While browsing YouTube, I stumbled across another interesting little film worth sharing: In this case, a documentary on a music recording studio “Sugar Ray’s Vintage Recording Studio” which is designed to perfectly re-create the essence of recording in the 1950’s, using vintage equipment and ethos from that bygone decade. This film talks about the troubles […]
On November 12th, 1981, the Space Shuttle Columbia was launched on the second flight of the Space Shuttle Program, a flight which also marks the first re-use of a crewed spacecraft – one of the key goals of the Shuttle Program. STS-2 marked the first use of the Remote Manipulator Arm (the “Canadarm”) , and […]
I would imagine when most people think of “computer music” these days they still think of the beeps, boops, and blips of the Atari and early computer systems of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Even by 1983, however, music from computers had come quite a long way, and we were just on the verge […]
A decade ago, while browsing the then relatively new website called YouTube, I found a video that discussed something I never thought I would see: A theory that Michael Jackson was involved in the music for the 1994 video game “Sonic The Hedgehog 3.” “What? How? Why? Huh? How did I not learn about this?” […]
Here we have a quick, 5 minute film clip from 1966, produced by NASA to provide a status update on the Apollo Program. In 1966, as you may recall, we were finishing up the Gemini Program, and the Saturn V rocket was nearing testing completion for it’s first flight, in late 1967, as a test […]
Alright, finally we’re getting to something that will feel familiar to everyone: networking! More correctly, the pre-internet computer networking methodology known as BBS’s, via literally dialing a number and putting a phone on the modulator-demodulator – a modem, if you are old enough to remember those kinds of things! This episode shows our friend Billy […]
45 years ago this past month, from April 16th to April 27th of 1972, the Apollo 16 mission went to, and returned from, the Moon on our 5th successful lunar landing mission. This film goes over the mission in detail, going over key points of the mission and the unique events that happened during the […]
The Space Shuttle wasn’t just the NASA follow up to Apollo – oh no, it was intended to replace all expendable launch vehicles, both those in use by NASA for civilian payloads and military launches. The specifications of the payload bay and the overall design of the shuttle were driven by military payload requirements, namely […]
Early in the morning on April 27th, 1986, the East Coast broadcast feed for the television station HBO was interrupted by a mysterious message, consisting of a standard color test pattern and a somewhat politely worded warning message: GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH ? NO WAY ! [SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!] It’s quite the complex […]
It’s been 31 years since the Chernobyl Disaster, an event, alongside the 2011 Fukushimi Daiichi disaster, that ranks as the worst nuclear disaster in history. Last year, for the 30th anniversary, I covered the disaster in some detail. In the year since then, the Chernobyl remains have since, finally, been covered with a permanent shelter […]
The Soyuz 1 mission, which I discussed in great detail yesterday, flew, amazingly, for just about 24 hours – it was a day after launch that Komarov finally made his landing attempt, which of course as we know ended in disaster, on April 24th. Something I forgot to mention is, had everything gone perfectly with […]
On April 23rd, 1967, the Soviet Union launched the first manned mission of their new Soyuz program. The Soviets had not launched a crew in 2 years, realizing that to get anywhere close to beating the Americans at a race to the moon they would need to produce a new spacecraft that could conduct a […]
It was about 7PM Central time on April 20th, 1972 that Apollo 16 crew members John Young and Charlie Duke landed in the Descartes plains as part of the Apollo 16 mission. This video explains the general process of the Apollo Lunar Module actually landing on the moon, and contains video and audio of the […]
One thing that all computers do in some form is store data, be it programs we install on them, or data we generate ourselves using these programs. This is, of course, by design – computers are tools to help us do work (or at least, that’s why they are made, whether or not we use […]
45 years ago today, on April 16th, 1972, Apollo 16, the penultimate mission of the Apollo Lunar Program, launched, carrying John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charles Duke on a mission to land at Descartes Highlands and learn more about the geology of the lunar highlands, a part of the Moons lithograph that had not been […]