prosthetic knowledge

The 20th Anniversary of the SMS Text Message

20 years ago today, the first text message was sent by an engineer: “Merry Christmas”.

At BBC News, an interview is presented in text message format with Matti Makkonen, a Finnish Civil Servant who came up with the original idea. You can read the interview here

Also, why SMS messages are 160 characters long? Via The LA Times:

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

The 10th Anniversary of the First Drone Kill 

As this piece from The Bereau Of Investigation shows, four words that changed the course of military action were “OK. Fine. Shoot Him”:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) usually gets all the credit for the first US drone targeted killing beyond the conventional battlefield.

But it was the military which gave the final go-ahead to kill on November 3 2002.

Lt General Michael DeLong was at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida when news came in that the CIA had found its target. The deputy commander made his way down to the UAV Room, showing live video feeds from a CIA Predator high above Marib province in Yemen.

The armed drone was tracking an SUV on the move. The six terrorist suspects inside were unaware that a decision had already been made to kill them.

Interviewed by PBS, DeLong later recalled speaking by phone with CIA Director George Tenet as he watched the video wall:

‘Tenet goes “You going to make the call?” And I said, “I’ll make the call.”  He says, “This SUV over here is the one that has Ali in it.”  I said, “OK, fine.” You know, “Shoot him.” They lined it up and shot it.’

Eight thousand miles away and moments later, six alleged terrorists were dead. Among them was a US citizen.

Read the whole article here

FA-G Gallery: It Must Be Downloaded Show

Online Net-Art Gallery celebrates it’s 1st year anniversary with it’s featured artist’s work as a collection of 1MB zip files:

A. Bill Miller
Emilie Gervais & Sarah Weis
Pixelnoizz
Corentin Héraud
Alain Barthelemy
Anthony Antonellis
Rollin Leonard
Emilio Gomariz
George Costanza
Max Capacity
Sarah Samy
UBERMORGEN.COM README
Philipp Teister
Ferestec
Ted Davis

“It must be downloaded” show to celebrate FA-G’s 1st anniversary.
Ethanks to all the amazing artists who contributed their awesome work during the last year! More thanks to the participants in this holy ZIP show!
We’re looking into a marvelous second season with a lot of new stars and popular legends!

=)

Akira - Real-World Red “Capsule” Jacket via Kineda

For $900, you can own a real-world leather biking jacket as worn by Kaneda in the Manga / Anime classic ‘Akira’, which is set to celebrate it’s 30th anniversary.

If you understand Japanese and have the cash, or you want to see more pictures, more info can be found here

ZX81: Small black box of computing desire By Stephen Tomkins (via BBC News Magazine)

Packing a heady 1KB of RAM, you would have needed more than 50,000 of them to run Word or iTunes, but the ZX81 changed everything.

It didn’t do colour, it didn’t do sound, it didn’t sync with your trendy Swap Shop style telephone, it didn’t even have an off switch. But it brought computers into the home, over a million of them, and created a generation of software developers.

Before, computers had been giant expensive machines used by corporations and scientists - today, they are tiny machines made by giant corporations, with the power to make the miraculous routine. But in the gap between the two stood the ZX81.

It wasn’t a lot of good at saving your work - you had to record finished programming onto cassette tape and hope there was no tape warp. It wasn’t even that good at keeping your work, at least if you had the 16K extension pack stuck precariously into the back.

One wobble and your day was wasted. But you didn’t have to build it yourself, it looked reassuringly domestic, as if it would be happy sitting next to your stereo, and it sold in WH Smiths, for £69.95.

And how it got its name:

… The name combined the two most futuristic letters in the alphabet with a number that rooted it in the present day - though that doesn’t seem to have been particularly deliberate. The designer Rick Dickinson says they named its predecessor, the previous year’s ZX80, after its processor, the Zilog Z80, with an added X for “the mystery ingredient”.

More computing nostalgia here