The PDP-11 was, and is, an extremely successful and influential family of machines which has spanned over two decades from the early 1970s through the mid 1990s. This note is an attempt to gather some of the knowledge on this family and present it for the benefit of those who are enthusiasts, curious, or downright confused as to what the -11 was and is, and how it related and still relates to its world.
What operating systems were written for the PDP-11?
Made by a pharmacist whose son was sick with croup, Vicks VapoRub saw skyrocketing sales during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.
For most people, memories of childhood coughs and colds are synonymous with a menthol-smelling ointment in a dark blue jar with a turquoise cap.
For more than a century, Vicks VapoRub has been a household name across continents. How it became one has roots in the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century.
The ingenious American engineering behind early sequential signals in Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars
By rotating a cam assembly, three lobes completed circuits for individual bulbs: inner, middle, and outer.
The electric Ford Mustang Mach E SUV is the latest FoMoCo product to feature sequential turn signals, blinking taillights that show, by flashing individual LED bulbs, the direction you’re turning. But what if I told you this is old technology, nothing new, and first saw use in the mid-1960s?
First introduced on the 1965 Ford Thunderbird and popularized on the more powerful Ford Mustang and Mercury Cougar, sequential turn signals were a novel way to differentiate Ford products from the rest of the muscle cars.
The National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting has been around for more than 20 years, but a project supported by a $500,000+ grant has transformed its World War II-vintage building — the former VOA Bethany “relay station” transmitting plant — into a world-class repository of communications history and knowledge.
The 30,000-square-foot, two-story building was deeded over to the township of West Chester, Ohio, following the VOA’s closing of the station in 1994.
SUMMARY
The author reaches 1,800 years back into history, looking at the oldest, handwritten editions of the letters of Paul. Actual photographs of the manuscripts are included in this article.
Vintage Wings of Canada is a not-for-profit, charitable organization with a collection of historically significant aircraft and is run entirely by volunteers. It is our mission to acquire, restore, maintain and fly classic aircraft significant to the early history of powered flight in Canada, focussing largely on the aircraft of the Second World War. We run education and flying programs with our own aircraft and in concert with the aircraft collection of our founder, Michael Potter. It is our goal to inspire and educate future generations about the historical significance of our aviation heritage and to demonstrate that these aircraft are more than just metal, fabric, and wood artifacts. We seek to keep the souls of these aircraft alive through the thundering sound of engines, the smell of leather, glycol, oil and sweat, as well as the laughter of their pilots as they dance with them in their natural element in the skies over Canada.
There may be no more iconic aircraft in America than a Goodyear blimp. A blimp is a unique advertising extravaganza and a mainstay of live aerial television coverage at every imaginable sporting event. The Goodyear blimp represents the brand, but also is every bit of Americana as can be found in aviation.
This year, two of the Goodyear NT (new technology) airships — Wingfoot One and Wingfoot Two — are in attendance in a salute to the 100th anniversary of Goodyear’s airship operations. There are three Goodyear blimps in the United States; Wingfoot Three is in for maintenance. To honor the heritage of the program, Wingfoot One is flying a livery inspired by the original Pilgrim. In 1925, Pilgrim became the world’s first commercial nonrigid airship that used helium.
The great movies, directors, actors, and writers of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s produced what has since been called the Golden Era of Hollywood. Technological advances, especially sound and color, also contributed. Scripts came from great novels and works of history, and from compelling stories serialized in magazines. One of those who contributed mightily to the Golden Era, in particular to the movies of John Ford, was the writer James Warner Bellah. His stories were powerful, poignant, and filled with men of character and courage. He himself was a veteran of not only World War I but also World War II. //
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Bellah published eight books and three dozen short stories and articles. He also wrote or co-wrote nine screenplays. He will probably be best remembered for his work with the legendary director John Ford. The two first met, not in Hollywood, but in India during World War II. Ford’s famous cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), came from the pen of James Warner Bellah. //
Probably the best of these films is The Sea Chase (1954), starring John Wayne and Lana Turner.
Hemmi Bamboo Slide Rule Company Ltd. in Japan is the oldest and most well known Japanese manufacturing company making slide rules. Jirou Hemmi and Company was founded in 1895 and, in 1912, was granted by the Japanese Patent Office Patent No. 22129 for their laminated bamboo construction method for slide rules. As a young company wanting exposure to a larger market, They started by selling distribution licenses to three other companies: the Fredrick Post Company of Chicago, Illinois, the Hughes-Owen Company of Canada and Tamaya & Company of Tokyo, Japan.
Re: I saw similar a couple times in that timeframe ...
My recollection, because I started to make phone bill payments in those years, was that the local operating telcos (first the “Baby Bells” and then their ever-merging successors) had two types of residential service on offer: one at a nominally lower base cost plus a charge for every local call, and one at a supposedly higher base cost that allowed unlimited local calling. Both, of course, charged a king’s ransom for a domestic long-distance call. An overseas long-distance call required a cardiologist when your bill arrived.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-80 was the last American-built aircraft to feature an analog cockpit. The aircraft entered commercial service with Swissair in October 1980, and became a mainstay of short-haul aviation across the world. The US-based manufacturer went on to build a total of 1,191 MD-80s, several of which are still in service today.
A decade ago, an employee stole 25 priceless documents from the Netherlands’ National Archives in the Hague. The trove included 16th-century records of clandestine government affairs, a 15th-century letter from a knight and documents from the Dutch East India Company.
Officials weren’t aware the documents had been stolen until recently, when they were returned by the Amsterdam police and art detective Arthur Brand, who is known for recovering lost and stolen artworks and artifacts. //
Officials at the archives knew that the documents were missing, but they assumed they had simply been misplaced. “We manage more than [90 miles] of archives, over 15 million photographs and 300,000 maps and drawings,” a spokesperson for the National Archives tells NL Times. “With such numbers, it is impossible to have a complete inventory of all the documents.”
Townhall.com @townhallcom
·
LOL — @SpeakerJohnson is OVER Jeffries' crap.
"Ronald Reagan said one time, 'No speech should be longer than 20 minutes.' Unlike the Democrat leader, I'm gonna honor my colleagues time and be a little more brief than that." 😂
0:20 / 0:20
1:55 PM · Jul 3, 2025. //
"My friends and colleagues, we are so blessed, we should not take it for granted. We live in the most free, the most successful, the most powerful, the most benevolent nation that has ever been on the face of the Earth. And there's a reason for that — the reason that we are the greatest nation is because we were built on the ultimate foundation. And the bold Declaration that my friend Hakeem Jeffries articulated earlier is true. We unite under that. The bold Declaration that we do hold these truths to be self-evident. What is a self-evident truth? It's something that's obvious. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' — it does not say 'born equal,' it says 'created equal.' And...it is our creator that gives us our rights.
"See? The powerful thing about that is we're the first nation in the history of the world that acknowledged that our rights do not derive from government — they come from God himself. You see those words up there — that motto — it says 'In God We Trust,' right above the Speaker's rostrum. You know, a previous Congress put that there in the early sixties....Congress voted to put that there as a rebuke to the Soviets' worldview at the height of the Cold War. Why? Because communism, socialism, find their root in Marxism, and Marxism begins with the belief that there is no God. It's wrong."
"This Congress made a stand those many years ago, and we should do it again — we're different, we're distinct, we're exceptional, because we acknowledge that right there, our motto. It doesn't say 'In Government We Trust,' it says 'In God We Trust.' And we better remember that. He has blessed us with this grand experiment in self-governance now for almost two-and-a-half centuries, and by God's grace, we are working hard, and we are delivering on our promise to Make America Great Again.
If you haven't ventured over to the America 250 link on Whitehouse.gov, this Independence weekend is the perfect time. In partnership with Prager U, the White House has launched the "Founders Museum," with videos that feature AI representations of the founders and revolutionaries of our republic. With the representation of each biography and their contributions to the founding of our nation, the AI animations put forth a challenge to the viewer on how one should carry forward liberty and what was fought and paid for through their sacrifice.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/america250/founders-museum/ //
The videos can be viewed individually, in their respective series (Founding Fathers, Ladies of the Revolution, Major Events, and Declaration of Independence Signers), or as a whole unit. The section also includes a learning option with downloadable biographies, portraits, and documents that allow one to create their own "Founders Museum."
The 2025 Half Century spectacular will showcase large daily field demonstrations, remarkable feature displays, a daily Parade of Power down the runway, and sanctioned tractor pulls.
We look forward to seeing you August 21-24!
Newly announced catalog collects pre-2022 sources untouched by ChatGPT and AI contamination. //
As it turns out, his pre-AI website isn't new, but it has languished unannounced until now. "I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn't been contaminated with AI-generated content," he wrote on his blog.
The website points to several major archives of pre-AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (before ChatGPT's November 2022 release), Project Gutenberg's collection of public domain books, the Library of Congress photo archive, and GitHub's Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq project appears on the list as well, flash-frozen from a time before AI contamination made its methodology untenable.
The site accepts submissions of other pre-AI content sources through its Tumblr page. Graham-Cumming emphasizes that the project aims to document human creativity from before the AI era, not to make a statement against AI itself. As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to natural levels, low-background steel eventually became unnecessary for most uses. Whether pre-AI content will follow a similar trajectory remains a question.
Still, it feels reasonable to protect sources of human creativity now, including archival ones, because these repositories may become useful in ways that few appreciate at the moment. For example, in 2020, I proposed creating a so-called "cryptographic ark"—a timestamped archive of pre-AI media that future historians could verify as authentic, collected before my then-arbitrary cutoff date of January 1, 2022. AI slop pollutes more than the current discourse—it could cloud the historical record as well.
For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what may someday be seen as the last pre-AI era. It's a digital archaeology project marking the boundary between human-generated and hybrid human-AI cultures. In an age where distinguishing between human and machine output grows increasingly difficult, these archives may prove valuable for understanding how human communication evolved before AI entered the chat.
It has long been clear that the leftist activists who succeeded in getting “Juneteenth” added as a federal holiday meant to strip Independence Day of some of its moral and historical significance. The timing of Juneteenth, only a fortnight and change before the Fourth of July, is intended to usurp some of the Fourth’s glory. At the same time, the theme of the new holiday is designed to suggest that slavery, rather than liberty, is the defining feature of our founding. It’s an attempt to make 1776 vie with 1619, with the abolition of slavery being portrayed as our real moment of independence, in place of the moment when we actually proclaimed our independence and declared that “all men are created equal.” //
Per the Office of Personnel Management, the official name of the holiday to be observed on June 19 is “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The official name of the holiday to follow 15 days later is “Independence Day.” It could hardly be clearer that Juneteenth was intended to compete with, and partially marginalize, the Fourth of July.
America does not need, should not have, and does not legitimately have, two Independence Days. Designating Juneteenth as “National Independence Day” intrudes upon our actual Independence Day. It suggests that Americans’ freedom doesn’t really trace to the Declaration of Independence but rather to the Emancipation Proclamation — or, more exactly, to awareness of that proclamation (more than two years after it was issued). It also suggests that our actual Independence Day doesn’t apply to all Americans. //
PBS writes, “Juneteenth commemorates when the last enslaved African Americans learned they were free.” This, however, is false. After Juneteenth, which marks the moment when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in June 1865 and announced that all slaves in Texas were free, people were still held in slavery in Delaware and Kentucky, border states unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. //
Only Congress and the states, through the passage of a constitutional amendment, had the power to end slavery on a national basis.
This fact, and the fact that slavery remained in existence in Delaware and Kentucky after Juneteenth, likely would have been raised in the Senate had it bothered to engage in a genuine debate over whether Juneteenth should be a federal holiday. Instead, that body, which once prided itself on its vigorous deliberations, passed the Juneteenth bill under a unanimous consent agreement in the wake of the George Floyd riots, an act of true irresponsibility and political cowardice.
Since Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in Texas, rather than the end of slavery in the U.S., it a much more sensible holiday for Texas than for the U.S. as a whole.
On a national basis, a date truly worth commemorating would be December 6, the day on which the 13th Amendment was ratified, marking our constitutional triumph over an inherited evil that clashed with our founding principles. On that day in 1865, Americans successfully amended their Constitution to read, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” That is a day, and those are words, worth celebrating.
Congress should make December 6 a federal holiday to celebrate America’s abolition of slavery, while eliminating Juneteenth as a federal holiday and thereby confirming that we have but one Independence Day.
Rare RCA control panel from 1966 may be the only surviving example of its kind.
All indications are that the Democrat Party is in big trouble.
Let’s look back at American political history. This country has had a tradition of having two broad and ideologically fluid coalition parties that contest with each other across the nation. Over our history, two of these American parties have disappeared from existence – the Federalists and the Whigs.
How and why did this happen?