Wait and see
IN THE 1770s, Benjamin Franklin went to Paris to witness the flight of an early hot-air balloon. ‘What good is it?’ someone asked him. To which Franklin replied: ‘What good is a newborn baby?’ Any new technology in its early stages may appear pointless. New inventions have to be given time to grow in order […]
Small is beautiful
TECHNOLOGISTS ARE CONSTANTLY seeking to make silicon chips smaller and smaller. But it’s not just so your iPhone will fit more snugly in your pocket; it’s all about speed. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which is to say, as fast as it’s possible for anything in our universe to travel. The smaller the […]
Jargon unbusted
WHEN I BOUGHT MY FIRST MAC in 1987 the computer salesman offered me the choice of two graphics programs: I could pick either MacDraw or MacPaint. ‘What’s the difference?’ I asked The salesman looked at me contemptuously. ‘MacPaint is a bitmap program,’ he explained, ‘whereas MacDraw is object-oriented.’ Apple may have gone to extreme lengths […]
Twenty’s plenty
I BOUGHT MY FIRST Apple Mac in 1987. It had 512k RAM and a floppy disk drive, which meant you had to swap disks if you wanted to load a program, or open a file, or save your work. It was a tortuous process, so I treated myself to a 20 Megabyte hard disk. It […]
Future-proof Spectrum
WHEN I BOUGHT my first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum, in 1979 I had to make a choice between the 16k version and the massive 48k version. I chose the 48k model because it was future-proof. 48 kilobytes of memory was enough to run games from Manic Miner to Jet Set Willy; in a text file […]
Elite gaming
THE VIDEO GAME Elite, a space trading game, was published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro platform in 1984. It had unusually high replay value because each time a player launched the game, all the planets in its universe had different names. That’s because generating the names at random required less code than storing pre-made […]
Civilised behaviour
IN SID MEIER’S CIVILISATION game series, world leaders are assigned personality traits, with variables for such factors as cooperation, betrayal, economic ability. In the original game, Mahatma Gandhi was the only leader whose aggression level was set to 0. The game developers built in a mechanism whereby when a civilisation achieves democracy, its aggression level […]
Faster and faster
THE SPACE INVADERS arcade game was released in 1979 by Japanese developer Taito. Due to the low power of the computing chips, each time an ‘invader’ was destroyed, the game got faster. That’s because the processor was having to throw fewer pixels on the screen. An increase in speed as the player progresses is a […]
Web leaks
A POSTER IN THE WINDOW of an estate agent. There’s nothing wrong with repurposing a design from one medium to another, but perhaps before printing this A4 sheet they could have reconsidered “Click here to sign our online petition”.
Why is spam illiterate?
I GET A LOT OF SPAM. You probably get a lot of spam. Email in-boxes around the world are overflowing with spam. But is it all as slapdash and rushed as it seems at first glance? Here’s an email I was sent, reproduced exactly as I received it: From: Henrietta Frazier To: Steve Caplin Payment […]
Why buy a Mac?
IN THE LATE 1980s, in the early days of what was then known as desktop publishing, you needed an Apple computer if you wanted to run the software that would enable you to take part in the communications revolution. It became the norm for company computers to be split along partisan lines: Apple Macs for […]
The iPhone problem
THE iPHONE IS PROBABLY one of the world’s most popular technological achievements. It revolutionised the mobile phone industry when it was introduced in 2007, and I strongly recommend you take the time to watch the inspirational and charismatic Steve Jobs making its introduction. The iPhone is a fantastic music player, movie player, camera, web browser, […]
Web leaks 2
IF YOU’RE DESIGNING A QUICK SIGN, then it makes sense to grab an arrow off the internet rather than going through the laborious process of selecting the Arrow tool in Word. But this isn’t an arrow. It’s a web button. Are we supposed to press it for more information?