2008.01.17

Computer Merit Badge Circa 1969

00.00.00 - Mark

The Boy Scouts of America have had Computers Merit Badge since 1967, and the old book is pretty amazing. Beautiful fonts, weird photos, even some really neat looking projects. Not everything is horribly inaccurate (considering it predates the Altair 8800 and the personal computer revolution by over 5 years) Even some of the original requirements are still in the modern version! I'm going to have to look for some other old requirement books for merit badges, I'm sure there's some neat stuff to dig up. Here's a PDF of the book (mirrored copy from Dave's Old Computers)

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2007.02.15

Four Years

11.55.09 - Mark

This blog has come a long way in four years. Back on February 15th, 2003 I signed up with a blogger account and I've come a long way since - nearly 1600 posts, hundreds of comments, developing my own blogging engine and adding all sorts of features I never would have dreamed of four years ago.

I've been online far longer than four years however, I had a couple of static pages hosted online going as far back as late 2000 or early 2001. Long enough that I've since forgotten, but I still have some pages online going back to June 2002. Thankfully my taste and writing have both improved since I first started those sites.

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2006.10.31

A History of All-hallows Eve

18.33.42 - Mark

One of the best things about Halloween, other than free candy and geeks building haunted houses, is that it is one of the few holidays that has been completly secularized - so much so that its easy to find religious individuals (from a variety of faiths) that absolutly hate it and are calling for its destruction. Of course, part of their hatred of the holiday is that they are ignorant of its history, from Celtic traditions thousands of years ago to the Christian tradition of begging for "soul-cakes" which led to the modern trick or treating to the modern myths about apples with razor blades and poisoned candy.

For a more fleshed out Halloween History, check out this article on OmniNerd

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2006.02.13

Big, Dumb, and Lazy

16.07.04 - Mark

C|Net is buzzing about the 60th anniversary of ENIAC's first public demonstration, the big chunk of iron most people associate with being the first digital computer. There's a whole lot wrong with the article, like the hand waving gives towards the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.

Of course there's also the table comparing ENIAC to a modern Intel chip



I didn't know that square millimeters was a measure of weight...

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