Tag Archives: history

Episode Links

Museum Piece

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If you like museums — but find you don’t have the time or money to travel around to them — check out the Google Cultural Institute. It’s an online repository that helps explain and illustrate history right in the web browser. The project launched in 2011, and now includes more than six million digitized items, including high-resolution photos, archival video clips, maps, documents and artwork. Google’s partners in this effort include the British Museum in London, Museo Gallileo in Florence, the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw, Museum Nasional Indonesia and institutions in more than 40 countries.

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The site is roughly divided into three main topic areas: Art Project , paintings, sculpture and other creative works from around the world; Historic Moments, exhibits that focus on pivotal events in the human timeline; and World Wonders, detail tours of heritage sites around the globe. You may learn more just by wandering the site and randomly stumbling into things you didn’t know were there in the first place, like The Palace of Versailles in 3D or the site’s LIFE magazine photo collection.

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For geeks, there’s a trove of material from Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center during World War II, as well as an exhibit from the country’s National Museum of Computing on Colossus & The Breaking of Lorenz, a Nazi cipher thought to be uncrackable. War is well represented on the site — for example, more than 40 items are on display from the National World War I Museum in Kansas City. That exhibit is part of a larger World War I project with material from other institutions like the Imperial War Museum in Britain. Cornell University has a collection on Lincoln at Gettysburg and there are plenty of other military topics explore.

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Music and comics are covered, too. There’s an exhibit called Unveiling the Mysteries of the King Cello, which looks at the world’s oldest surviving cello, as studied in CT scans and icongraphic studies. Tezuka Osamu: Revival of the God of Manga, another exhibit, focuses on the works of the Japanese master of the form.

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Too many cool, informative things are waiting online at the Google Cultural Institute to mention here, so go look if you’re interested. The site also has its own YouTube channel (which has a video that explains how to use the Google Cultural Institute), an online tour and a Google+ page. It may not be quite the same as being there, but hey — no airfares, long lines or hefty museum admissions fees.

Podcast

PTJ 71: Righteously Rowdy

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This week J.D. takes us for a ride on the video game way-back machine with a look at the new Historical Software Collection at the Internet Archive. Also in this episode Kaiser Pedro has some hopefully helpful hints about improving your battery life and protecting your privacy on an Apple device running their iOS 7 mobile operating system. In the news Google unveils its long-rumored Nexus 5 smartphone;  Apple looks to expand its manufacturing presence in the United States; hackers target a limousine service; Twitter makes its stock market debut; gamers lineup for the release of “Call of Duty: Ghosts”; and British supermarket chain Tesco wants to scan the faces of customers for advertisers.

Episode Links

The Games People Played

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Video-based games have been around since the middle of the 20th century. Consider Tennis for Two, created in 1958 and played on an oscilloscope at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Or Spacewar, thought by many to be the first shooter game, created in 1961 at MIT and played on a Digital PDP-1 mainframe computer. (And you thought the early Game Boys were bulky.)

But it was the next couple of decades when videogames really blasted off, with Computer Space and Pong fueling the arcade boom in the early 1970s. This lead into the microcomputer craze and the home videogame wave, Remember The Hobbit, Mystery House, Adventureland or Choplifter? If you played these in the early 1980s, you have some serious old-school gaming cred, emphasis on the old.

Now, thanks to the Historical Software Collection at the Internet Archive, you can actually re-play some of these cherished memories again. Dedicated souls have labored over the JavaScript port of the MESS computer software emulator, which gives users of any modern browser an almost instantaneous way to run these ancient programs. If you’re a fan of electronic games, it’s definitely worth checking out — especially if you want to see just how far we’ve come in a relatively short amount of time.

So what’s in the collection? You can revisit Lemonade Stand, an economics game popular on the Apple II in 1979, or the 1981 version of Castle Wolfenstein. From 1982, you can find the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man and KC Munchkin for the Odyssey2. How about 1983’s Chuckie Egg for the ZX Spectrum? There’s plenty more where those came from.

ETThe Internet Archive Software Collection itself is a vast trove of CD-ROM images, Linux distributions, shareware mirrors and more. You could spend an afternoon trawling the virtual exhibits in this online repository. A sub-collection called Classic PC Games lets you relive those old DOS and early Windows favorites as well. But it’s not just fun and games. The archive has other ancient artifacts like VisiCalc and even WordStar to download or try out in emulation.

Yes, you can even grab a bag of Reese’s Pieces and run a version of that horrible E.T. game from 1983, just to see how bad it was. You are, after all, a student of history and history is not always pretty.