Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Backwards Satanic Lyrics.... With Quicktime!
I accidentally just discovered a strange keypress in Quicktime: if you press Command-Left Arrow while watching a movie, it will play in reverse! I was watching a video in my browser, and accidentally pressed this thinking I would jump to the previous page in my browser's history, when instead everyone in the video started talking backwards! Maybe I can use this to find those supposed satanic lyrics in various music songs...
Spacewar!
Spacewar was a groundbreaking game that pretty much introduced computers to gaming. One of the first articles that introduced Spacewar to the broader world just went up, from many decades ago, and its a hilarious snapshot of cold war paranoia:
"If you still think Spacewar is just a computer 'game'," said MIT's chief cybernetician, George Haskins, "keep this in mind -- theoretical physicists during the late 1930s and '40s didn't have the slightest intention of developing hydrogen bombs capable of wiping out whole cities... Look at it this way, either we're getting ready for space battles with other Earth nations, or," he hesitated, "somebody believes we're going to have serious differences with alien civilizations and beings from beyond the solar system."
Read the rest of "The Saga of Spacewar"
[from Paleo-future]
"If you still think Spacewar is just a computer 'game'," said MIT's chief cybernetician, George Haskins, "keep this in mind -- theoretical physicists during the late 1930s and '40s didn't have the slightest intention of developing hydrogen bombs capable of wiping out whole cities... Look at it this way, either we're getting ready for space battles with other Earth nations, or," he hesitated, "somebody believes we're going to have serious differences with alien civilizations and beings from beyond the solar system."
Read the rest of "The Saga of Spacewar"
[from Paleo-future]
Labels: computer history, space
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