#tech history

[victusinveritas]

[70sscifiart]

Computer magazine covers by Robert Tinney that weren't for Byte magazine

[adastra-sf]

The Robot Uprising Began in 1979

edit: based on a real article, but with a dash of satire

source: X

On January 25, 1979, Robert Williams became the first person (on record at least) to be killed by a robot, but it was far from the last fatality at the hands of a robotic system.

Williams was a 25-year-old employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On that infamous day, he was working with a parts-retrieval system that moved castings and other materials from one part of the factory to another. 

The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.

"Using its very powerful hydraulic arm, the robot smashed the surprised worker into the operating machine, killing him instantly, after which it resumed its duties without further interference."

A news report about the legal battle suggests the killer robot continued working while Williams lay dead for 30 minutes until fellow workers realized what had happened. 

Many more deaths of this ilk have continued to pile up. A 2023 study identified that robots have killed at least 41 people in the USA between 1992 and 2017, with almost half of the fatalities in the Midwest, a region bursting with heavy industry and manufacturing.

For now, the companies that own these murderbots are held responsible for their actions. However, as AI grows increasingly ubiquitous and potentially uncontrollable, how might robot murders become ever-more complicated, and whom will we hold responsible as their decision-making becomes more self-driven and opaque?

[space-discovery]

Spacewars! videogame as seen in the  DEC PDP-1 computer creared by MTI research lab (1962).

It is currently displayed on it's PDP-1 version at the Historic Computers Museum. Originally programmed by Steve Russel and peers.

[oldguydoesstuff]

Digital Equipment Corporation promotional photo from the 1960s showing how "mini" a PDP-8 minicomputer could be, look it fits in a car!

Quite the feat back in the age of room-filling mainframes.

[thegikitiki]

"Real men code in Assembler." Look at that glorious mustache and plaid shirt combo, even if I didn't reference the year, most could already guess the decade. This is peak 1981 tech-bro energy. He's probably calculating how many 5.25-inch floppy disks it will take to store a single low-res image, all while glowing in the warm radiation of his CRT monitor. The giant red lamp is strategically positioned to highlight his utter dedication to reading a spiral-bound manual thicker than a phone book.

Source: 1981 Atari Computers Assembler Editor Cover Art

[disease]

Frank Rosenblatt, often cited as the Father of Machine Learning, photographed in 1960 alongside his most-notable invention: the Mark I Perceptron machine — a hardware implementation for the perceptron algorithm, the earliest example of an artificial neural network, est. 1943.

[applesolutelymac]

I saved another iBook from being parts only!

Seller claimed it was not functional but maybe just meant because Best Buy removed the HDD which may have been lousy. I put another one in and replugged something and it works fine! DVD player is not responsive though so someday I should figure that out.