many of the battles are won. DEC and Sun don’t exist anymore. And Microsoft is playing quite nicely with Linux and other open source tools. Linux isn’t the hot-button topic it was once was. It’s just plain successful. More than 8,000 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel in the past seven years, according to the Linux Foundation. And it has even become a standard operating system on custom-built consumer devices. You can find it on everything from inflight entertainment systems to streaming video players to Google’s Android phones. “It became the plumbing,” says Jeremy Allison, a Google engineer who speaks frequently on the topic of open source and is himself a lead developer with another coding project, called Samba.

in 1895, two Belgians, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, began the project that grew into the Mundaneum. Their card catalog, initially called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, compiled links to books, newspaper and magazine articles, pictures and other documents from libraries and archives around the world. People were able to submit queries via the mail or telegraph.

The collection expanded to 16 million cards, and Mr. Otlet and Mr. La Fontaine envisioned a “city of knowledge,” complete with museum exhibits and other archival material.

The Belgian government provided space for the Mundaneum for some years in a building in Brussels but cut off funding in 1934. When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, the Mundaneum was replaced with an exhibit of Third Reich art, and some material was lost.

Now, what is left of the Mundaneum is housed in a new site in Mons, where the existing museum opened in 1998. This includes the card catalog, as well as sketches by Mr. Otlet in which he describes an imaginary system of “electric telescopes” that would allow users to search and browse through databases like the Mundaneum.

“As we went around the world looking for the roots of the Web, this was a particularly intriguing example, and one that people didn’t know about,” said William Echikson, a spokesman for Google.

(Grace Hopper) is credited with popularizing the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer)…. The remains of the moth can be found in the group’s log book at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.