ENIAC (pronounced [ˈɛniæk]), short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, but its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
Location: somewhere near the Port of Oakland…
Photos taken on the spot by yours truly, background info from Wikipedia:
The Scopitone is a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component. It was a forerunner of music video. The Italian Cinebox/Colorama and Color-Sonics were competing, lesser-known technologies of the time.
Based on technology developed during World War II, color 16 mm film clips with a magnetic soundtrack were designed to be shown in a specially designed jukebox. The first Scopitones were made in France, among them Serge Gainsbourg’s Le poinçonneur des Lilas (filmed in 1958 in the Porte des Lilas Métro station), Johnny Hallyday’s “Noir c’est noir” (a cover of Los Bravos’ “Black Is Black”) and the “Hully Gully” showing a dance around the edge of a French swimming pool.
Scopitones spread to West Germany, where the Kessler Sisters burst out of twin steamer trunks to sing “Quando Quando” on the dim screen that surmounted the jukebox. Scopitone went on to appear in bars in England. By 1964, approximately 500 machines were installed in the USA, according to Time magazine.
Several well-known acts of the 1960s appear in Scopitone films, ranging from The Exciters (“Tell Him”) to Procol Harum (“A Whiter Shade of Pale”). In one Scopitone recording, Dionne Warwick lay on a white shag rug with an offstage fan urging her to sing “Walk on By”. Another had Nancy Sinatra and a troupe of go-go girls shimmy to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”. Inspired by burlesque, blonde bombshell Joi Lansing performed “Web of Love” and “The Silencer”, and Julie London sang “Daddy” against a backdrop of strippers. The artifice of such scenes led Susan Sontag to identify Scopitone films as “part of the canon of Camp” in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”.
By the end of the 1960s, the popularity of the Scopitone had faded. The last film for a Scopitone was made at the end of 1978. However, in 2006 the French singer Mareva Galanter released several videos which mimic the Scopitone style. Galenta’s album Ukuyéyé features several songs in the Frecch Yé-yé style. She also recently hosted a weekly French television program called “Do you do you Scopitone” on the Paris Première channel.
Barely four years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler was calling for a theory of evolution for machines. Since then, a few hardy souls have attempted to oblige him, but none has quite hit the mark. Their reasoning, very much à la Darwin, is that any given technology has many designers with different ideas – which produces many variations. Of these variations, some are selected for their superior performance and pass on their small differences to future designs. The steady accumulation of such differences gives rise to novel technologies and the result is evolution.
The history of technology is not one of more-or-less independent discoveries, but an evolutionary story of related devices, methods, and capturings of phenomena. In the time of the earliest humans, we picked up phenomena lying around on nature’s floor. Certain fibres possess strength and flexibility? Binding materials. Friction creates heat? Fire. Fire allows the smelting of metals? Metal tools. Combinations of braided fibres and metal cutting-heads make axes. Combinations of levers, ropes and toothed gears make possible grain milling, irrigation and building construction.
In more modern times, chemical and electrical phenomena yield myriads of technological elements, and combinations of these have given us industrial chemistry, the telephone, radio, the computer and the internet. In just a few millennia, with repeated capturings and repeated combinations, the few have become many and the simple have become complex. We have progressed from grinding stones to iPhones.
So what would a theory of evolution for technology look like?
Read the whole article, Evolution 2.0: On the origin of technologies, @ NewScientist.com
via psychological illusionist Derren Brown’s crew blog. Which is well worth checking out for robust commentary & conversation on all things perceived, if you’re into that sort of scene.