Nokia: A long and innovative history

Phones from Nokia's glory years

The end of an era came on April 25, 2014 when Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia's handset division. Though our Finnish friends haven't lost their touch in building high-quality smartphones like the Lumia Icon (pictured above), the company has spent the last few years trailing behind its rivals in developed markets.

Yet, as any mobile phone geek can tell you, there was a time when Nokia was thecell phone company that mattered. Starting in the 1990s and until the advent of the iPhone and Android, it produced many of the planet's most successful phones. Join me to relive some of Nokia's biggest hits and craziest leaps of faith. Note that when appropriate, I've included a link to the original CNET review.

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32 of the Most Popular Toys From the Last 145 Years

via Wired

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  Zoetrope reel, 1870s — Before there was Pixar, there was the Zoetrope. The optical illusion was first demonstrated in 1836, over a hundred years before the first Saturday morning cartoons. The device was patented in 1867 by Milton Bradley, the man, not the company, and in many ways can be considered one of the first mass-market toys. Photo: Andy Brown
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  Sindy, 1960s — While she doesn't have the name recognition of Barbie, this doll has friends in important places. "My favorites are the Sindy doll—I had one myself—and any of the teddy bears," says Howell who helped curate the photo subjects. "I always preferred soft toys to dolls and now I get to look after them in the Museum." Photo: Andy Brown
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  Paper soldiers, 1890s — "This is my favorite image," says Brown. "I love how camp they look today." Photo: Andy Brown
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  Clackers, 1970s — Paradoxically, some of the best selling toys were the hardest to track down. Clackers were a popular noise making toy in the 1970s, but was fairly cheap, disposable, and liable to crack. "Loads of people can remember them," says Brown. "But very few people thought to hang on to them." As children's playthings become more ephemeral, this lack of a cultural record will only be exacerbated. Photo: Andy Brown

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7 Eerie Ways That H.G. Wells Predicted the Future

Policymic - If H.G. Wells were still alive, September 21 would be his 147th birthday. Who knows, he is one of the greatest science fiction writers, he might have figured out a way to live forever and is hiding out somewhere. Shake your head all you want at the unlikeliness of that idea, but take a moment to consider the seven things below that he predicted well before they actually were invented and you might reconsider.

1. Heat Rays

The Martian invaders in Wells' 1898 War of the Worlds relied on a heat ray as their primary weapon. "Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire."

The U.S. military has developed its own heat ray weapon. The Active Denial System, designed to be a non-lethal weapon against enemy troops, projects a wavelength that causes an intense burning sensation without leaving permanent damage. The U.S. Marines demonstrated the weapons maritime uses just last week.

2. Genetic Engineering

A central theme in 1896's The Island of Doctor Moreau is genetic engineering, specifically animal modification. "I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it."

Wells envisioned actually sewing parts of creatures together to make a new whole. In reality, genetic science works in a more exacting way and given us everything from herbicide tolerant crops to glow-in-the-dark cats.

 

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At Frank Lloyd Wright's home, a lab for world-class architecture (Photos)

CNET - OAK PARK, Ill. -- Before Frank Lloyd Wright became the most famous architect in the world, he was a struggling employee who had to borrow money from his boss to build his own house.

That house, and the adjoining professional studio, make up the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in this posh suburb of Chicago. I got a chance for a behind-the-scenes tour Monday as part of Road Trip 2013, and as a Wright fan who has toured other favorites like Taliesin West in Arizona, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and the Marin County Civic Center in California, this was a treat.

 While most Chicago buildings used standard red bricks on their facades, and relegated the use of earth-tone Chicago bricks to the side, Wright favored such tones, and decided he wanted to use the material on the front of his home. He also wanted sets, or bands, of windows that were side by side, rather than separated. And he chose a front door that was much wider than the norm.    More

Nat Geo - Excellent Vintage Photos

 

Great Pyramid and Sphinx, Giza

Photograph by Hans Hildenbrand, National Geographic

Men on camelback ride past the Sphinx and Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt.

 

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Photograph by Walter Edwards, National Geographic

A man and woman look out at the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial.

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Medieval Church Discovered Beneath Parking Lot

Richard III and his queen, Anne of Neville, appear in a stained glass window in Cardiff Castle. Click to enlarge this image.

University of Leicester 

The hunt for King Richard III's grave is heating up, with archaeologists announcing today (Sept. 5) that they have located the church where the king was buried in 1485.

"The discoveries so far leave us in no doubt that we are on the site of Leicester's Franciscan Friary, meaning we have crossed the first significant hurdle of the investigation," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the dig, said in a statement.

PHOTOS: Age of the Gladiators

Buckley and his colleagues have been excavating a parking lot in Leicester, England, since Aug. 25. They are searching for Greyfriars church, said to be the final resting place of Richard III, who died in battle during the War of the Roses, an English civil war. A century later, Shakespeare would immortalize Richard III in a play of the same name.

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Summer Olympics: 1896 vs. 2012 - Noticeable Changes Since the Early Games in Athens

Discovery News - With 116 years separating the first moden Olympics from this year's games, there are bound to be some noticeable changes between the two. Aside from archived photos of the Olympics, one of clearest windows into the first modern Olympics held in 1896 is from G. S. Robertson in an essay titled, "An Englishman at the first modern Olympics" (via Longform.org).

Robertson's account of the 1896 paints a picture of an Olympics in its infancy that, while grappling with the challenges of hosting an international competition without the benefits of modern telecommunications or transporation, still manages to capture what would be described in later generations as the Olympic spirit.

If you can manage to squeeze it in between commercial breaks while watching this year's Olympics, Robertson's essay is worth the full read. For those short on time, here are the starkest contrasts between this year's games and the 1896 Olympics:

PHOTOS: Top 25 Iconic Olympic Moments

Entry requirements for the 1896 Olympics: Show up.

Organized by Pierre de Coubertin, considered the father of the modern Olympic movement, the first modern games in Athens in 1896 was meant to include the participation of as many nations from as many corners of the world as possible. As Robertson notes, however, the promoters of the first Olympics had "apparently forgotten that few athletes are classical scholars, and that still fewer have either the time or the money to make so long a voyage."

This meant that a disproportionate number of participants were from the home country, Greece, other nations in continental Europe, and the United States. The United States and Hungary were the only ones to attempt to send an all-around team, according to Robertson. In fact, the first Olympic champion in modern history was an American, triple-jumper James Connolly.

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National Geographic – In the Footsteps of the Apostles

They were unlikely leaders. As the Bible tells it, most knew more about mending nets than winning converts when Jesus said he would make them “fishers of men.” Yet 2,000 years later, all over the world, the Apostles are still drawing people in.


Photograph by Lynn Johnson

ITALY

Gracing the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan since 1498, Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of the Last Supper invites viewers to contemplate how the Twelve Apostles felt in the moment after Christ predicted that one of them would prove a traitor.
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Photograph by Lynn Johnson

ISRAEL

Franciscan priest Fergus Clarke gazes at the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The tomb’s emptiness echoes the Apostles’ message: Jesus rose from the dead.
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Photograph by Lynn Johnson

ISRAEL

The Western Wall is all that remains of Jerusalem’s Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Jews consider the site sacred, as do many Christians. Pilgrims often leave handwritten prayers stuffed into the chinks.
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The Short, But Storied History of the iPad

“Is there room for a third category of device in the world, something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone?” Steve Jobs asked before he introduced the world to the iPad early in 2010. With a wait time of two to three weeks for even those who were among the first to order the new iPad, it would seem the obvious answer is “yes.” But just two years ago, it wasn’t so.

At the time, Dan Lyons, writing for Newsweek, said “[F]or some of us who sat in the audience watching Steve Jobs introduce the device, the whole thing felt like a letdown.” It got criticized for its lack of camera, multitasking, and Flash. Even its name and its looks were fair game.

“It’s a nice reader,” Bill Gates said.

To be fair, the critics were no more harsh than Steve Jobs once was. Even while the iPad was being developed at Apple, Jobs was not only denying its existence, he was denouncing its purpose. “We have no plans to make a tablet,” he said to Walt Mossberg at 2003′s D: All Things Digital Conference. “It turns out people want keyboards. Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already.”          

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Evolution of the Solid-State Drive

 

History of the SSD

 

PCWorld - Believe it or not, it has been 35 years since the very first solid-state drive (aka solid-state disk) hit the market. Like all SSDs, that model was designed to appear to a computer like a traditional rotating disk, while storing and retrieving data far faster than traditional hard drives could. Such devices are called “solid-state” because they contain no moving parts, only memory chips.

Over the years, the computer industry’s quest for faster, cheaper, higher-capacity SSDs has driven storage technology in ways no one could have foreseen in 1976, including the use of SSDs as the primary storage component in some consumer PCs.

In the next 15 slides, you’ll witness the evolution of the solid-state drive, from a bulky, obscenely expensive server accessory to a tiny consumer box (with hundreds of gigabytes of capacity) that anyone can buy for $50.              More