Dot-ca, 20 eh!
The Vancouver Sun has a quick history of the creation of the Dot-ca top-level-domain, exactly 20 years ago today.
Labels: Internet
Tales from the history of Canadian technology
The Vancouver Sun has a quick history of the creation of the Dot-ca top-level-domain, exactly 20 years ago today.
Labels: Internet
There was an interesting profile of the Galt Gas Electric car in the Globe and Mail automotive section today. As one of the first 'hybrid' cars -- powered by both an electric motor and a small internal combustion engine -- it was built in 1914, a time when gasoline automobiles were still competing with electric and steam powered cousins. Only one Galt was ever built (it was named for its hometown, now known as Cambridge, Ontario), but the article repeats the claims that it could run at 4L per 100km, an astounding figure, even today. The company owners were unable to interest any investors, but the fact that it was driven to Chicago and New York suggests it was a successful design. The original and only Galt was given a new body in the 1940s, and it now rests in the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa, Ontario.
Labels: Automotive
The American computer scientist John Backus died recently, and obituaries followed in major newspapers, on the radio and television, and online. Such an honour is rare for computer scientists, but there is little doubt that his contributions to modern computing were significant and deserving of such recognition.
The CBC recently posted an article concerning the stability of digital archives, and in particular, difficulties that the New Brunswick provincial archives were having with digital storage formats and media:
"One of the problems is that [digital is] so susceptible, so vulnerable to damage," Noel said. "I've had audio tape come into the archives, for example, that had been submerged in water in floods and the tape was so swollen it went off the reel, and yet we were able to recover that. We were able to take that off and dry it out and play it back.
"If a CD had one-tenth of one per cent of the damage on one of those reels, it wouldn't play, period. The whole thing would be corrupted."
Labels: archives, obsolescence
James Gosling has been named to the Order of Canada for his work on Java. The Canadian computer scientist studied at the University of Calgary before completing his Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon in 1983. He was the primary architect of the programming language Java and wrote the first Java compiler. There are many critics of Java, but there is little question it had a dramatic impact on the networked world.
Labels: Computing
As noted in the Globe and Mail Travel section Wednesday, the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford is going to be open this Saturday, 10am to 4pm (and again March 17). While the collection doesn't seem to have many Canadian artifacts, that's no reason to stay away!
The electron microscope came in at number 16 on CBC TV's recent 50 Greatest Canadian Inventions. One of the two co-inventors, James Hillier, recently died in New Jersey, aged 91. Born in Brantford, he was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, working under Prof. Eli Burton, when he and another student, Albert Prebus, created the world's first practical electron microscope, capable of magnifying objects thousands of times.