Jan 18, 2024
Can we hit pause on the nerd history lesson for a second?
(Avengers #6)
seen from United States
seen from Maldives
seen from Canada
seen from Germany
seen from Sweden
seen from China
seen from Yemen
seen from Maldives
seen from Brazil
seen from Argentina
seen from Malaysia
seen from Indonesia
seen from Canada
seen from Indonesia
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seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Austria
Can we hit pause on the nerd history lesson for a second?
(Avengers #6)
The "space cadet" keyboard was created in 1978 and used the Shift, Top, Front/Greek, Control, Meta, Super, and Hyper keys to allow chording to type over 4,000 different characters without having to use special menus (if you could remember what they all were). Information about this keyboard tends to focus on those capabilities, so I haven't been able to figure out why it also appears to have Like and Dislike buttons near the top right:
Bally’s Star Trek pinball machine from 1978.
The story of Bally’s is an interesting one. Nerds might know them best as a pinball machine manufacturer, but they were the largest producers of slot machines and gambling amusements, and even owned casinos. One of the most extraordinary parts of their empire were the Bally’s Total Fitness Centers, which was one of the earliest and largest chains of gymnasiums. To summarize: Bally’s was a pinball machine company that started producing slot machines and gambling, and used that money to get the largest chain of gyms until the 2000s.
Manly Banister, 1950: "EGOBOO: a Fantasy Satire"
I bet one or more of y'all might enjoy reading a 24-page zine in which a Weird Fiction author complained about sci-fi-horror-fantasy fandom drama through a parody story about an obnoxious sci-fi fan taking over the world through the power of pseudoscience, featuring actual uses of 1950's equivalent of goofy fandom language, including
the plural of "fan" is "fen"
important figures are "ghods"
the phrase "Good Gravius, Flavius!"
"the Deros are coming"
and yes, they were already calling it "fandom"
@vintagegeekculture I recognized a few of the names being parodied but missed the main one: any idea who the villain Prime Pseudoscientist Vermilionn "Verminn" Swampwaterr is supposed to be making fun of? I can't tell if he's supposed to be another writer or just a prominent fan.
A map of the early Internet, 1969
https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/historical.html
The first image scanned by a computer, 1957. It could only do binary (either the image was black or white), so they scanned it once with low light sensitivity and once with high and then combined the two images to create the grey areas.
Very first version of Tetris, back when graphic displays were limited to text, created by AI researcher Alexey Pajitnov to test Soviet hardware