In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.

source: HN

The answer lies in the history of the zip code and its predecessor, the postal zone.

The ocean liner SS United States - renowned for her beauty and record-breaking speed - lies in wait in Mobile, Alabama, counting down the days until she is sunk and turned into an artificial reef off the coast of Florida. It is a controversial end for a vessel of such luxury and grandeur; one with a rich and magnificent history as one of the greatest ships to ever grace the waves of the Atlantic. Together, let’s celebrate her legacy through some of my own illustrations, and explore everything that made SS United States truly one of a kind.

The book is sold out, but there are some fun widgets to play with as well.

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.

But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me. Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only. The font’s name is Gorton.

source: L

The cargo cult metaphor is commonly used by programmers. This metaphor was popularized by Richard Feynman’s “cargo cult science” talk with a vivid description of South Seas cargo cults. However, this metaphor has three major problems. First, the pop-culture depiction of cargo cults is inaccurate and fictionalized, as I’ll show. Second, the metaphor is overused and has contradictory meanings making it a lazy insult. Finally, cargo cults are portrayed as an amusing story of native misunderstanding but the background is much darker: cargo cults are a reaction to decades of oppression of Melanesian islanders and the destruction of their culture. For these reasons, the cargo cult metaphor is best avoided.

I doubt anyone is going to avoid anything, but the history is very interesting.

This website is a free archive dedicated exclusively to creating a one-stop shop for all the incredible typography and art of the Sanborn maps. It includes almost 3,500 unique decorative titles, all drawn before 1923. While large portions of the original maps have been digitized and archived in various places both online and offline, there has never been a comprehensive collection of all of the decorative titles from the Sanborn maps.

source: DF

Twenty five years ago today, the world breathed a collective sight of relief when nothing particularly interesting happened. Many days begin with not much interesting happening, but January 1st, 2000 was notable for not being the end of the world. I’m of course discussing the infamous Y2K bug. We all know the story: many legacy systems were storing dates with two digits- 80 not 1980, and thus were going to fail dramatically when handling 00- is that 1900 or 2000?

Over the past few weeks, various news outlets have been releasing their “25 years later” commentary, and the consensus leans towards this was no big deal, and totally fine. Nothing bad happened, and we all overreacted. There may have been some minor issues, but we all overreacted back then. So I want to take a moment to go back to the past, and talk about the end of the 90s. Let’s go for it.

In Alaska, residents are negotiating a contentious relationship with muskoxen, which were introduced to the area decades ago without local consent.

One Iñupiaq word for muskox is umiŋmak, a term that refers to the animal’s beard-like coat. The word’s existence speaks to the Iñupiat’s long relationship with muskoxen, which once roamed the Arctic. The decline of muskoxen is often attributed to climatic changes after the last ice age, along with predation and hunting. Around Nome, few, if any, Indigenous stories about the animals survive.

The average visitor to Nome today would never guess that muskoxen were ever ghosts on the landscape. The animals adorn guidebooks and artwork at gift shops and draw wildlife viewers and photographers. With their bulky coats, sloping shoulders, short legs, and upturned horns, it’s not hard to picture them roaming alongside saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and other big-bodied beasts of the Pleistocene. But all the muskoxen around Nome today have ancestors that saw the inside of a train station in New Jersey. Their reintroduction to Alaska was the result of a decades-long campaign by early 20th-century settlers and promoters, one that followed a template used many times over before and since: it was a plan for developing the Arctic, drawn up without the consent of Indigenous people.

source: HN

A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That has made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.

When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism, windowless and nearly featureless. Its only apertures are a series of ventilation hoods meant to hide microwave-satellite arrays, which communicate with ground-based relay stations and satellites in space. One of several long lines buildings designed by John Carl Warnecke for the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, 33 Thomas Street is perhaps the most visually striking project in the architect’s long and influential career. Embodying postwar American economic and military hegemony, the tower broadcasts inscrutability and imperviousness. It was conceived, according to the architect, to be a “skyscraper inhabited by machines.”

source: HN

Nearly a century ago, the Ford Motor Co. spent heavily in blood and coin to construct what became, practically overnight, one of the Amazon’s largest cities. Thousands of acres of forest were razed. Millions of dollars were spent. Hundreds of workers died.

But neither Ford nor the Brazilian government, which assumed control of the property when the company departed in 1945, has done much of anything to preserve this historic town whose brief heyday came at so high a cost. William Clay Ford Jr., Henry’s great-grandson and now the company’s executive chairman, reportedly supported in 1997 the opening of a rubber museum here, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, according to federal attorneys, has for more than 30 years ignored pleas to endow the town with historical protections.

The NYC subway system—a mishmash of new and old technology—still struggles to build payment systems that work for everyone. And often, the tech often separates the haves and have-nots.

From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

Washington is a city of great bridges and terrible bridges. These are their stories.

The Cincinnati subway stations are still there. But if you’re still waiting for a train to come, you’ve been waiting for almost a century. To this day Cincinnati remains home to the largest unused subway system in the world, with over two miles of empty tunnels. Engineers who inspected the tunnels recently deemed them in “very good condition.”

source: HN

Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a Russian espionage network?

I remember concluding that the most likely, if still rather improbable, explanation was that the 9-less messages were dummy fill traffic and that the random number generator used to create the messages had a bug or developed a defect that prevented 9s from being included. This would be, to say the least, a very serious error, since it would allow a listener to easily distinguish fill traffic from real traffic, completely negating the benefit of having fill traffic in the first place. It would open the door to exactly the kind of traffic analysis that the system was carefully engineered to thwart. The 9-less messages went on for almost ten years. (If I were reporting this as an Internet vulnerability, I would dub it the “Nein Nines” attack; please forgive the linguistic muddle). But I was resigned to the likelihood that I would never know for sure.

A probably not entirely wrong history of cameras developed for the moon.

In 1927, a Baltimore man was on a mission to blast off to Venus. Nearly a century later, a documentary crew is on its own mission to find the rocket built for that journey.

Some great illustrations, too.

“The Kharkovchanka” - Russia’s Colossal Antarctic Cruisers which have been continuously operating in some of the most extreme environments on Earth for over 50 years. Produced in Kharkiv, Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic and originally operated by USSR, the ’Харьковчанка’ (literally ‘Kharkiv Women’), these amazing Snow Cruisers were built in the late 1950s and featured everything a polar explorer could need in the field. In their half-century mission, they have crossed thousands of miles on Antarctic Ice, visited the South Pole, the pole of inaccessibility as well the dozens of outposts and research stations on the continent.

Previously: “The Snow Cruiser“-Antarctica’s Abandoned Behemoth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR0M7KjnJTE