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Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Typewriter Up for Sale
Posted by Kit Eaton at 11:30 PM on July 16, 2008
See that battered old Hermes Standard 8 typewriter there, in a fetching shade of institutional brown? I'd practically saw my own leg off to own it. Why? Because I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan, and that battered old thing is the very typewriter DNA used to bring The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the world. A surprisingly analogue gadget, for such a self-avowed technology fan as he. And get this: it's actually on sale by a British bookseller, as part of a package with a "fine" condition first-edition copy of Hitchhiker's. The package, complete with autograph on the typewriter lid, will set you back over US$25,000. A vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big sum. But, boy... wouldn't it be worth it? [Abe Books via BBG]
A recent dig around in the BBC's archives has resulted in an unexpected find: recordings made in 1951 of a Ferranti Mark 1 computer playing tunes. Predating what was thought previously to be the first (on a Bell Labs IBM mainframe in 1957) the tapes were made during a recording of Children's Hour in Manchester University. The Ferranti was the first commercially available general purpose computer, and can be heard beeping through God Save the King, Baa Baa Black Sheep and In the Mood... slowly, and a bit scratchily since the recordings are 57 years old. Interestingly, the software was written by a chap called Christopher Strachey, a friend of Alan Turing. Click on to the BBC link to hear this bit of History in action, and marvel how far we've come since. [
We're not sure why someone would want to make an OLED desk lamp at this point in time, what with the technology being relatively new and somewhat expensive right now, but OSRAM Opto Semiconductors and designer Ingo Maurer have done just that. This lamp, called "Early Future", is made up of ten distinct OLED tiles measuring 132 x 33 mm each. There's no price on this as far as we can see, but it's going to be a while until people will actually be buying these OLED lamps anyway. For now we'll stick to illuminating our offices with the soft glow of four LCD monitors. [
