British Science Week 2024 (11 – 15 March) was all about time so to celebrate we thought we’d create this timely portal.
How time helped in early celestial navigation
The very first computers: Victorian engineer Charles Babbage designed, though never built the first mechanical computer. The first computers had actually existed for a long time before he had his idea, though. The British superiority at sea and ultimately the Empire was already dependent on them. They were used to calculate books of numbers that British sailors relied on to navigate the globe. The original meaning of the word computer was actually a person who did these calculations. The first computers were humans. [Read the article]
Two or more people can write in a document at the same time, thanks to Operational Transformation
How do online word processing programs manage to allow two or more people to change the same document at the same time without getting in a complete muddle? One of the really key ideas that makes collaborative writing possible was developed by computer scientists, Clarence Ellis and Simon Gibbs. They called their idea ‘Operational transformation’. [Read the article]
How to find your own personal time zone
Time is the theme for 2024’s British Science Week. Here’s how to calculate your own personal time zone. [Read the article]
Mercury delay lines – Quicksilver memory
Some 1950s computers used tubes filled with mercury as a memory to store numbers. Data arriving electronically at a mercury delay line was converted to a sound pulse in the mercury. The computer would use its clock to help it count how many pulses had passed and a microphone listened for the right time to release it from the memory store back into the circuitry to do a calculation with it. [Read the article]
A gendered timeline of technology – celebrating women in computing
Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious. Here is a gendered timeline of technology innovation to offset that. [Read the article] [Download the poster]
The tactful watch – for when you need to be subtle about clockwatching
For those times when it might be rude to look at your watch in public this 18th Century tactile and tactful watch will let you feel what time it is… [Read the article]
Comic timing – studying comedy with computers
Comedians don’t just learn jokes but perfect their timings and pauses to make them funnier. Vanessa Pope used a computer program to analyse comedians’ speech and speech patterns. [Read the article]
Click the Portals image below to uncover our other themed pages.
Image credits:
Celestial navigation: brass sextant by Marek Ostasz from Pixabay
Operational transformation: Writing together image by aymane jdidi from Pixabay
Time zone: Colourful map by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Quicksilver memory: Flying Tennis ball image by bess.hamiti@gmail.com from Pixabay
Tactful watch: hand in pocket
Comic timing: Comedian by Rob Slaven from Pixabay
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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