Railway Time: Why France’s Railways Ran Five Minutes Behind

July 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

With us chafing at time zones and daylight saving time (DST) these days, it can be easy to forget how much more confusing things were in the late 19th century. Back then few areas had synchronized their clocks to something like Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or other standards like London time or Paris time, with everyone instead running on local time determined by as solar time. This created a massive headache for the railways, as they somehow had to make their time schedules work across what were effectively hundreds of tiny time zones while ensuring that passengers got on their train on time.

In a recent video [The Tim Traveller] explains how the creation of so-called Railway time sort-of solved this in France. As railroads massively expanded across the world by the 1850s and travel times dropped rapidly, this concept of Railway time was introduced from the US to Europe to India, creating effectively a railway-specific time zone synchronized to e.g. London time in the UK and Paris time in France. In addition to this, French railways also set the clocks inside the stations to run five minutes behind, to give travelers even more of a chance to get to their train on time when stuck in a long goodbye.

By 1911, across Europe GMT was adopted as the central time base, and the French five minute delay was eliminated as French travelers and trains were now running perfectly on time.

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A History Of Pong

July 28, 2025 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.

The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.

But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.

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When The UK’s Telephone Network Went Digital With System X

July 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

The switch from analog telephone exchanges to a purely digital network meant a revolution in just about any way imaginable. Gone were the bulky physical switches and associated system limitations. In the UK this change happened in the early 1980s, with what the Post Office Telecommunications (later British Telecom) and associated companies called System X. Along with the system’s rollout, promotional videos like this 1983 one were meant to educate the public and likely any investors on what a smashing idea the whole system was.

Although for the average person in the UK the introduction of the new digital telephone network probably didn’t mean a major change beyond a few new features like group calls, the same wasn’t true for the network operator whose exchanges and networks got much smaller and more efficient, as explained in the video. To this day System X remains the backbone of the telephone network in the UK.

To get an idea of the immense scale of the old analog system, this 1982 video (also embedded below) shows the system as it existed before System X began to replace it. The latter part of the video provides significant detail of System X and its implementation at the time, although when this video was produced much of the system was still being developed.

Thanks to [James Bowman] for the tip.

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The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics

July 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 187 Comments

It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.

Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.

Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?

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Why Apple Dumped 2,700 Computers In A Landfill In 1989

July 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 53 Comments

In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing else on the market, and had a price tag to match—retailing at $9,995, or the equivalent of over $30,000 today.

It held so much promise. And yet, come 1989, Apple was burying almost 3,000 examples in a landfill. What went wrong?

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The Apollo–Soyuz Legacy Lives On, Fifty Years Later

July 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kilometers (136 miles) over the surface of the Earth.

Although their spacecraft actually launched a few days earlier on the 15th, today marks 50 years since American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald “Deke” Slayton docked their Apollo spacecraft to a specifically modified Soyuz crewed by Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov. The two craft were connected for nearly two days, during which time the combined crew was able to freely move between them. The conducted scientific experiments, exchanged flags, and ate shared meals together.

Politically, this very public display of goodwill between the Soviet Union and the United States helped ease geopolitical tensions. On a technical level, it not only demonstrated a number of firsts, but marked a new era of international cooperation in space. While the Space Race saw the two counties approach spaceflight as a competition, from this point on, it would largely be treated as a collaborative endeavour.

The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project lead directly to the Shuttle–Mir missions of the 1990s, which in turn was a stepping stone towards the International Space Station. Not just because that handshake back in 1975 helped establish a spirit of cooperation between the two space-fairing nations, but because it introduced a piece of equipment that’s still being used five decades later — the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS) docking system.

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The DEW Line Remembered

July 16, 2025 by Al Williams 20 Comments

The DEW line was one of three radar early warning systems of the time.

If you grew up in the middle of the Cold War, you probably remember hearing about the Distant Early Warning line between duck-and-cover drills. The United States and Canada built the DEW line radar stations throughout the Arctic to detect potential attacks from the other side of the globe.

MIT’s Lincoln Lab proposed the DEW Line in 1952, and the plan was ambitious. In order to spot bombers crossing over the Arctic circle in time, it required radar twice as powerful as the best radar of the day. It also needed communications systems that were 99 percent reliable, even in the face of terrestrial and solar weather.

In the end, there were 33 stations built from Alaska to Greenland in an astonishing 32 months. Keep in mind that these stations were located in a very inhospitable environment, where temperatures reached down to -60 °F (-51 °C). Operators kept the stations running 24/7 for 36 years, from 1957 to 1993.

System of Systems

The DEW line wasn’t the only radar early-warning system that the US and Canada had in place, only the most ambitious. The Pinetree Line was first activated in 1951. However, its simple radar was prone to jamming and couldn’t pick up things close to the ground. It was also too close to main cities along the border to offer them much protection. Even so, the 33 major stations, along with six smaller stations, did better than expected. Continue reading “The DEW Line Remembered” →