Tech History Today – April 20

In 1926 – Sam Warner approves the sound-on-disc system created by Western Electric and creates the Vitaphone company to develop the process to add sound to film.

In 1940 – Vladimir Zworykin and his team from RCA demonstrate the first electron microscope. It measured 10 feet high and weighed half a ton achieving a magnification of 100,000x.

In 1964 – The first AT&T picturephone transcontinental call was made between test displays at Disneyland and the New York World’s Fair.

The SF Signal Podcast (Episode 118): An Interview With Sword and Laser Hosts Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt

We were very honored to be invited to sit and chat with Patrick Hester from the SFSignal podcast about the Sword and Laser show. I was worried we’d have to stand but Patrick was very nice in letting us sit. He also was very nice in listening to us go on and on about our dragon and how we love scifi/fantasy books. But then SFSignal is all about SciFi and fantasy so I guess he might have been interested. Plus they got nominated for a Hugo! So we made it up to him by congratulating them.

Anyway if listening to Veronica Belmont’s voice si at all interesting to you, or you like to hear people talk about awesome things, you might want to check it out.

Get the podcast episode here!

East Meets West 283 – Lingua Changa

We talk about beards, dragon names, grammar nazis, and the evolution of language.

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/EastMeetsWest283-LinguaChanga/eastmeetswest283.mp3

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Tech History Today – April 19

In 1947 – A report appeared in Billboard magazine of the first public demonstration of the Jerry Fairbanks Zoomar lens. The National Broadcasting Company in New York City conducted the demo and the zoom lens soon became standard TV equipment.

In 1957 – The first non-test FORTRAN program ran at Westinghouse. It produced a missing comma diagnostic. A successful attempt followed.

In 1965 – “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits” by Gordon Moore was published in Electronics. Moore projected that over the next ten years the number of components per chip would double every 12 months. By 1975 he turned out to be right, and the doubling became immortalized as Moore’s law.

Autopilot 04 – Quantum Leap

Autopilot 04 – Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from March 26, 1989 to May 5, 1993, for a total of five seasons. The series was created by Donald Bellisario, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist from six years in the future (during the series’ original run) who becomes lost in time following a time travel experiment, temporarily taking the places of other people to “put right what once went wrong”. Dean Stockwell co-starred as Al Calavicci, Sam’s womanizing, cigar-smoking sidekick and best friend, who appeared as a hologram that only Sam, animals, young children, and the mentally ill could see and hear.[3] The series featured a mix of comedy, drama and melodrama, social commentary, nostalgia and science fiction, which won it a broad range of fans. One of its trademarks is that at the end of each episode, Sam “leaps” into the setting for the next episode, usually uttering a dismayed “Oh, boy!”

Tech News Today 481: The Hand Of Ballmer

Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell

Windows 8 to come in 3 flavors, Page, Ellison and the Google-Oracle circus trial, Ikea wants to build your next TV, and more.

Guest: Nilay Patel

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Running time: 53:24

Tech History Today – Apr. 18

In 1925 – The first commercial radio facsimile transmission was sent from San Francisco, California to New York City. It was a photograph showing Louis B. Mayer presenting Marion Davies with a gift.

In 1930 – BBC Radio made the startling announcement that nothing terribly important had happened. Listeners who tuned in to hear the news bulletin were told, “There is no news.” Piano music began subsequently.

In 1986 – Newspapers reported that IBM had become the first to use a megabit chip, a memory chip capable of storing 1 million bits of information, in its Model 3090.