(Found via SF Signal.)

And that idea was an awful lot like a KVM switch.

In a New York Times interview, ARPAnet pioneer Bob Taylor describes one of the foundational motivations for developing ARPAnet as this:

“We had in my office three terminals to three different programs that ARPA [The U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency] was supporting. … For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at SDC and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or MIT about this, I had to get up from the SDC terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. I said, oh, man, it’s obvious what to do: If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet.” [Emphasis mine.]

For those of you who don’t know Bob Taylor, you almost certainly know his work. While at NASA, he helped direct funding to Douglas Engelbart’s research, which gave us the computer mouse. Years later, Taylor worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Complex (PARC), where he developed a rather infamous device known as the Alto – the world’s first personal computer with Ethernet and a graphic user interface.

In between his NASA and PARC gigs, Taylor worked with another computer pioneer named J.C.R. Licklider. Together, this pair authored one of the seminal academic papers in the history of modern technology: “The Computer as a Communication Device.” In it the pair describes “a labile network of networks” of computers that “foster a working sense of community among their users.” Licklider and Taylor weren’t just talking about a decentralized network; they were conceiving online communities, e-mail, video conferences, Skype, wikis, and so much of the supposedly cutting-edge modern Internet we love today. And this paper was written in 1968.

About the only thing Taylor and Licklider didn’t foresee in their paper was the word Internet. In fact, they didn’t really name the network at all. Licklider had already done that, five years earlier, giving this computer communications web a sci-fi inspired name that hints at why we call it the Internet today.

WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME FOR THE PROPOSED COMPUTING NETWORK WE NOW CALL THE INTERNET?

Get the answer.

This week’s quibble comes from the Nov. 11, 2008 edition of Geek Trivia, “A little white-hot lie.” TechRepublic member gary (along with several other folks) took issue with the region of the sun which I termed the coolest:

“You stated that the coolest part of the Sun is the surface at 5,700K to 6,000K while that is true and this may be splitting nuclei but the coolest (if you can call it cool while you are being vaporized) part of the Sun are sunspots which are, by astronomical standards, downright chilly. They are only from 4,000 to 4,500K.”

Right you are, gary. I should have mentioned sunspots as being cooler than any other part of the sun, relatively speaking, but I guess I blocked them out as solar phenomena, rather than as a basic structural component of the sun. Thanks for keeping me honest, and keep those quibbles coming!

Falling behind on your weekly Geek fix?

Check out the Geek Trivia archive, and catch up on the most recent editions of Geek Trivia.

Test your command of useless knowledge by subscribing to TechRepublic’s Geek Trivia newsletter. Automatically sign up today!

For those who hadn’t heard, NASA is gearing up to build a permanent moonbase in the next decade or so — if it can find the right legacy hard drive expert to save their bacon. Seriously.

Here’s how it breaks down: NASA learned the hard way during Apollo that moon dust is insanely abrasive, sort of like aerosol sandpaper. Learning how to deal with moon dust is going to be a serious issue for moonbase planners. Fortunately, NASA accrued all kinds of moon dust data during the 1970s.

Unfortunately, NASA “misplaced” all its moon dust data tapes, mostly because it never thought they’d come in handy. Since NASA lost the originals — and thus never translated the moon dust data to modern media — and all it has left are backups of the original data tapes, which can only be read by a vintage IBM 729 mark 5 tape drive. For those scoring at home, IBM stopped making the 729 in the 1960s. Thankfully, an Australian computer museum had one on mothballs, but it isn’t functional.

Thus, if any of you old-school tech heads has the kung fu to get a 40 years out-of-date tape drive running, NASA has a job for you. It’s sort of like the plot of Space Cowboys, only nerdier. And they say old IT guys have nothing to contribute.

Big Brother is watching, and his name is HAL 9000. (This guy, not this guy.) Keep your fellow geeks in line, and your muggle coworkers confused, by reminding them that the Big Red Eye is always upon them, usually from the vantage point of your sternum. That should stop them from trying to jeopardize your mission — or open the pod bay doors without you.

You have to respect any PC case that includes a scale landing bay for my die-cast model Colonial Viper. And that hangar bay has working landing lights. And the front face of the tower has illuminated DRADIS readouts. And the keyboard has partially disassembled armor plating. Together, you’ve got the ultimate Battlestar Galactica case mod, and it’s way cooler than any of that steampunk stuff the kids are into these days. Now, all I need is a matching Cylon Basestar media server…

(Found via SF Signal.)

The Lich King has played a major role in the Warcraft game universe created by Blizzard Entertainment for many years. Check out the Warcraft III: Frozen Throne to get the full history of Arthas and his attempts at world conquest.

The movie above is the intro movie for the expansion and hints at what adventurers will see as they enter the new continent of Northrend. A HD version of the move is available on the Blizzard Wrath of the Lich King Web site.

Some of the Technolgia Guild members (that’s the official, unofficial guild of TechRepublic) are going to participate in midnight launch events around the country, but I am waiting to pick up my copy of the WotLK during lunch on the release date. I need my sleep.

In the weeks to come, Technologia will take screenshots and make reports about what we are doing in the expansion, but in the meantime, you can check out the Wrath of the Lich King Photo Gallery. The expansion looks great and the guild is excited about what we will find.

FYI — we told you Agent Smith was a PC guy.

The most powerful laser ever built (which is another deceptive phrase, as more powerful lasers are built at an almost yearly rate) is the Texas Petawatt Laser at the University of Texas at Austin. In a typical experiment for the laser, it can heat a slug of aluminum to 10 million kelvins, which is also hotter than the sun — except when it’s not.

Back in 2005, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used high-frequency sound waves to rapidly collapse gas bubbles, creating temperatures of 20,000 kelvins. This was also hotter than the sun — except when it’s not.

Each of these experiments, and many more like them, garnered headlines because they billed themselves as generating temperatures “hotter than the sun.” This is important work, because extremely high temperature generation is a necessary component for nuclear fusion, the same process that powers the sun. There’s some intellectual symmetry here, which is part of the reason these labs’ public relations staffers used the sun comparison, but it should be taken with a grain of salt.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, the truth of “hotter than the sun” varies greatly depending on your point of view. Lots of natural, commonplace phenomena are also technically hotter than the sun. Lightning regularly produces temperatures hotter than parts of the sun. The Earth’s core is technically hotter than portions of the sun. But lightning and the Earth’s core don’t stand any realistic chance of generating nuclear fusion, so what gives?

The gotcha in the “hotter than the sun” mantra is that the sun exhibits wildly different temperatures depending on where you measure the heat. Moreover, the coldest part of the sun — and the area that is most often used for comparison — isn’t really that hot, despite what common sense would lead you to believe.

WHAT IS THE COLDEST PART OF THE SUN, AND HOW HOT DOES IT GET THERE?

Get the answer.

This week’s quibble comes from the Nov. 5, 2008 edition of Geek Trivia, “The Altered States of America.” But this time, it’s not a quibble with the article, it’s a quibble with the U.S. Constitution.

Over 100 comments were generated from this edition of Geek Trivia, most of them dealing with frustrations over — and suggestions for the improvement of — the federal electoral process of the United States. Thus, in the spirit of this debate, I ask: What one change would you make to the process for electing the President of the United States, and why?

Now’s your chance to air your electoral quibbles, so keep them coming!

Falling behind on your weekly Geek fix?

Check out the Geek Trivia Archive, and catch up on the most recent editions of Geek Trivia.

Test your command of useless knowledge by subscribing to TechRepublic’s Geek Trivia newsletter. Automatically sign up today!