Dona Bailey was the programmer on a four-person team for the successful Atari arcade game Centipede in her first assignment. She was hired by Atari in 1980 and was the only female programmer in its nascent arcade division. When she left the much larger Atari two years later, she was still the only woman in…
We Are Deciding Our Future
Vannevar Bush’s idea “The Memex” used to be a new, complicated, and unreliable way of memorization for people in the 1930’s, but time turned it into a memory system on which modern people rely on. We changed complexity and reliability from synonyms to antonyms. Google has become the most popular search engine because they have…
Listen! Listen! Can’t you hear them?
We seek for a positive ethical role In the age of big data, we often hear our friends and family members talking about how they are worrying about their safety, from cameras on their phone and laptop, to their personal information; from how to make sure their uber/lyft driver is safe, to online dating. As…
From memex to Tiktok
Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly “As We May Think” in 1945. As early as the 1930s he was already ahead of his time in wanting to improve the way people accessed, stored, and communicated information. In this landmark article, he describes a hypothetical computer-like machine, the memex, which would help someone…
The Hidden Heroine: Annie Easley
Brian Zhao Erin Malone IXD History 26 September 2020 Annie Easley Annie Easley is NASA’s first African American computer and rocket scientist. She was born in Birmingham of Alabama on April twenty-third, 1933. Although the Jim Crow Laws were enforced in Alabama and the opportunities for African Americans to receive education were very limited at…
