legendary operating systems

article about ten meanwhile historical operating systems on TecChannel:

http://www.tecchannel.de/pc_mobile/windows/2018554/legendaere_betriebssysteme_msdos_nextstep_amigaos_macos/index2.html

The text is in German, but even for non-German speakers it is worth taking a look at the beautiful screenshots!




VisiCorp Visi On

Mac OS System 1.0












Xerox Alto

IX @ Hacker Space Fest 2009

IX by h3x3n has been accepted to the Hacker Space Fest 2009, Paris.
The festival starts on June 26th and lasts until June 30th and consists of workshops, presentations, conferences and an exhibition of works.
Our installation can be seen throughout the festival. The presentation of the project will be on Monday, 29th June, 15:00.

agenda: http://www.hackerspace.net/

Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond

"Sound out of Paper" with Andrei Smirnov
May 21 at NK Berlin, Elsenstr. 52 2HH, 2Etage Entrance: Free starting at 21:00

Russian proto-electronic music from 1930-s and beyond, A presentation and film viewing session of synthesized sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique produced in the 1930s recently discovered at the Russian State Film Archive. The technology of synthesizing sound from light called Graphical (Drawn) Sound technique which was invented in Soviet Russia in 1929 as a consequence of the newly invented sound-on-film technology. At exactly the same time similar efforts were being undertaken in Germany by Rudolf Pfenninger in Munich and, somewhat later, by Oscar Fischinger in Berlin. This invention came at least twenty years too early while the World War II was already at the threshold. As a result by late 1930-s the work in this domain effectively came to a halt. Although there were several short articles published in USA by V. Solev (1935), most publications about research and developments in the USSR were in Russian. At the same time the most important documents were never published at all and were circulating in manuscript form. Fortunately many unique archives survived and are collected now at the Theremin Center in Moscow. Over two hours of synthesized music produced in 1930s twenty years before the foundation of electronic music were discovered recently at the Russian State Film Archive.

Ars Electronica 2009: Human Nature

Ars Electronica announced the topic for its next festival:
http://www.aec.at/humannature/index_en.html

The festival will take place in Linz, Austria, from Thursday Sept. 3rd to Tuesday Sept. 8th, 2009.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Ars Electronica. The festival started in 1979, from 1980 to 1986 it was held biannually, from 1987 on yearly.

Wolfram|Alpha

on may 18th, 2009, Wolfram|Alpha has been launched. in contrast to search engines such as google, it is called an "answer engine", a growing knowledge base of structured data. users are welcomed to contribute by submitting specific facts, a whole set of structured data as well as algorithms (http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/participate.html)

"Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries." (http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html)
these sources can be accessed at the bottom of every query result.

at the moment, wolfram alpha "contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica."


blog: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/
website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

archive 2020

a conference about archiving and sustainability of born digital content. unfortunately it already took place (today, may 18th, 2009) in amsterdam.

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/#2489


talks by:
Lev Manovich (on cultural analytics)
Olga Goriunova (runme.org)
Eric Kluitenberg (the living archive)
Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it)
Aymeric Mansoux (goto10)
Christiane Paul (the whitney artport)
Esther Weltevrede (archiving web dynamics)
Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss (netzspannung.org)

virtueel platform (nl)

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/

mission statement:

"Virtual Platform defines e-culture as new developments in the cultural sector arising from cross-pollination between technology and society. Virtueel Platform firmly believes that e-culture makes an essential contribution to cultural, social and economic innovation, and works to strengthen and develop Dutch e-culture at home and abroad."

latest post on CTHEORY

CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 32, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
RT 004 05/13/2009 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter:

Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism

"Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation
left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your
job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can't afford to go
out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a
video game. As Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch fell
and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler reeled round the edge of their
grave, North American sales of game hardware and software hit
all-time highs in 2008. Forecasters claimed virtual play was
recession-proof; a maturing audience of stay-at-home gamers would
cocoon around the Wii, Xbox360 or PS3, or migrate to ~World of
Warcraft~ or ~Second Life~, to enjoy a diversion from economic
disaster. Such estimates of game-business resilience may prove
optimistic: by 2009 job losses were hitting industry behemoths such
as Sony and Electronic Arts (EA). But this latest iteration of
bread-and-circuses culture-theory nevertheless provides a timely
entry for a discussion of digital games as exemplary media of
contemporary Empire."

warm recommendation