A WWII-era patch for a US Navy punch-card officer. A gift from Grace Hopper to the Smithsonian.
Penicillin Model
A model of the penicillin molecule by Dorothy Hodgkin from 1945. Sculpture + data visualization + scientific work.
When Was Analog Born?
I’ve been ruminating lately about when the idea of analog was born. It seems so pre-digital and of the “real world,” but it turns out is actually very much tied to the rise of computers as a way to describe their opposite. A quick NGram search shows this pretty clearly: around the late 1940s (birth of the modern digital computer era) we see both these terms explode, but basically zero uses of analog at all before this time.
We could also see analog as related to the literary term analogue, meaning an analogy. If the digital is a representation of something (discreet samples in digital audio, for example), then digital is an analogy of its physical, real-world counterpart.
Speedball Lettering Booklet
Images from a wonderful booklet put out by Speedball in 1940, demonstrating hand-lettering techniques. There are lots of different styles in the book, but particularly wonderful are the Gothic ones with ghost-pens.
Download the full booklet as a PDF.
Core Plane Memory
Core plane memory (woven wires and magenets in a cube structure) from Project Whirlwind (the first computer to operate in real-time and to have video output) and circa late 1940s.
Via: Wikipedia
