I've been asked by a digital publication to do a regular column on forgotten or overlooked bits of tech and business history that changed stuff forever.
So what's your favourite weird nugget of obscure history or people in tech or business?
This is LITERALLY your chance to make me write about it 😄
@garius ever heard about the Mundaneum? The invention of the universal decimal classification system, in a space that attempted to gather all the world's knowledge.
@garius it may not have changed things forever but the methods early Satellites used to get data back to earth have always interested me (in part because my grandfather was involved - he led the satellite business for Aerospace Corp for a long time.) many spy satellites literally ejected physical film with parachutes from space. The fact that this actually worked and the film was recovered is what I find amazing.
@garius how an obscure company Electronic Book Technologies (EBT) laid the foundation for what became the modern web. Tim Berners Lee used an evaluation copy of EBTs SGML based DynaText Browser as inspiration for what became the first “HTML” web browser that he built on a NeXt machine when EBT turned down Tim’s request to use the DynaText browser for his WWW project at CERN in 1990.
@garius the DES encryption standard, and the almost-20-year mystery of the S-boxes. I don‘t know how forgotten or overlooked that is — maybe younger readers are less familiar? It was the first glimpse of NSA-vetted cryptography, with all of the intriguing and possibly sinister implications, and a major impetus for public academic cryptography research. I had friends who tried crunching those inscrutable tables of numbers on their C64s and Amigas, hoping to discover the trick.
@garius the sophistication of Vax hardware. You could change boot disk by swapping the plastic drive light covers. The drive took its number from the cover which had it ‘encoded’ on the rear in the form of plastic pins which caused contacts to be made or broken thus allowing the hardware to know which drive number it was assigned.
I rescued a machine with a head crash like this, made the removable drive the boot drive, booted from a backup in the drive. Genius.
@garius How far back do you want/need to go? Things like the development of the windmill/watermill, changing the way people could get flour & therefore bread more easily, which then also changed the way villages agglomerated, so no-one was too far from a mill.
Or the fact that Huguenot refugees brought their table pin looms with them to make purses, hats, etc, & then in the 1850s when the wooden cotton reel arrived, people knocked 4 nails into it for kids - hence 'French' knitting!
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