Tag: HISTORY

While Google's stance on a lot of things is "just search it," that's not always the most comfortable way to do things. For example, when I poke around my browser's history page it's nice to have things sorted and grouped rather than deposited in a large pile. History2 provides a more flexible way to peruse Chrome's archives. Install the extension and click its icon in your toolbar, and the ...

The Internet Movie Database turned 19 yesterday. If you're scratching your head wondering how the IMDb can be older than the web, you'll notice that the first initial is I, not W. That's because the iconic destination for information about films and TV shows actually predates the web. In fact, the earliest version of the technology behind the IMDb was a set of scripts for searching the USENET ...

History Tree is a (Windows only) Firefox add-on that makes your browser history easier to navigate by displaying it as a tree diagram. It gives you a quick visual layout of the tabs and windows you've opened, and lets you find the page you're looking for even when the browser's back button won't reach that far. You can also switch to a page thumbnail view that makes it easier to find the page you ...

With all the buzz about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how powerful were the computers that "took us to the Moon?" It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing. If you've never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this post. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read ...

I don't refer to my browsing history all that often, but there are times when I need to go back and find a particular something that I just can't remember by name. Firefox's default Today/Yesterday/every day this week setup isn't really the tidiest way to go back three or four days, and it's hard to search when you can't recall what to search for. History Submenus makes the task a bit easier by ...

My beloved Firefox seems to have gotten kind of bloated and slow lately, particularly when starting it up. If you've experienced a similar decrease in Firefox's startup performance, check out this quick tip from Mac Tricks and Tips. One of Firefox's default settings is to remember 90 days of history. This means that Firefox is maintaining a list of every site you've visited along with the date ...

Firefox 3.1 or 3.5 or whatever it's called these days, includes a feature that lets you delete just some information from your web browsing history instead of clearing your entire history file in one fell swoop. All you have to do is open the history section in your bookmark library or in the "most visited" sites section in your browser toolbar, right-click on a site and select "Forget About This ...

Plenty of options exist for the odd time you want to capture a web page exactly the way you see it. BackupURL is an interesting new option - think of it as an on-demand Wayback Machine. Just copy and paste a URL and press the backup button, and a truncated link is created for you. For example, the TSN page above - its content has likely changed if you visit the original link, but the BackupURL ...

This week's Retro Video is a short history of ENIAC, which was "born" on February 15, 1946. On that day ENIAC's immense banks of vacuum tubes, crystal diodes, relays and other electronic parts were warmed to a crispy golden brown as ENIAC set to the task of calculating how best to turn humans a crispy golden brown. Happy Love Day! ...

I love the quote from playwright John Allen, who really understood how "Internet" could connect physically disparate affinity groups. John also says, "there's an interesting kind of restraint that you find. ...There's not a lot of put-downs... not screenfulls of 'go to hell.'" My how times of changed. These days anonymity and "Internet" are synonymous with flame wars and cyberbullying. One can ...

Historicaltweets.com takes us on a journey through time to see Twitter posts from historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Michael Jordan. There are categories for 1800's, various decades of the 1900's, and even Comically Old when the word "Twitter" would have fit nicely in iambic pentameter. You can submit your own ideas, choose to view a random tweet, and will soon be able to buy ...

Though not as well-known as Microsoft's Office Labs, Intuit has a similar endeavor of their own. One of its slickest apps is Thumbstrips, a Firefox addon that records your browsing history as thumbnails. It's currently featured in the Digital Pack Rat assortment on Fashion Your Firefox, and for good reason. Thumbstrips' snapshots make locating previously viewed pages much easier. Apart from the ...

Widgets, most people use them now on their social network pages, blogs, or even on desktops. But where did they originate and how did they come to be? Niall Kennedy, the widget guru, answers that in his brief history of the widget. Where did it all begin? Back in 1981 when the graphical user interface was first designed for home use. Netscape pushed the widget along its journey in 1996 with the ...

Many enthusiastic web surfers know that the venerable Internet Archive is the home of the Wayback Machine, a tool that allows you to go back in time with a particular website to see what previous versions looked like. What we hadn't noticed until today is that the Wayback Machine has a bookmarklet you can use when viewing any site to quickly check if there are archived versions of it. The 'marklet ...

What would you say is the greatest software ever written? Snood would probably top my list, but I must admit InformationWeek's list is a bit more.. practical. Charles Babcock's What's the Greatest Software Ever Written? is a great mini-survey of the history of software, terminating in a list of 12 of the world's most historic software developments. I won't ruin the final 3 for you, but here are ...