Weighing in at over a tonne and comprising 1,500 valves and miles of wiring, it is not what most people would recognise as a computer.

Despite its antiquated appearance, however, this enormous machine - once nickNAMEd The Baby - was once the cutting edge of technology. Some of the pioneering engineers behind it gathered in Manchester yesterday to celebrate the birthday of what was the world s first digital computer.

Sixty years ago today The Baby completed its first calculation, giving birth to technologies which we are still using.

Baby that gave birth to a hi-tech revolution | Technology | The Guardian

Almost 50 years ago, archaeologists searching for the ruined house of Augustus found a tiny clue buried deep in 2,000 years' worth of rubble overlooking the Forum in Rome.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | House of Augustus opens to public

Events in South Carolina and the introduction of the race issue into America's Democratic presidential primary campaign by the Clintons have brought back some memories of my own about race in South Carolina.

One night in January 1951, I was among a busload of young Georgia recruits and draftees to arrive at Fort Jackson, the big infantry training base near the state capital, Columbia. It was a racially mixed group, uneducated, headed for the infantry because they weren't very promising material.

I was the only one with a college degree, and one of the few who had finished high school. I was with them because I had put my name down for officer candidate school, and for that the full, 16-week-long training cycle was essential.

It had been a long drive and the bus had segregated itself - this was still the Jim Crow South - with blacks in the back and whites in the front. One white guy said in a low voice, "I hear they got [racial expletive] officers in this man's Army. I ain't gonna salute no [expletive] officer!" Other whites muttered agreement.

We arrived late at Jackson and gathered outside the bus. A big, black sergeant strode up to look us over. The guy who wasn't going to salute no black officers was pulling at a cigarette. The sergeant said, "You, there! Eat that cigarette." The recruit managed to get the fire out before he ate the cigarette. It was established who was in charge.
...
The army had always been a Southern institution, and in 1948 it still was, despite the Civil War. Then Truman made it into the most important instrument of black liberation and social ascension America had seen since Emancipation.

South Carolina, then and now - International Herald Tribune

An amateur cryptographer has beaten Colossus in a code-cracking challenge set up to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer.

The competition saw Colossus return to code-cracking duties for the first time in more than 60 years.

The team using Colossus managed to decipher the message just after lunch on 16 November.

But before that effort began Bonn-based amateur Joachim Schuth revealed he had managed to read the message.

"He has written a suite of software specifically for the challenge," said Andy Clark, one of the founders of the Trust for the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where Colossus is sited.

News of Mr Schuth's success reached Bletchley Park on Thursday night, said Mr Clark.
...
Tony Sale led the 14-year Colossus re-build project and it took so long because all 10 Colossus machines were broken up after the war in a bid to keep their workings secret. When he started the re-build all Mr Sale had to work with were a few photographs of the machine.

In its heyday Colossus could break messages in a matter of hours and, said Mr Sale, proved its worth time and time again by revealing the details of Germany's battle plans.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Colossus loses code-cracking race

in 1957 space as a territory had not yet been defined, and US leaders argued that it should be recognised as beyond the normal confines of territorial limits.

An opposite position, however, argued for the extension of territorial limits into space above a nation into infinity.

"Freedom of space" became an extremely significant issue for those concerned with orbiting satellites, because the imposition of territorial prerogatives outside the atmosphere could legally restrict any nation from orbiting satellites without the permission of nations that might be overflown.

Since the US was in a position to capitalise on this freedom of space, it favoured an open position.

US President Dwight D Eisenhower tried to obtain a freedom of space decision on 21 July, 1955, when he proposed it at a US/USSR summit in Geneva, Switzerland.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rejected the proposal, however, saying that it was an obvious American attempt to "accumulate target information". Eisenhower later admitted: "We knew the Soviets wouldn't accept it, but we took a look and thought it was a good move." The Americans thereafter worked quietly to establish the precedent.

Then Sputnik, a scientific satellite, overflew the United States and other nations of the world. On 8 October, 1957, an Eisenhower advisor, Donald Quarles, offered this irony to the US president: "The Russians have... done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Sputnik 'was force for world peace'

Fifty years ago today, to the delight of many and the consternation of more than a few, the Soviet Union launched something like a silver volleyball with four swept-back antennas into Earth's orbit.

huzzah
Happy Birthday to the Future

The beeping ball that launched the Space Age - International Herald Tribune

Fifty years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. The town of Grand Forks, North Dakota, with fewer than 150 blacks, hardly figured to be a key front in that battle - until Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

The day Louis Armstrong made noise - International Herald Tribune

Newly discovered snapshots donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos.

In the Shadow of Horror, SS guardians frolic - International Herald Tribune

"So that's where 'cut-and-paste' came from!"

The moment neatly captured the gap between the world that boomers grew up in and the inescapably digital world of today.

How Computers Transformed Baby Boomers - Baby Boomers At 60 - MSNBC.com

The Green Zone is a little America embedded in the heart of Baghdad. It is the former preserve of Saddam Hussein and his favored associates—an uncrowded district of villas, palaces, and monuments set in a parklike expanse that spreads for four square miles inside a meander of the Tigris River at the center of the ruined city. During the thirty-five years of Baath Party dictatorship it was neither gated nor strictly delineated, and it did not need to be, since the public's survival instincts were well honed, and people just naturally understood that special unwritten rules applied there. The Green Zone was the seat of Saddam's power. You could cross it along the three or four grand boulevards that were open to traffic, and you could reflect on the glory of the regime, but you could not safely linger or gawk. If you had a car and happened to blow a tire, you kept driving on the rims, and made a good show of it too. I know of one young man, the son of a high official in the former regime, who made a U-turn there, and was arrested for the indiscretion; he was held and questioned until his father intervened, and explained that he was innocent and just a bit feckless. Ah, youth.

thus starts a wonderful piece written back in Nov 2004
the world in depicts will make a fantastic movie
"the American bubble in Baghdad"

Welcome to the Green Zone