1949. augusztus 29-én, Szemipalatyinszkben, a Dél-Urál lábánál, egy gyönyörű tájon felrobbantották az orosz atombombát, majd a környék a szovjet nukleáris kísérletek fő színhelyévé vált. Hat évvel később itt robbant az első szovjet hidrogénbomba is. Annyi volt mindössze a gond, hogy a környéken másfélmillióan éltek.
(via Szemipalatyinszk, 456 szovjet nukleáris kísérlet színhelye | GRJ)
The UNIX Operating System
In the late 1960s, Bell Laboratories computer scientists Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson started work on a project that was inspired by an operating system called Multics, a joint project of MIT, GE, and Bell Labs. The host and narrator of this film, Victor Vyssotsky, also had worked on the Multics project. Ritchie and Thompson, recognizing some of the problems with the Multics OS, set out to create a more useful, flexible, and portable system for programmers to work with.
What’s fascinating about the growth of UNIX is the long amount of time that it was given to develop, almost organically, and based on the needs of the users and programmers. The first installation of the program was done as late as 1972 (on a NY Telephone branch computer). It was in conjunction with the refinement of the C programming language, principally designed by Dennis Ritchie.
Because the Bell System had limitations placed by the government that prevented them from selling software, UNIX was made available under license to universities and the government. This helped further its development, as well as making it a more “open” system.
This film “The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive”, is one of two that Bell Labs made in 1982 about UNIX’s significance, impact and usability. Even 10 years after its first installation, it’s still an introduction to the system. The other film, “The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use”, is roughly the same, only a little shorter. The former film was geared towards software developers and computer science students, the latter towards programmers specifically.
The film contains interviews with primary developers Ritchie, Thompson, Brian Kernighan, and many others.
While widespread use of UNIX has waned, most modern operating systems have at least a conceptual foundation in UNIX.
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
A Cartoon of the Day, in honor of our Science Fiction issue.
Hold on tight: in 4 billion years, we’re due for a galactic collision!The galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy that lives in a small cluster of other galaxies called the Local Group. The other big member is the Andromeda galaxy, located about 2.5 million light years away. That’s a long way off, but we’ve known for a long time that Andromeda is heading more or less toward us at a speed of roughly 100 km/sec (60 miles/second).
The question is, is it headed directly at us, or does it have some “sideways” motion and will miss us?New results announced today by astronomers using Hubble show that — gulp! — Andromeda is headed right down our throats!
But don’t panic. It won’t happen for nearly 4 billion years.
Watch the video here.
Stellar archaeology traces Milky Way’s historyThis illustration shows the Milky Way Galaxy’s inner and outer halos. A halo is a spherical cloud of stars surrounding a galaxy. Astronomers have proposed that the Milky Way’s halo is composed of two populations of stars. The age of the stars in the inner halo, according to measurements by the Paranal Observatory, is 11.5 billion years old. The measurements suggest the inner-halo stars are younger than the outer-halo population, some of which could be 13.5 billion years old.
Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI)
Out of This World Physics Demos
Don Pettit has been producing regular science education videos while stationed on the International Space Station as part of his Science Off The Sphere series. They are fantastic! I think science lessons would be much more fun if we got to do them all in microgravity.
In the video above, he demonstrates wave oscillations on water droplets using a laptop speaker. More great videos can be found here, including antibubbles and dancing droplets.
(via MetaFilter)
