Tech Lunch

Sometimes, whilst flicking idly through a trade magazine, a product catches my eye that just makes me laugh out loud with a burst of geek joy. The people I share an office with usually raise their eyes from their screens just long enough to acknowledge me but not enough to encourage me. So rather than being indulged by my colleagues who, I suspect, just don’t appreciate my sense of humour, I thought I’d blog about it: Pantone mugs.

Each bone china coffee mug is adorned with one of just ten Pantone colours, complete with the associated code, for example Royal Blue 286C. The mugs are produced by W2 Products and you have to see them to appreciate the effect. You can read all about them on their website including the news that they can all be dishwashered safely except the Pink 239C mug. If you work in Web design, illustration or another related industry what could be better for the office?

This got me thinking. A long, long time ago I kept a Pantone swatch card on my desk which listed the code numbers for the restricted list of 216 colours (there are actually thousands of Pantone colours) that had to be used on the early Web. The reason for limiting the colour spectrum on the Web was due to the browsers’ widespread adoption of something called the Netscape colour cube which defined the ‘Web safe’ colours. Perhaps the W2 company should consider producing a limited edition range that is both fully Web and dishwasher safe?

iPods, mobile phones and blackberries are all symbols of our modern era. Or are they? Not according to the Museum of Lost Interaction, a collection of recently found technologies from the earlier part of last century. The museum, which is based at the University of Dundee, features artefact classics like the 1952 Zenith Radio Hat (a combined trilby and walking cane) and the 1900 Richophone, a multi-player role playing game based on a series of hotel telephone booths. My favourite is the mobile Morse Code device.

At first I thought this was an elaborate April Fool, but it turns out to be genuine archaeological work of staff and students in the computing and design departments at the University. Or is it?

Happy Easter.

I was up in Leeds on Friday, helping to celebrate 50 years of computing at my old university. The keynote speech was delivered by Dr. Andrew Herbert, a Leeds alumnus (1975), and now Director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge (UK). He mentioned one of his lecturers, Mike Wells, and his views on networks. Back in the early 1970s Mike was adamant that stand-alone computers would not be stand-alone for much longer. Apparently, during one of his lectures, Dr Wells had revealed: “there’s this thing called ARPANET in the United States which could be interesting”. ARPANET was, of course, the forerunner of the Internet.

In another of Friday’s talks, Dave Holdsworth, an ex-member of staff, gave a talk on the history of computing at the university. He mentioned that by the mid seventies a diverse and pretty incoherent collection of networks had sprung up between self-selecting groups of universities and research agencies. In 1975, Professor Wells was instrumental in producing what has become known as the Well’s Report which led to the creation of the JANET (Joint Academic NETwork). This backbone network successfully linked the growing jumble of university inter-networks into one powerful national system. This was pioneering work in those days, and, as I have already outlined in an earlier blog entry about Tom Loosemore, provided a skeleton for the vision of the later development of the public Internet in the UK.

Professor Mike Wells was therefore not only a lecturer with an early grip on the importance of linking computers together, but was also a leading figure both in the university computing service and on the national networking scene. As the JANET was formally launched 23 years ago, on 1st April 1984, it also seems fair to say that he probably also had a rather wry sense of humour.