These are my links for 2009-06-08 through 2009-06-22:

• Cappuccino Web Framework - Build Desktop Class Applications in ... - Web development framework modeled after Macintosh application development.
• almost.at - Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time - Using social media sites to follow events live.
• Wordnik - Site that gives you information about a word including definition and recent uses around the web.
• SimilarSites - Find Similar Sites - Finds similar sites by searching a domain name.
• Prezi - The zooming presentation editor - Web based presentation creation tool with zooming effects.

I went by the Computer History Museum out in Mountain View while I was in town last week for the Google I/O conference. I really enjoyed the the museum and I thought I would share some pictures of the artifacts I particular liked.

Besides the museum and the physical artifacts they have, they also have an awesome YouTube channel with a ton of great content. I have been working watching all of the content for a few months now.

http://www.youtube.com/computerhistory

This is a book I finished a while back. I haven't had a chance to read or write much lately. Anyway this book is a good anecdotal telling of the development of the personal computer. It is a collection of stories about the various people involved in the development of the personal computer.

It starts with the story of the labs at Stanford and people like Doug Englebart and his amazing demo of inventions that introduced many of the commonplace technologies that we rely on today. And it takes you all the way up to XEROX PARC, Homebrew Computer club, the founding of Apple and Microsoft.

The part I enjoyed the most was near the end when the book was telling the stories from the Homebrew Computer club. This is where everything was really starting to come together in a package that was suitable for an individual owner and user. It also explains (at least I think) where the roots of the anti-Microsoft mentality comes from in the open source community. The story goes; Bill Gates brings MS-Basic and demos it at a Homebrew meeting and someone takes a copy and gives it to everyone in the group and it gets further shared from there (like the club always had with technology in the past). This sharing angers Bill Gates and causes him to lash out in a series of letters to the club. And I think the bad feelings and mistrust have just grown from there by further actions on both sides considering a number of the members in the club went on to become figures in both commercial industry and open source.

The only part of the book that I didn't really like is how it kept trying to tie drug use in as often as possible as if it was a centrally driving factor in the innovation of the time. I don't think it is that surprising that people experimented with drugs in the 60's and 70's.

Markoff, J. (2006). What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry. New York: Penguin Books.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64695919