Core Dump

Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works was a revolt against the formalities of conventional industry. It was a throwback to a time when airplanes were created by small teams who all broke for lunch together. Johnson crammed a small number of capable people into close proximity, so that “engineering shall always be within a stone’s throw of the airplane.” He believed in the freewheeling inventive genius of individuals—particularly himself; he resented the intrusions of committees of government bureaucrats with their meddlesome meetings, and rebelled against their minutely detailed specifications.

He pared away procedural dross: Whatever used up time without advancing the project was banned—even visits from the customer. Finished drawings were not required; shop men were encouraged to work from sketches and when possible to develop parts directly on the airplane. Decisions, once made, would not be second-guessed; good enough was good enough. Meetings were limited to two or three essential participants. Initial flight tests would be conducted by the builders—not, as was usual at the time, by the customer’s pilots.

Labels: history, military, technology

Labels: history, news, photography

December 14, 1980. Having “had a sit back” (Ringo) after Eventually’s staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show’s history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the “battle of the bands” between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode “rejuvenated” his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

January 7th, 1981. Lennon, Harrison and Starr attend the funeral of a New Yorker named Mark David Chapman, who committed suicide in mid-December and whose apartment, after the fact, was revealed to be a shrine to the Beatles. “I just felt, you know, responsible somehow, like he died because of us,” says Starr, although he refuses to articulate further on this point. Harrison agrees: “it’s amazing to think how great an impact we can have sometimes. You just want it so that you don’t have this kind of impact.” Lennon says nothing.

August 5th, 1981. The announcement of Neither Here Nor There, the new Beatles album, is less shocking than the announcement of Eventually – the previous announcement taught Beatles fans to “watch the signs” and rumours of Lennon and McCartney spending time in the studio have been swirling for months. The success of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy had previously led some to wonder if the Beatles were once again finished; Lennon dismisses such talk soon after the press release, complaining that people “just don’t seem to understand” that the group has figured out how to continue working together without the self-destructive fights.

Labels: history, music, SF

Labels: history, photography

Labels: history, space

Labels: history, photography

My entire life I have known that men landed on the moon. This was not a moment I held my breath for, or dreamed of, or imagined only in books or films or art. It happened long before I was born and has never been anything but a fact. It’s so distant that to me, it’s science fiction. Yet more than any single event in scientific history, a moment that I was not even alive for is still the most inspiring goddamn thing I’ve ever known. Every time I look at those images I am moved by the breadth of human ingenuity. All my cynicism is replaced by a belief that with passion, hard work, and perseverance, we can overcome any barrier—even the ones we didn’t know we had set for ourselves. We can achieve any measure of greatness. We can become our fiction and make our dreams something tangible, attainable.

We can touch the sky.

Nothing in my own lifetime has ever filled me with that kind of hope or inspiration—nothing but science fiction.

With that in mind, I’ve asked authors, artists, critics, and fans in the science fiction community to send me their stories of what they were doing when the LEM landed on the lunar surface, and to tell me how it informed their relationship with science fiction. What you’ll be seeing throughout today on Tor.com are personal glimpses of a moment in history.

Labels: history, SF, space

Captain Hank Brandli knew a terrible secret in the summer of 1969: the U.S. Air Force meteorologist had classified information indicating danger to the Apollo 11 crew returning to Earth from their historic mission. They had done it—the Eagle had landed. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had walked on the moon, raised the American flag, collected samples, and then blasted off for a perfectly executed lunar orbit rendezvous with Michael Collins in the command module Columbia. Now they were headed home on the final leg of the trip for a July 24 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. However, from his highly classified weather forecasting work, Capt Brandli realized that instead of a heroes’ welcome, the astronauts could face a watery grave.

Labels: history, space

As the United States celebrates its Independence Day, it's worth considering just how easily it could have never happened at all. Here now is a rundown of alternate history stories and essays where the American Revolution turned out very differently.

Compared to the Civil War or World War II, the American Revolution has, for whatever reason, been largely neglected by alternate history writers. While books like Bring the Jubilee and The Man in the High Castle stand as iconic works that imagine Confederate and Nazi victories respectively, there is no such defining work detailing the particulars of the British maintaining control of their wayward colonies. Still, there are a number of more obscure short stories and essays (plus a couple of novels) that do consider just such a scenario, and they generally take one of the four following forms...

Labels: history, SF

With the engines buried in the fuselage, exterior surfaces blended together, and plane constructed almost entirely out of wood (possibly to prevent radar from penetrating the skin, or possibly because Germany was facing a resource shortage), it's easy to look back on the 2-29 with hindsight and say the Horten brothers were developing a stealth fighter to subvert British radar, but we don't know for sure.

The Horten brothers had another design based on the Ho 2-29. A design for a intercontinental strategic bomber, the Ho 18.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling, thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo 004B turbojets. As the documentary shows, had the Nazis extended the war in 1946 and developed the atomic bomb as planned, the Ho 18 could have been their Enola Gay.

Labels: history, military, technology

There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others. Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public. Decades later, we can still learn from these multi-million dollar mistakes. By no means is the following list exhaustive; one could probably write about the flaws of every PC ever released. But when considering past design mistakes, these examples spring to my mind.

Labels: computing, history

Labels: history, space

Labels: computing, history

Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, said large gravel, marine fossils and other unusual deposits found in sediment cores across the area date to 2,300 years ago.

The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, he said, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice.

"If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm," said Dr Goodbred.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, history

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

Labels: history, technology

Labels: history, If I had a million dollars

Labels: history, space

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, history, science, space, technology

The nearly 400-year history of mechanized calculation was created by men and women with varying and diverse talents, temperaments, backgrounds and education, working in such fields as mathematics, the sciences, government, business and commerce. It is a history not just of singular inspiration and genius but also the continuing, collective discovery of new materials, skills, technologies and techniques to implement and enhance the plans and dreams of individual inventors and scientists.

Down through the years, beginning largely in the 1930s, IBM has helped to chronicle and contribute to this history by collecting a number of significant counting and reckoning tools and devices -- including abacuses, slide rules, calculators, arithmometers and tabulators -- and by preserving some of its own and other pioneering products.

Labels: computing, history, technology

Labels: history, music, photography

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

What happened to the monk's book after that is unclear, but in 1908, Johan Ludwig Heiberg, a Danish philologist, discovered it in a library in Constantinople. He was astonished to find that the book contained previously unknown texts by Archimedes. He studied the book in detail, puzzling out the faint letters with a microscope. His efforts brought the works to the attention of scholars around the world, but after he had completed his transcription, the book again disappeared until nearly a decade ago, when it was auctioned off at Christie's.

The book's anonymous buyer has funded an enormous research project on the volume. First, intensive conservation and restoration stabilized the condition of the book itself. Then the researchers took digital pictures of it in different wavelengths of light, creating a multi-spectral image that could be manipulated to reveal the text by Archimedes. On four of the pages, forged paintings covered the entire text, so the researchers used x-ray fluorescence imaging to peek beneath the paintings and decipher the obscured text.

Labels: history, science

Labels: history, photography

Labels: history, software

Labels: history, photography, space

I first came across Coster-Mullen’s name in January of 2004, after I attended an exhibit by the artist Jim Sanborn, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. The show, called “Critical Assembly,” included what appeared to be spookily exact replicas of the interior mechanism of the first atomic bomb, which Sanborn had manufactured according to Coster-Mullen’s specifications. A year later, I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that mentioned a six-hundred-mile trip Coster-Mullen had taken across the Midwest with a full-scale model of the Hiroshima bomb in the back of a Penske rental truck. He had built the replica with the help of his son, Jason, in his garage, basing it, in part, on his analysis of sixty-year-old screws, bolts, and fragments of machined steel that had been stored in rural basements and attics.

Labels: history, technology

Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn't get much easier than that.

So please take a look for yourself and experience these great photos. Your exploration will be limited only by your imagination and your desire to keep on clicking. Be sure to check back often as more photos from the LIFE archive will be added regularly to Google Image Search. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we do!

Labels: history, photography

Labels: computing, history

Labels: history

Labels: history, photography

The cipher machines and radio equipment naturally form the centerpiece of the museum, and there's an entire computer history museum onsite (it was closed, with the strangest sign I've ever seen, words to the effect of, "This site is closed for maintenance. Enter at your own risk. You may be escorted off the grounds by security if you are caught here." Huh?) along with the notorious Nazi Enigma machine that was kidnapped in 2000 and ransomed back (the crime was never solved). The historic material on the Enigma (which began life as a commercial product before the war!) is really excellent, as are the technical explanations of how it worked.

Labels: computing, history

Labels: history

Fuller’s career is the subject of a new exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition traces the long, loopy arc of his career from early doodlings to plans he drew up shortly before his death, twenty-five years ago this summer. It will feature studies for several of his geodesic domes and the only surviving Dymaxion Vehicle. By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?

Labels: history, technology

Labels: history, photography

To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it.

Jann Wenner is the founder and editor of Rolling Stone.

Jann Wenner: Jim and Marc set up a demonstration. I’d never seen a hyperlink before. I don’t think anybody had. And it was kind of drop-dead amazing. That you could click on this blue, highlighted, underlined word and then, bam, go to a whole new level of information was dazzling. So I said, Look, this is fantastic, I get it, but I don’t want to go through the cost of building a Web site. We didn’t have the staff or the technology, let alone the money, to do such a thing. But I would invest in two seconds. And I actually sent them a check, but they sent the check back. They said, If you don’t build a Web site, we’re not taking your money.

Labels: history, Internet

Twelve hours after agreeing to sell Bear Stearns Cos. for $2 a share, Alan Schwartz wearily made his way to the company gym for a much-needed workout.

It was 6:45 a.m., March 17, and Bear Stearns's chief executive had slept little since hammering out the ugly details of his fire-sale deal with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

When Mr. Schwartz, already dressed in his business suit, trudged into the locker room, Alan Mintz, still in his sweaty gym clothes, made a beeline for the boss.

"How could this happen to 14,000 employees?" demanded the 46-year-old senior trader, thrusting his face uncomfortably close to Mr. Schwartz's. "Look in my eyes, and tell me how this happened!"

Labels: history, politics

Irena Sendler was a social worker in Warsaw, Poland, when Germany occupied that nation in 1939. Almost immediately the Jews of that city were confined in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which existed from 1940-1943. Even before the ghetto was established, Sendler began helping them.

As an employee of Warsaw's Social Welfare Department, Sendler had a permit to enter the Ghetto to check for typhus and other infectious diseases. She used that to smuggle Jewish children out, giving them Catholic identities so that they could be raised in secret by sympathizers outside the Ghetto. Babies and infants were smuggled out in ambulances or public transport, sometimes disguised as bundles of belongings. Teenagers were rescued from work gangs sent outside the ghetto. She kept records of their real identities on scraps of paper, which were later buried in a jar under an apple tree until after the war.

Sendler even went so far as to wear a yellow Star of David, symbol of the Jew under Nazi rule, when inside the ghetto, exposing her to the real risk of brutality or deportation to a death camp without warning. She did it, she said, as a 'sign of solidarity' with the Jews.

Labels: history

Yuri's Night, now in it's eighth year, features events ranging from a huge festival at NASA Ames featuring Phil Lesh and Stewart Brand, to a party in Ethiopia for thousands of local university students, to an intimate (and hard core) group at the South Pole station. Wired will have a photo and film crew down at NASA Ames tracking the festivities, but feel free to send us your pictures from across the world.

International Space Station Commander Peggy Whitson and her crewmate Garrett Reisman sent down a greeting from outer space (their Russian colleague Yuri Malenchenko was in the lab module working but also sent his "Poyeholi!" along through Peggy). They are welcoming three new crew members who just arrived in time to celebrate this Yuri's Night in space.

Labels: history, space

Labels: history, movies and television

Labels: history, movies and television

The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change the war in Vietnam. During his campaign for the presidency the year before, Richard Nixon had vowed to end that conflict. But more than 4,500 Americans had died there in the first six months of 1969, including 84 soldiers at the debacle of Hamburger Hill. Meanwhile, the peace negotiations in Paris, which many people hoped would end the conflict, had broken down. The Vietnamese had declared that they would just sit there, conceding nothing, "until the chairs rot." Frustrated, Nixon decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support.

Labels: history

Labels: history

The story has taken on some of the characteristics of an urban legend by now. But it really did happen. I have the official file of the investigation right on my desk today. It was declassified in the summer of 2001, and Michael Ravnitzky, a journalist who works with an outfit called American Lawyer Media in Washington, applied for it from the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command under the Freedom of Information Act and shared it with Gordon Van Gelder, the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who kindly made a copy of it available to me. (Mr. Ravnitzky has made something of a specialty of obtaining recently declassified government files involving SF people–Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Hugo Gernsback among them. He’s even been able to get the files of Project Moon Dust, a UFO-connected enterprise whose existence the Air Force long denied.) It is with Michael Ravnitzky’s permission that I share the Cartmill story with you now.

The file opens with a blurrily reproduced letter from John Campbell (based in New York) to Cleve Cartmill (who lived in Manhattan Beach, California) dated August 16, 1943. Cartmill had evidently proposed writing a story about a super-bomb. After complaining that he has hardly any stories in his inventory, having lost most of his best contributors to the war effort–Cartmill, who was partly paralyzed, was ineligible for military service–Campbell responds to a proposal from Cartmill for a story based on the idea of using atomic weapons in warfare, telling him that it is "fact, not theory," that researchers have used "new atomic isotope separation methods" to produce a supply of fissionable U-235. "They have quantities measured in pounds. They have not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. Because they are not at all sure that, once started, it would stop its reaction until all of it had been consumed. . . . They’re afraid that that explosion of energy would be so incomparably violent . . . that surrounding matter would be set off. . . . And that would be serious. That would blow an island, or hunk of a continent, right off the planet. It would shake the whole Earth, cause earthquakes of intensity sufficient to do damage on the other side of the planet, and utterly destroy everything within [thousands of] miles of the site of the explosion."

Labels: history, SF

Labels: history, space

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Labels: history

Labels: history, space

Labels: history, movies and television, space

"We must pay $25 [at 1900 prices] a month for even a passable servant"; that is $300 a year. Add to that $10 a month for laundry, for the "servants will do no laundry work." $1 a month for haircuts. $2 a month for a gardener. On personal servies alone we are up to $445 a year, and the good professor sees these expenditures as absolute necessities. He cannot economize on them. He has no choice but to make such large expenditures on personal service--if he does not, his household will fail to make a properly upper-middle-class impression, for the lawn must be trimmed, the house dusted, the clothes cleaned, and the children washed. And "shall we expect our wives to bear and rear children, do all of the housework, sustain their social duties, and remain well and strong" without servants? G.H.M. has no gasoline-powered lawnmower, no electric hedge clippers, no vacuum cleaner, no dishwasher, and neither a washing machine nor a dryer. Consumer durables take the place now of what took servants’ time sweat for college professors’ households (and housewives', daughters', and aunts' sweat for others) a century ago.

Labels: history

Labels: environment, history

Labels: history, photography

Labels: history

Labels: history, technology

Labels: history, places

Labels: history

Labels: history, space

Labels: environment, history

Before the greenish radar scans, before blurry photographs from atellites, before television or television meteorologists, and before the snappy twenty-fourhour-a-day Weather Channel, there was this: the faint flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder on the prairie’s horizon. This was what amounted to a storm warning on the plains.

The far, open sky filled with mountainous cauliflower clouds that grew fat with rain and hail, and those dark olive-hued clouds could conceal the most powerful force known in nature—or not. No one knew for sure, no mere mortal could; after all, the tornado, or cyclone as it was called on the plains, was an act of God, an Old testament punishment for ill deeds or a test of faith. It was capricious and deadly, leaving the living to bear witness that the great wind came straight from heaven, or so it seemed.

Labels: books, environment, history

Brandenburg's involvement in digital music compression began in the early 1980s when he was a doctoral student at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. A professor urged Brandenburg to work on the problem of how to transmit music over a digital ISDN phone line. It wasn't just a computer coding problem. Brandenburg had to immerse himself in the science behind how people perceive music.

That was where Suzanne Vega came in. Her song Tom's Diner, though seemingly a simple ditty, proved devilishly difficult to reproduce without annoying background noise. "Suzanne Vega was a catastrophe. Terrible distortion," Brandenburg recalls. "The a cappella version of Tom's Diner was more difficult to compress without compromising on audio quality than anything else."

When MP3 developers refined the technology to the point where Tom's Diner sounded true to the original, they had made a major breakthrough. "I've listened to this 20 seconds [of Tom's Diner] a thousand times. I still like the music," says Brandenburg, who met Vega years later when both attended an event in Cannes to mark the creation of MP3.

Labels: history, music

Labels: history, SF

Labels: books, history, SF

Labels: history, movies and television

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

Labels: history, technical communication

Labels: history, music

In this exhibit you will be able to examine a diverse presentation of covers, selected advertisements and text, as well as a gallery of covers of particular interest to fans of pulp art. An additional feature is the presence of six full-length issues from the LAC collection that reflect a variety of societal themes such as gender portrayal and relationships, racism, Canadian identity and language use.

Labels: books, history

While remaining true to the historical record in every important particular, Simmons has given us a host of colourful, believable characters caught up in a driving, hell-bent narrative. The Terror is a tour de force. The author's nationality notwithstanding, this novel is far more deserving of specifically Canadian attention than the majority of the books that, come autumn, we will see short-listed for this country's most prestigious literary prizes.

Labels: books, history

Labels: history

Labels: history, photography