Category Archives: Computing

The Imagination of Disaster by Susan Sontag (1965), When the Movies Pictured A.I., They Imagined the Wrong Disaster By A.O. Scott (2023)

Posted on February 26, 2023 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows … Continue reading →

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History of programming languages

Posted on February 13, 2023 by 1960s: Days of Rage

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure … Continue reading →

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History of compiler construction

Posted on January 23, 2023 by 1960s: Days of Rage

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL). “In computing, a compiler is a computer program that transforms source code … Continue reading →

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Meet ‘The Afronauts’: An Introduction to Zambia’s Forgotten 1960s Space Program

Posted on July 25, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“Broadly speaking, the ‘Space Race’ of the 1950s and 60s involved two major players, the United States and the Soviet Union. But there were also minor players: take, for instance, the Zambian Space Program, founded and administered by just one … Continue reading →

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The Baseball Encyclopedia

Posted on June 24, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“The Baseball Encyclopedia is a baseball reference book first published by Macmillan in 1969. Nine further editions of the book were released between 1974 and 1996. The Baseball Encyclopedia features statistical summaries for Major League Baseball (MLB) players.  Baseball reference … Continue reading →

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Stewart Brand Saw the Future

Posted on June 23, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking … Continue reading →

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Garbage collection (computer science)

Posted on June 21, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Stop-and-copy garbage collection in a Lisp architecture. Memory is divided into working and free memory; new objects are allocated in the former. … “In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts … Continue reading →

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Hacker culture

Posted on April 22, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

“The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy – often in collective effort – the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to achieve novel and clever outcomes.[1] The … Continue reading →

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Extravehicular activity

Posted on March 19, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Ed White performs the first American spacewalk during Gemini IV “Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut outside a spacecraft beyond the Earth’s appreciable atmosphere. Normally, the term applies to what has been termed a spacewalk outside … Continue reading →

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An Introduction to E.A.T. – Engineers, the Avant-Garde and a Tennis Court

Posted on January 5, 2022 by 1960s: Days of Rage

Set of Documentation of the Workings of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) between 1966 and 1968 “On March 18th, 1960, a sculpture on the roof of New York’s Museum of Modern Art began to destroy itself. Engines attached to … Continue reading →

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