New! Now in glorious technicolor and high-fidelity full-bit-rate .mp3 sound... the complete Apple Gunkies and Nocturnal Aviation oeuvre.

Elinor Goulding Smith
 
• NEW  Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book is now back in print! Read the sample chapter How to make your own Greek Temple,  then buy it at 1stBooks, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or any bookstore that takes special orders (ISBN 1-4033-1406-3).
• Won't Somebody Tolerate Me--An essay written by my mother, Elinor Goulding Smith, in 1956. It is about being an agnostic in a time and a place when "freedom of religion" seemed to mean "freedom of religion for everyone but agnostics. You can have any you like, but you gotta pick one."


The Optics of an Eyeglass Prescription
 

An Eyeglass Prescription--An illustrated explanation of the abbreviations, terms, and numbers on an eyeglass prescription.


Young at Heart: Aging Gracefully with Attitude
 
NEW  My old high school classmate, Anne Snowden Crosman, has published a pretty darn nice book containing a collection of interviews with people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who have managed to stay young at heart. Interviewees include Linus Pauling, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and 57 others. Read my review here at Amazon.

Handmade, Handpainted Alphabet Blocks from PTV Egg Company

  Nice handpainted alphabet blocks are made by some friends of mine at PTV Egg Company.

Photos for your Desktop
 
Photos suitable for desktop art on your PC or Mac. Eight photos, mostly on nature themes (trees, clouds, etc.) at 1600x1200, 1024x768, 832x624 and 800x600 resolutions, with gamma (darkness) tuned for Mac or PC.


MIT Nostalgia
 
• The Doormat Singers--In the years 1964-1966, listeners to MIT campus radio station WTBS were sometimes privileged to hear the songs of the Doormat Singers: Matt Fichtenbaum, MIT '66 and Dan Murphy, MIT '65. Four songs are available here in .mp3 format, about two megabytes each. (Dan Murphy's post-Doormat-Singers folksinging is chronicled here)
• Bullets--Personal college nostalgia. These are photographs of bullets in flight. I took them myself. Sort of. I took them in Dr. Edgerton's lab in 1962. Entire page is about 40 KB including all jpg's.
• Apple Gunkies and Nocturnal Aviation Spoofs of commercials that aired on the MIT campus radio station (which at the time had the call letters WTBS). Apple Gunkies, Digicomputronimatics ("when you think of Dynadigitrons, think of Digicomputronimatics"), "Flexopneumohydroservosystematization and Control", and more...
• Neon Visions OK, it's just a silly animated GIF which you may find amusing and nostalgic if you lived in a West Campus dorm at MIT in the sixties. Otherwise, don't bother...
• PDP-1 Music Music as played by the PDP-1 Computer, MIT Building 26, in the mid-sixties.


Computer History/Nostalgia


• Munching Squares--a program than runs on a G3 or G4 Mac and simulates a classic "display hack" on a PDP-1 computer.
• Project Whirlwind (No, folks, this was way before my time). Based on a 1953 documentary movie, Making Electrons Count. This Web edition includes: transcript of the soundtrack illustrated with 108 frames from the movie, forming a storyboard version of the film (approx 600K total); three minutes of edited audio (200K); 1 minute of compressed video (3 MB) showing Whirlwind's engineer walking through and around the huge racks, ending by holding up a core plane. The portions of the film dealing with 1953-style debugging from the point of view of a user are fascinating and hysterically funny to modern ears. "My consultant notices and corrects several logical programming errors. I express my confidence that the program is now ready to run. On the basis of his experience with other programmers, my consultant feels that my confidence is unfounded."
• Bush Differential Analyzer in action??? This 732K QuickTime movie reproduces a very, very short clip from the 1951 George Pal sci-fi epic, "When Worlds Collide." I think this must be a real shot of the Bush Differential Analyzer (1940's 100%-mechanical analog computer).
• TJ-2: A Very Early Word Processor. Reproduction of some "antique" documentation, with my comments.


Harvard Nostalgia


Philosophy 4 Etext of Owen Wister's charming, nostalgic account of two Harvard undergraduates off on a spree in 1880's Cambridge.

Miscellaneous Humor 


• The Year-2000-Is-A-Leap-Year FAQ--In the years leading up to 2000, to my astonishment, I saw various discussions in USENET and elsewhere debating whether or not the year 2000 was a leap year. ComputerWorld once published a letter in which someone upbraided a major piece of software--VMS, I think--for treating 2000 as a leap year. After making several unsuccessful attempts to convince skeptics in comp.software.year-2000 that the year 2000 was really a leap year, I wrote this, in an effort to find something, anything, that would actually close off debate.
• FAUXBIZ--This page uses Javascript to generate fake business addresses. (It's a joke, folks... like a poetry generators or random sentence generators. Every few years a new interpretive language comes along... BASIC or Hypertalk or VB and now Javascript... and we get to relive our past, writing hundred-line adventure games and the like). Well, things of this kind do have one practical use: populating databases for demonstrations...
• SCSI FAQ: Everything you never wanted to know about SCSI