cfmcdonald

8 ms·

61.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
Italy/Italia was used to designate the peninsula for thousands of years before there was a nation-state called Italy. [0] It was used that way continuously all the way up through the nineteenth century. e.g. Adam Smith, writing in the
62.
Steamships, Part 2: The Further Adventures of Isambard Kingdom Brunel(technicshistory.com)
11 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|2 comments
63.
Steamships, part 1: Crossing the Atlantic(technicshistory.com)
44 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|3 comments
64.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
I would guess the majority of humans alive today would struggle to solve these problems. Do only people who have a good understanding of middle/high school math count as generally intelligent? This seems like a ratcheting of expectatio
65.
The Rail Revolution(technicshistory.com)
10 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|0 comments
66.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
This is a good find. However I read through the key portions of the cited Lukasik article about the founding of ARPANET (pp. 10-12), and I can't find any real support for the claim in his introduction. He mentions the Baran RAND propos
67.
High Pressure, Part 2: The First Steam Railway(technicshistory.com)
4 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|1 comments
68.
High-Pressure, Part I: The Western Steamboat(technicshistory.com)
6 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|0 comments
69.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
Actually a Savery engine (the type of engine the OP's post starts off with) doesn't have a piston at all. And the Newcomen atmospheric engine didn't require a very precise fit to function either. It wasn't until Watt sta
70.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
For another take on this story, please check out my blog series on the Age of Steam: https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/
71.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
I think you're just inferring something that isn't there at all in the OP. Here's what it says: > The book takes us through a series of key moments in the development of the internet: 1969, when the publicly owned Advanced
72.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
> The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false It's actually true, more or less. Bob Kahn's initial motivation for thinking about internetworking was in order to connect PRNET[0], a packet radio network inten
73.
by cfmcdonald 4y ago
Yes, it was a joke. I don't think I said anywhere that all of these were bad ideas. The point was that everyone was trying lots of different ideas, because no one had any solid theoretic basis to tell them what might actually work. Rev
74.
The Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation(technicshistory.com)
25 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|4 comments
75.
The Steamboat Inventors: The Second Generation(technicshistory.com)
5 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|0 comments
76.
The Steamboat Inventors: The Second Generation(technicshistory.com)
9 points by cfmcdonald 4y ago|0 comments
77.
The Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation(technicshistory.com)
26 points by cfmcdonald 5y ago|3 comments
78.
The Steam Revolution(technicshistory.com)
42 points by cfmcdonald 5y ago|3 comments
79.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
I did read Winchester's chapter. I actually found Gavin Weightman's coverage of Wilkinson in The Industrial Revolutionaries better. I wanted to have more on Wilkinson, but I had to draw the line somewhere. This was already the l
80.
James Watt, Instrument Maker(technicshistory.com)
11 points by cfmcdonald 5y ago|3 comments
81.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Animals can do all sorts of weird things that might have once been believed to be impossible: "Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields, And Now We Know How That's Possible" ( https://www.sciencealert.com/bir
82.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
It's very unlikely that anything like this exists. Whatever writing craftsmen may have done in ancient times, it simply was not preserved and copied. The situation gradually improves post-Renaissance, but we don't even have any co
83.
The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam(technicshistory.com)
72 points by cfmcdonald 5y ago|12 comments
84.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
I have a number of nits with this post (e.g. OP is confusing Docs and Drive), but more generally I don't get OP's point. Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. N
85.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Large companies used to have company historians and company archivists. Some still do. There were probably never very many of those, though. The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.
86.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Yes, in the 1960s. Universities were expanding rapidly to respond to the influx of baby boomers, and humanities majors were much more popular, so it was relatively easy to get hired.[0] It's pretty much been varying degrees of bad sinc
87.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Sure, hubris is part of it. You are also getting paid (hopefully - if you aren't, then you're really screwed). It's not a lot, but enough to live on as a single person. Then, the academic humanities lifestyle is quite cushy f
88.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Author here. They are very different. Code (a fantastic book, by the way) is a technical book that provides an introduction to how computers work from first principles. The Switch is a historical book that describes how the switching co
89.
by cfmcdonald 5y ago
Author here. Sure, there are lots of ways to tell the history of computers, because lots of different lines of development fed into their creation. I hint at this in the prologue. But I chose to highlight one particular aspect (the origins
90.
The Switch: How the Telegraph, Telephone, and Radio Created the Computer(technicshistory.com)
26 points by cfmcdonald 5y ago|13 comments

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