Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist.

What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war?

I find it fascinating how the US cultural hegemony rewrites history. I've heard people in the UK talk about "Jim Crow laws" as though that was a thing that happened in the UK. It wasn't. While there were barriers and racism (as the book makes clear) the experience of Black people in the UK was vastly different than it was for African Americans. To the point that white American GIs were routinely castigated for trying to impose their vile racism onto our country.

What makes this book special is the contemporary reports and modern interviews. There are some amazing stories to be told and it is fascinating to hear first-hand accounts. The book also contains a list of prominent Black people living in the UK (including their addresses) which feels a little like padding - but then this is fleshed out with mini-biographies of most of them. What is astounding is, given the range of people living in Britain, you occasionally get little revelations like this:

Only one black evacuee has ever been interviewed for a television documentary.

Some people profiled are, for want of a better word, ordinary. People who had normal lives, kept the home fires burning, and took part in ordinary civic life. And then there are guys like Ras Prince Monolulu who were bona-fide celebrities.

It is fair to say that modern Britain's relationship with the notion of "Empire" is complicated. When the call to arms came, people from the farthest colonies rushed to aide the "motherland". In many cases, they were initially rejected due to formal or informal colour-bars. The social acceptability of and legal ramifications of these practices is evidenced in Constantine v Imperial Hotels Ltd.

But for every story of casual and institutional racism towards people who came to help, there are stories of love and acceptance.

The English people opened their homes to us, we were invited out for dinners, teas, no problems at all. There were problems with the American forces, but it didn’t hinder us.

As with any history book, some of the language used can feel a little shocking or distasteful. History is never easy to engage with, but this book presents an even handed look at a turbulent period. It ends a little abruptly, but it is an excellent overview of the literature. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand our history.

By contrast, a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that's before you take into account message transmission costs. That's roughly the same price as sending over 8,000 letters. Is that a sensible investment for the 1980's businessman?

In 1986, British Telecom started producing "The Communications Programme" which was "a new video magazine produced exclusively for the top communications people in the UK's largest organisations".

The show was distributed on video-tape and the archived shows are genuinely fascinating. They're a mixture of business reporting, thinly veiled advertorials, and a glance at the future of digital services.

Buried in the middle of episode 4 is this advert from the Department of Trade and Industry.

There's very little online information about the "Vanguard Project" - it was a VADS initiative (Value Added Data Services) run by DTI, BT, IBM, INS, ISTEL, and FASTRAK. Some of those acronyms survive, some don't!

Its aim was to promote awareness of EDI and its potential for the United Kingdom.

In 1986 the Department of Trade and Industry launched a project called Vanguard to promote the development of this kind of service in 10 different sectors including construction, educational supplies and wholesale food distribution. The major VADS suppliers (BT, IBM, INS, Istel and the Midland Bank) in the UK were heavily involved in the project from the beginning.

Information Sources in Information Technology

What's "EDI"?

Electronic Data Interchange.

A means of transferring data between co-operating enterprises without having to print it out on one computer and key it into another. Requires agreement about standards (proprietary or otherwise).

Did it work? Well, that's hard to say!

There's a paper from 1989 called Survey of Electronic Data Interchange Users and Service Providers in the UK. It dives into the then current challenges of getting British businesses to adopt EDI.

It quotes Sir John Harvey-Jones saying that most people running companies were:

…old people like me not familiar with the technological possibilities! We have great difficulty in making imaginative jumps to see the way in which the whole of our business can be reorganised, revitalised, set up in totally new ways, releasing energy and cost and putting us into the pole position. I can see abundant evidence that the full benefits of EDI will only be reaped by the companies where the Chief Executives is seized with enthusiasm for the potential prize he can grasp.

Which still seems true today! Although over-enthusiasm has led us to a weird AI-in-everything future.

The paper doesn't talk about Vanguard specifically, although it does have this rather cute diagram adapted from one of its reports:

Not quite the Gartner Hype Cycle!

The paper concludes that:

Unfortunately the zealots of EDI tend to be unable to ‘sell’ the benefits to management in most companies, and this is not helped by the way that many companies have been forced to trade electronically. Management tends to think that EDI is about computers, and because they think that computers are technical they abdicate responsibility with the cry of ‘its all too difficult’. This must be wrong. It is up to those who understand EDI to learn how to talk to management, and it is up to management to understand that not only is EDI not about technology, but even if it was it is still their responsibility.

Again, true as it ever was!

Nestled in the bibliography is this tantalising list of publications from the now-defunct Her Majesty's Stationery Office:

None of which appear to be online, although a few are in The British Library - and a few more available on Google Books

The state awarded several contracts for Vanguard - most of which seemed to be in the training space. Here's what The EDI handbook said about it:

(My thanks to Don Thompson, Owen Boswarva, and Ms7821 for digging out some of those references.)

Did it work? By the time I entered the workforce in the 1990s, it seemed like every desk had a computer. Although the Internet was in its infancy, email and electronic ordering was a normal part of business. The various proto-Internet protocols were still around, but were quickly being replaced.

A thesis published in 1991 asked an important question:

why should a non-interventionist Government as Thatchers become directly involved in developing the market and working together with private companies whose normal aim is to increase market share at the expense of their competitors rather, than cooperate with them?

The impact of Electronic data interchange on Irish foreign trade and transport

Metcalfe's Law tells us that there is no value being the only business on a network. It simply isn't rational to invest in connecting to a data service that no-one else is on. But the value of that network increases as more people and businesses get connected. If you've read The Entrepreneurial State, you'll know that governments are often responsible for subsidising technological initiatives like this. The state, its citizenry, and its businesses all benefit from the increased efficiencies of electronic communications, so it is only right that the state should bootstrap these sorts of projects.

I sent an FoI request to find out more but it looks like all the information is now archived.

If you know of any other sources of information about Project Vanguard - please leave a comment.

It is quite an astonishing prediction, and the last line is perfection.

In 1926, several journals and almanacs syndicated a column discussing this comet. The above is from The New Jerusalem magazine and theological inspector which has added "This is very alarming!".

Most of the other reprints leave off this last line - but The Christian Advocate" adds "But who expects that the earth will endure four millions of years!"

Only a few thousand more years until we will know if the prediction was accurate!

How did radio-waves change the course of the war? Was RADAR solely the preserve of the British? What tactics were used to conceal developments? Was there an invisible war in the skies? Battle of the Beams takes a technical and social look at how physics became the forefront of attack and defence. It dives into the people who set their brains to work on the problem, and those who were determined to stop them.

The book honest about the problems of referencing contradictory source material. Some of the work published after the war is obviously biased towards the writer's personal successes - which don't always tally with reality. Similarly, there's a good overview of what both sides were doing in technology. We often only hear about ENIGMA and Britain's attempts to crack it - it's rare to read something from the other side. Here we get to experience both sides as they attempt to tame the radio waves, discover how they are being used against them, and the countermeasures both sides took.

The book is pacey and leaps back-and-forth across the channel, giving a real sense of drama to the sometimes baroque nature of physics research. There is a little touch of the "boys-own-adventure" what with daring fighter pilots and exciting raids - but it never strays into the hagiographic.

As ever with histories of the second World War, you're left wondering how it was the Allies succeeded. The book is full of infuriating little anecdotes like:

The report was filed and then forgotten, seen by some officials, understood by fewer, and then left in the archives of Whitehall. Britain continued for at least a year to believe that it, alone, had mastered this new wonder weapon of radar.

Similarly, a daring piece of espionage was fatally undermined when the defector was imprisoned and then:

through an astonishing cock-up the film he had gone to so much trouble to smuggle in had been sent to be processed at the post office, and most of it had been destroyed.

Gah!

Nevertheless, a fascinating look at how technology develops and how systems react to change.

This is a marvellous and depressing book. Marvellous because it finely details the history, atrocities, and geopolitical strife of unfettered capitalism. Depressing for much the same reason.

Dalrymple takes the thousand different strands of the story and weaves them into a (mostly) comprehensible narrative. With this many moving parts, it is easy to get confused between the various people, places, companies, and loyalties. Your eReader's dictionary will have a good workout as you try to decipher the various calques and loanwords.

It is more nuanced than I expected. Rather than just an unending parade of awfulness, it does dive in to the various attempts to reign in the terror and promote peaceful trade. These nearly always failed. Similarly, there were individual acts of kindness and honour which, nevertheless, cannot begin to make up for the exploitation.

The one question it doesn't (and possibly can't) answer is "what would India have been like without the EIC?" Obviously the company was hugely disruptive and extracted vast amounts of wealth - but the history of every continent shows internecine warfare whenever a ruler dies. A constant theme of the book is "Almost immediately, the court disintegrated into rival factions" The bloody battles between the various states, despots, kings, and tyrants would have eventually occurred. The French - and other colonisers - would have also rampaged through the nation. This isn't to excuse the EIC, and almost everything they did was inexcusable, but rather to say they probably weren't uniquely awful in the atrocities they committed.

We see the rapacious nature of megacorporations today. While few have a standing army, they are all dedicated to usurping authority and plundering resources. The Anarchy describes how the Company whispered in the ears of leaders, promised them the world, and then cruelly turned on them. Again, a depressing reflection of our own times.

Notable by their absence are women. There are an endless assortment of unnamed dancing girls and courtesans, but the only named women are the (mostly British) wives in the background and Begum Samru. There's also only a brief mention of the other geopolitical impacts the EIC had. For example, I had no idea that the tea from the eponymous Boston Tea Party was supplied by the EIC.

I don't understand why publishers pretend eBooks have the same limitations as their paper counterparts. The paper book puts all the illustrations at the end - presumably to save money. But this book would have benefited from interspersing the portraits with the text. Similarly, a map or two wouldn't have gone amiss to help the reader visualise the tangled path the various armies took.

The books is disturbing and upsetting, but a vital read for anyone who wants to understand a key point in the world's history. If only we could learn from it, eh?

The response was swift and utterly devastating for those laggards who want to hold back progress. The AI guy said:

Books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will be instructed through AI. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with AI. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.

We have been working for some time on educational AI. It proves conclusively the worth of AI in chemistry, physics and other branches of study, making the scientific truths, difficult to understand from text books, plain and clear to children.

That's it. We can throw away all those outdated paper books. Children will learn directly from an AI which, coincidentally, is sold by the company. We can trust their studies on such matters and be assured that they have no ulterior motive.

But, ah my friends, I have told a slight untruth. I didn't ask that question. Frederick James Smith asked the question to Thomas Edison in 1913. The question was about the new and exciting world of motion pictures.

You can read the full exchange from The New York Dramatic Mirror.

A hundred-plus years since the great and humble Edison made his prediction and… books are still used in schools! Those of us of a certain age remember a TV occasionally being wheeled in for one lesson or another. Today's kids watch more video content than ever - of mixed quality - but still rely on books and teachers.

Videos are good for some aspects of learning, but woefully inadequate for others.

I'm not trying to say that just because one technology failed, so will all others. But it is amazing how AI-proponents are recycling the same arguments with basically the same timescale. Will AI be part of education? Sure! Just like videos, pocket computers, the Metaverse, and performance enhancing drugs.

Will it be the only tool ever needed for education? I doubt it. Will vested interests and uncritical journalists continue to boost it? You don't need to have read many history books to work out the answer.

Further reading: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Emanuele Lugli has noted, units of measurement are, for the powerful, ‘sly tools of subjugation’. Each time they’re deployed, they turn the world ‘into a place that continues to make sense as long as the power that legitimises the measurements rests in place’.

One thing that struck me was how often we squash measurements down into something human and usable.

As Kula notes, many historical studies of medieval metrology refer to the ‘primitivism’ and ‘crudity’ of elastic units, but in reality they are well fitted to the needs of the people who used them, embodying the relationship of humans to the land and capturing the necessities of their work.

Americans (wrongly) claim that Fahrenheit feels more natural. It doesn't; they're just used to it. But it does show that we have a bias for familiarity which stops the adoption of new forms and scales.

It dives into the human, social, and religious requirements for measurement. I particularly liked this little aside:

It’s perhaps due to this symbolic potency that the Bible mentions measurement more often than it does charity.

It is also a good compliment to A History of the World in 47 Borders - it shows how measurement lead to conquest, colonialism, and social upheaval.

Rather delightfully, the author goes a little gonzo and reports first-hand from various measurement sites. This isn't a dusty retelling of some encyclopædia article, it is a living exploration of the ritual around measurement. At times it appears that science and religion have an equal fervour for ceremony and obedience.

There is particular ire for the cultish weirdos of the Quantified Self movement, and it loops back to how measurement is a way for the uneasy to impose a sense of order on the world.

I found it a little too credulous about Zuboff's work on surveillance, but that's a minor criticism.

An excellent book for anyone interested in both the philosophy and practicality of measurement.

The problem with history is that is is all a bit samey. Someone unities an country using violence and cunning thus setting up an empire that will last a thousand years - only for his heirs to immediately fall into civil war on his death. There's only so many times you can read about the bloody Habsburgs fucking over yet another country before it gets tiresome.

The borders of the world have little to do with geography and all to do with the mundanity of indifferent administrators carving up the world to fit into neat little boxes, regardless of the wishes of the boxes' inhabitants.

My only quibbles are that it could really do with a more illustrations. Sometimes only a picture of a map will do.

Many are accused, and many hang despite their protestations. The town settles into an uneasy peace. And then, from London, rides a man determined to understand why his sister was accused and whether she yet lives.

Stories about the witch trials usually focus on the immediate horror - this is a superb look at the aftermath. Why do people turn on each other? What secrets will men murder for? How deep does guilt run?

It's a tangled tale, with a large dash of historial research to flesh it out. There's a lot of local slang to work through (another advantage of having an eReader with a comprehensive dictionary!) and some frenetic swordplay. It is bloody and gruesome without being excessive.

The audiobook is 99p on Audible - read by the superb Cliff Chapman - and the eBook is only £2.99 direct from the publisher.

What is feminism?

This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the autobiographies of prominent women in society.

Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, was the wife of former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. She was a socialite and knew simply everyone worth knowing. She asked her many friends to write a short autobiography of their formative years. The results were… eclectic.

Of course, the writers were all white Christian women who had achieved significant notability. Among them are women still remembered today and others who have long faded into obscurity. They (mostly) had fascinating lives which led them to the pinnacle of society. It is only when you read their Wikipedia biographies that you discover which were to become Nazi collaborators and eugenicists.

The women come from a range of backgrounds - we hear about the abject poverty of some childhoods and the stultifying luxury of others. The slang is outdated, and the name-dropping will send you scurrying for a search engine. A large number of the women complain about modernity, and how modern feminism has lost its way. Such complaints, it seems, will never be extinguished.

Of particular interest are the autobiographies of Sylvia Pankhurst and Coco Chanel. Pankhurst's is long and fascinating - Chanel's is hilarious and heartfelt. I've previously written about Caroline Haslett and her impact on the electrification of the British home - here she is in her own words. Similarly, Amy Johnson writing a few years before her disappearance is equally entertaining.

Of course, there are a number of biographies which are entirely skippable. The Marchioness of Londonderry spends about a hundred pages boring on about fox hunting and little else!

Times change, and reading this will expose you to some racism - both casual and explicit - as well as very outdated ideas on feminity, fidelity, and family. Some of the authors clearly feel that women can do anything as well as a man - others seem to advocate for women playing to their traditional strengths. The political spectrum is fairly well represented - although some of the arguments are now somewhat esoteric. One thing is for sure, there has never been any great consensus on what feminism means.

One of the things I found most interesting is the constant refrain from these women that they would rather have been men. Here's a sample;

Is that the frustration of women born in an unjust society, or something deeper?

This is a truly marvellous book. Both in terms of the ladies it portrays, and the arguments it espouses. It is also illustrated with a photograph and autograph of all its subjects. Although the book still appears to be in copyright, I'll attempt to non-destructively scan what I can for inclusion on Wikipedia.

The full list of contributors are:

• The Countess of Oxford and Asquith
• Margaret Campbell (Marjorie Bowen)
• Gabrielle Chanel
• Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, MD
• Caroline Haslett, CBE
• Ethel Levey
• The Marchioness of Londonderry, DBE
• Mary, Countess of Minto, CI
• Sylvia Pankhurst
• Edith Picton-Turbervill OBE
• Irene Vanbrugh
• Ellen Wilkinson, MA, MP

Some people celebrated when Saddam's statue was toppled in Iraq. Yet those same voices condemn the felling of Coulson, Rhodes, and a dozen other statues. Why?

Alex von Tunzelmann has a knack for getting to the heart of history in an accessible manner. There isn't a hefty amount of ponderous academic theory to wade through - just well researched stories mixed with contemporary accounts.

Statues don't have human rights. But our primitive brains sometimes seem to confuse the icon for the individual. When we have a parasocial relationship with a historical figure, it can be distressing to see their "body" being attacked and beaten by a mob. But the statues are of men, not gods. They weren't infallible in life and deserve to fairly assessed in death. A statue is the physical manifestation of propaganda - they are adverts for a cause. Pulling down a statue is a direct response to unwanted and offensive advertising.

The only weakness is that there are no photographs or etchings of the statues in question. The descriptions are vivid, but there's no substitute for seeing the article in question.

Towards the end of the book, she mentions the Empty Library in Berlin. It is a memorial to burned books. And this is where my thinking gets confused. Burning an individual book does not destroy history, nor does it harm a cause, or directly threaten an individual. Yet I have and instinctive liberal disgust at the sight of a book burning. I'd say I'm no less repulsed by it that a reactionary is at seeing a statue being pulled down.

Could someone write a similar set of essays defending book burning? Are there arguments to be made that some books are a monument to evil and their presence in libraries is a symbol of oppression? Fallen Idols makes a convincing case that merely putting a plaque on the side of a statue to explain historic context is insufficient - is the same true for the preface of dangerous book?

Fallen Idols is an excellent and well-told set of history stories. Highly recommended.

Some websites don't contain dates in their URls. There may not be a © date or publication date shown on the page. And the <meta> tags might not contain anything useful. If you're lucky, the site will look old fashioned:

Unlike the BBC, most sites have adopted the "Eternal CSS" pattern. When fashions change, the entire site gets a facelift - which means ancient articles look modern. This can mislead readers into thinking old information is new.

Here's (one way) this can be fixed - inspired by Moriel Schottlender fabulous historic CSS selector.

Get the page's publication date

A page might have a date published on it. For example:

Published on <time id="published" datetime="2005-02-14">Valentine's Day</time>

CSS has an attribute selector which can see the year encoded in that datetime:

[attr|=value] Represents elements with an attribute name of attr whose value can be exactly value or can begin with value immediately followed by a hyphen, - (U+002D). It is often used for language subcode matches.

That means, the element can be styled based on its year. For example, make the year 2005 green, and the year 2006 blue:

time[datetime|="2005"] {
  color: green;
}

time[datetime|="2006"] {
  color: blue;
}

That's fine for styling a specific element, but using the CSS property has() it is possible to set variables based on the date. For example, this code sets a variable which can be used anywhere on the page:

:root:has( time[datetime|="2005"] )  {
    --timeColor: green;
}

:root:has( time[datetime|="2006"] )  {
    --timeColor: blue;
}

p {
  color: var(--timeColor);
}

(Note that has() is only available in Chrome. It is coming soon to Firefox.)

Variables from Metadata

If the published date is in the metadata, rather than the body, it can still be used in CSS. This is how WordPress adds the original published date to a page's <head>:

<meta property="article:published_time" name="article:published_time" content="2007-11-16T12:34:41+00:00" />

The date can be accessed and used to set specific variables depending on the year:

:root:has( [name="article:published_time"][content|="2007"] ) {
    --font: "Old Fashioned";
    --bgColor: green;
    --fontColor: red;
    ...
}
:root:has( [name="article:published_time"][content|="2023"] ) {
    --font: "Modern";
    --bgColor: white;
    --fontColor: black;
    ...
}

Using this pattern, it is possible to have a single style-sheet which has a different look and feel depending on the age of the article.

Imagine that! You could set old pages to have a 1990's look and feel while keeping modern markup.

Maths limitations

It isn't yet possible to use the attr() CSS Function to get the date. And it is impossible to do if/else or use less than / greater than in CSS.

But we can cheat!

A variable can be set depending on the year published:

:root:has( [name="article:published_time"][content|="1998"] ) {
    --publishedYear: 1997;
}
:root:has( [name="article:published_time"][content|="1999"] ) {
    --publishedYear: 1999;
}
:root:has( [name="article:published_time"][content|="2000"] ) {
    --publishedYear: 2000;
}
...

That pattern can be repeated as far back as your site goes - and as far forward as you think you'll still be publishing.

CSS has no access to the computer's datetime functions - that requires JavaScript. But if the website does expose the date it was generated, it should be possible to calculate the age of the page.

For example, if the <body> contains:

<time id="RomanYear" datetime="2023">ⅯⅯⅩⅩⅠⅠⅠ</time>

The year can be turned into a variable using a similar pattern:

:root:has( #RomanYear[datetime|="2023"] ) {
    --currentYear: 2023;
}
:root:has( #RomanYear[datetime|="2024"] ) {
    --currentYear: 2024;
}
:root:has( #RomanYear[datetime|="2025"] ) {
    --currentYear: 2025;
}
...

It is then possible to use the calc() CSS function to calculate the age of the page:

--age: calc( var(--currentYear) - var(--publishedYear) );

From this, it's possible to work out how old the page is as a percentage of the site's history. For example, if the earliest publication on the site is from 2001:

--oldestYear:    2001;
--currentYear:   2023;
--publishedYear: 2014;

--siteAge: calc( var(--currentYear) - var(--oldestYear) ); /* 16 */

--pageAge: calc( var(--currentYear) - var(--publishedYear) ); /* 9 */

Finally, a sepia filter can be placed over the page - with its intensity higher the older a page is.

--percentAge: calc( var(--pageAge) / var(--site-age) );

--filterRatio: calc( var(--percentAge) );

filter: sepia( var(--filterRatio) );

What's next

What will you do with this forbidden information?

But who said it first? Oh, there are a variety of sites online which will swear that it's a modern author. But let's see if we can find a quote from the last century.

Back in 1999, Neil Gaiman was interviewed in Locus Magazine and said:

England has history; Americans have geography. Which goes back to that joke, ‘America is a country where 100 years is a long time, and England is a country where 100 miles is a long way.’ Both of those things are true on many levels. There really isn’t a great English road trip tradition, because in three or four days, you’ve done it all. Whereas in America, the idea of the road trip is this magnificent long slog.

So it was already an establish trope by the tail-end of the millennium - as can be seen in Billboard Magazine's October 1998 edition.

Diana Gabaldon published "Drums of Autumn" in 1996. She's often cited as the origin of the quote.

Travelling back a bit further, there's a Usenet post from 1995 where 'Mike "from the US, but my wife is from Scotland" Bartman' says:

It appears that the difference between the US and the UK is that in the UK 100 miles is a long way, and in the US 100 years is a long time... ;^)

There's quite a few Usenet posts with that phrase, but I couldn't find any before the mid 90s.

In 1992, Benjamin Jones wrote a column in "EUROPE, The Magazine of the European Community" (ISSN 0191-4545)

(60MB PDF Source)

But the earliest I can reliably trace it back is a book from 1991 called "The Changing context of social-health care : its implications for providers and consumers". It in, Emily Friedman wrote a paper called "Patients as Partners: The Changing Health Care Environment" which talks, in part, about the litigious nature of American consumers of health services. She writes:

You can read the original at the Internet Archive or on Google Books.

Who was this "Simon"? Is he a real or imagined interlocutor? Did he originate this mot juste? Given the passage of time, it's probably impossible to find out.

Sadly, Emily died in 2016. It sounds like she fought tirelessly for justice - may she rest in power.

As for unreliable sources? There's this page from Jan Kučera which catalogues jokes posted to HUMOR@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU. It appears to have gone live around 1996:

That claims to be from 1988 - but there doesn't appear to be an archive of the HUMOR@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU listserve that I can find.

However, it does turn up in the venerable TextFiles:

It looks like "Fraser" at DEC sent that via UUCP to (for those of you not familiar with the now obsolete "Bang Path Notation) funny at looking via University of Waterloo's math department. Whereupon Brad Templeton probably re-circulated it to Usenet's "rec.humor.funny".

And that's as far back as I can trace it. Early Internet history is either mouldering on a set of tapes somewhere or completely lost. Google Books and Archive.org don't show the phrase appearing any earlier. But perhaps your research skills are better than mine?

Can you find an earlier reference? If so, please stick a comment in the usual box.

So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this:

It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that people think degraded images are somehow more authentic.

But something was niggling me. Were there really videophones of that ilk when that song was released in 1998? Well, yes and no.

There's a long history of prototype video-telephony - and by the mid-1990s there were some consumer products available.

This sweet number would set you back $1,600 (About $3,500 today). Better hope you had at least one rich friend who also had one.

If you scour eBay, you can find videophones from that bygone era. They are few and far between because they were a commercial flop. Video compression technology was in its infancy and modem speeds were poor. Even if you paid for an ISDN line, the video quality was guaranteed to be crap.

But what about this specific phone? Well, here I must reveal the disappointing news that Bryan Adams is a big fat liar and his music videos are full of falsehoods and shouldn't be trusted for serious historical researchers.

Ahem.

That's not a videophone in the music video.

Thanks to the sleuthing of Taig McNab and Stuart Langridge we can see that the phone is the Uniden Axis H0100.

I found one on eBay - here's what it looks like after a few decades of use:

The logos at the top and bottom of the screen have been covered with black rectangles - which is what made me think there was a camera embedded in the unit.

Far from a full-colour screen, this video shows the screen is a pretty rubbish LCD affair. White background and a choice of blue or grey for text. Indeed, it was used as a glorified calendar with address-book capabilities. Judging by contemporary reports it could connect to CompuServe - but, as with early videophones the reviews were not ethusiastic. And no mention of video-calling.

So, there you have it. Music videos should only be used for entertainment purposes and nothing more serious.

How did Romans take a shit? That's at the heart of this book. Not just the how - but the why, the when, and the where. How did foreign toilet habits influence the state? Was hygiene properly understood? What are the limits of Roman engineering.

The book is interesting without being particularly entertaining. This isn't a Mary Roach style wander through the street of Pompei - it's a fairly dry scholarly work. It's also - like many academic eBooks - poorly formatted; all the figures and illustrations are placed at the end rather than being integrated with the text. It also doesn't distinguish between citations and footnotes, which can make reading it a bit wearisome.

It is full of curious little asides. As well as finding out that the Bocca della Veritá is probably a sewer cover (ew!) there's also this:

A rather startling anecdote in Aelian’s De natura animalium illustrates the perceived inherent danger that threatened when a house was connected to the public sewer. According to the tale, each night an octopus swam up through a house drain in the toilet, accessed a pantry, and ate the pickled fish stored there by Iberian merchants. As octopi are saltwater creatures, it is hard to believe that they could survive in a Roman sewer for very long, but the story would have raised eyebrows about sewer connections.

It also revealed to me just how much I didn't know about Roman culture.

From birth the Roman male was to be subjected to sensual deprivation, on the one hand, and strong bodily manipulation on the other. Not only were the nose and the back of the head of male Roman babies manually shaped on a daily basis by nurses or mothers, but their penises as well were regularly manipulated to stretch the foreskin.

O...K...

Ultimately, it's a fascinating look at just how sanitation came to be embedded in the empire, its limits, and the politics which made it possible. And lots of discussion about ancient graffiti!

Obligatory "Life of Brian" quote

REG: What have the Romans ever given us in return?
XERXES: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
XERXES: The aqueduct.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
COMMANDO: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

True!

I hope it is obvious that I am pro universal suffrage. What amuses me about these cards is how emotional they are! These aren't dispassionate arguments designed to calmly influence the rational man. It is all pure emotion! Looking through the archives of anti-suffragette postcards it's clear that men can't be expected to follow a logical argument; they have to be frightened of humiliation in order to make a decision.

I assume the copyright for these has long since expired - so feel free to enjoy some high quality scans - with bonus view of their backs.

Click to download

10MB:

6MB

Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode.

Errr... OMG, yes!

So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the GDS office, gushing about how much open source stuff we did - then got to watch him record a podcast.

Amanda - who has has a canny eye for when people are slightly star-struck - asked if I'd like to interview Bruce at the weekend. At the National Museum of Computing. For a new exhibition.

Errr... OMG, yes!

So me and Lowena Hull got to spend some time chatting to Bruce on camera about his involvement in open source, the early days of Debian, and why OSS is still relevant today.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Doing some filming with @BrucePerens & @LowenaHull for @openuk_uk. Thanks to @tnmoc for the great location! pic.x.com/nK4ihOhH0T

---

We had a good rambling chat - the majority of which never made it off the cutting room flaw. He was such an eloquent speaker - always taking a moment to marshal his thoughts and knowing exactly when to finish his soliloquy.

It was a fairly long and tiring afternoon. But we had just enough time to take a wander through TNMOC. Bruce - like lots of elder-statesgeeks - seemed to be in 7th heaven. I got a running commentary of "Wow! You know, I had an early one of these..." and "I think I've still got the original one in my attic..." and "When I worked at Pixar, I was chatting to Steve [Jobs] about this and we both thought it was pretty nifty..." along with the obligatory "Why is a slide-rule in a museum?"

I watched him go toe-to-toe with the geeks who maintain Colossus - discussing the intricacies of synchronising tape speeds, various Baudot codes, and where valves / tubes could still be acquired from.

I saw him in a spirited discussion about various flavours of ALGOL and the mechanics of repairing a filesystem on hard-drives the same height as a man.

We had an interesting chat about IBM and their complicity in the Nazi regime's use of Hollerith cards. And I got to give him a précis of the BBC Micro's impact on the UK.

He asked me to take a few photos of him standing by ancient monuments of technology

Bruce Perens K6BP - I Stand with Ukraine

@BrucePerens

1/2 Somehow I walked all of the way through @bletchleypark today without noticing any mention that the machines they talk about are actually operating next door at @tnmoc, due to the effort of incredibly skilled volunteers. And there is no flow between the two museums. Please ... pic.x.com/w11orsCof9

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And, at the end of the day, he shook my hand and thanked me for showing him such a great time.

What a delightful person.

As I discussed, Sir Smile's smile appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th folios. One hundred years after the 4th folio was printed, the smile vanished. The 1786 edition simply omits it.

At the time, I didn't have access to any other versions between 1685 and 1786 - but I'm delighted to tell you that I've now found one!

The Hathi Trust has a scan of 1709's "The works of Mr. William Shakespear : in six volumes ; adorn'd with cuts / revis'd and corrected, with an account of the life and writings of the author, by N. Rowe, Esq."

Here's there page of Winter's Tale, Act Ⅰ scene ⅱ:

Aha! This version of the play was edited by Nicholas Rowe - later to be the fourth Poet Laureate.

But can we blame him for the missing :)? That's a harder question to answer. While he undoubtedly revised, reorganised, and standardised Shakespeare - he did so from an inaccurate copy. According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica:

Rowe was the first modern editor of Shakespeare. It is unfortunate that he based his text (6 vols., 1709) on the corrupt Fourth Folio, a course in which he was followed by later editors. We owe to him the preservation of a number of Shakespearian traditions, collected for him at Stratford by Thomas Betterton.

Now this is interesting! We know that some of the Fourth Folios contain the smile - such as this one from the University of Victoria. So which is the corrupt one?

A few years ago, Christie's auctioned off a copy of the Fourth Folio with an interesting provenance:

Tantalizingly, this copy bears the ownership inscription of Charlot Rowe, plausibly Charlotte Rowe (c.1718-1739), the only daughter of Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718). Nicholas Rowe was a dramatist, England's poet laureate, and considered the first professional editor of Shakespeare's plays. His six-volume edition of the plays appeared in 1709. Rowe based his text on that of the most recent comprehensive edition, the Fourth Folio. A Fourth Folio associated personally with Nicholas Rowe and his family, and in such fresh condition, would be a monument in the history of Shakespeare studies.

Even more tantalisingly, the auction contains a high-resolution scan of The Winter's Tale, Act Ⅰ scene ⅱ!

Which, tragically, cuts off just before Sir Smile. :(

Nevertheless, we can compare the scene which is shown.

Here's the "Rowe" scan:

Here's the "Victoria" scan:

Comparing those two scans show them to be virtually identical - even down to the slight misprints on individual letters.

This version of the Folio does over-do the parenthesis. They appear to sometimes be mismatched - "Art thou my Calf?)" for example.

All of which leads me to this conclusion:

• If the Charlot Rowe copy is the same copy used by Nicholas Row - then he is likely the person who removed the smile.
• If Nicholas Rowe used a different copy - then it is likely someone else removed the smile.

So, can anyone find a pre-1709 version of The Winter's Tale which omits Sir Smile's smile?

The investigation continues!

I guess we have to learn that from random statues before they experience marisepultura…

Sanghera is very clear this isn't a purely academic history book. Although it has plenty of citations and references, it doesn't tie itself in knots attempting to pin down what we mean by empire - or whether it was "good or bad".

If we immerse ourselves in definitions, however, we will end up with yet another forbiddingly long academic book on empire, when my ambition is to create something resembling the opposite.

This is an accessible and entertaining look at how the empire developed and - more importantly - the impact it had on the UK. And it really is about impact. There is very little ethical equivocation here. As he says:

History and the people who made it were complicated. You can’t apply modern ethics to the past. To read history as a series of events that instil pride and shame, or a balance of rights and wrongs, is as inane as listing the events in your own life as good and bad.

There are undoubtedly some aspects of the empire which were shameful - even contemporary accounts of some the events reveal the British public's deep unease at what was occurring.

And yet, a lot of what we hear about empire today is a sort of boys-own story of daring-do. We need to understand the contemporary morality to understand how our ancestors' reactions made it possible to change the future.

It's also a good way to look at some of the issues we face now. While Rishi Sunak is the first Prime Minister of Indian descent, the first MP of Indian descent to be fairly elected was Dadabhai Naoroji in… 1892! The UK has been intertwined with other countries for so long that none of the arguments about people "coming over here" are particularly new.

As I mentioned, this isn't a book which is solely about bashing or discrediting the empire. The author presents some compelling counter narratives - both in terms of its popularity, positive impact, and consequences. The book avoids "both sides"ing the issues and is relatively good at letting the reader decide for themselves.

It is a decidedly contemporary book - going right up to the Edward Colston statue incident. But, as part of its contemporariness, I think it relies a little to much on witticisms from random Twitter users. Similarly, the use of neologisms I found a bit silly.

Ultimately, if we want to understand our country's trajectory we need to understand its past. The argument over whether slavery was ended due to morality or "econocide" allows us to assess whether we're making similar decisions today.

It's an excellent and informative book.

You know... I can't remember! I know I got to visit the "Broom Cupboard", and I'm pretty sure I did a lot of data entry, oh - and I sat in a meeting for "Two-Way TV".

These were the early days of the consumer Internet. The WWW was still brand new and it wasn't certain that it would be the dominant communications medium of the future. Digital TV had just launched in the UK and users were regularly exhorted to "press the red button now!" Doing so would bring up an MHEG page which acted as a sort of fancy teletext.

But, crucially, it was one way. You could do a quiz via red button, but there was no way to send your answers back to the broadcaster.

Two-Way TV aimed to change that. My memories are hazy, but I'm pretty sure it was a flimsy grey box which (somehow) integrated with your OnDigital TV Box and a modem. If you were watching "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" you could play along at home, send in your answers in realtime, and win REAL CASH PRIZES!!!

That was their pitch - you can read their now defunct website. UK broadcasters held trials but, ultimately decided to go for interaction via premium rate phone numbers. That led to Two-Way TV going bust. And, of course, sowed the seeds of a huge scandal in TV-land.

But that wasn't the only form of interaction that broadcasters trialled.

In the year 1999, Children's BBC launched a TV show called "Sub-Zero". Hardly anyone remembers it - indeed there's barely a paragraph on Wikipedia. It doesn't exist on YouTube. Essentially, it was kids' version of The Crystal Maze. With some kids taking part via webcams!

Here's a brief clip of the first episode of the second series - 27th February, 2000:

Not exactly impressive, but pretty good for a minimum viable product.

By the second episode, 5th March, the producers were comfortable enough with the technology to support four simultaneous participants!

I'm grateful to the archivists and researchers at the British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council for tracking down and digitising the episodes.

Webcams of that vintage - as you can see - were low resolution. A max of 640x480, but more likely to be 320x240. Which was fine because the fastest dial-up speed was 56kbps. The ability to transmit video and sound simultaneously was non-existent - hence having the kids on separate phones for voice.

I think it is a fascinating glimpse into the way audience participation developed. Moving from the ubiquitous phone-in to juddery video-in.

By October 2000, Tomorrow's World were interviewing people via webcam.

Nowadays our TV screens are full of pundits Zooming in from home. I don't know if Sub-Zero was the first UK show to use webcams for audience participation - but it was certainly an early pioneer. They proved that it was viable to have multiple video calls being muxed into a TV show. Sure, it was a little shonky, but 20 years later it still looks futuristic.

Was there anything earlier than 2000?

On UK TV? I don't think so.

In the USA, four months prior to Sub-Zero, one of the inventors of the first live camera on the web was interviewed on a cable TV show called ZDTV. Indeed, ZDTV had users calling in via webcam+phone from around mid-1999

In 1995, CNET's Cable TV show described a webcam - but they didn't stream any humans, just a view of San Francisco.

If you know of an earlier example of people participating in a TV show via webcam, please let me know!

Thanks

Many thanks to James O'Malley for leading me down this rabbit hole. Hasn't he grown!?