Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing created a montage featuring almost Every Apple Design Ever in 30 Seconds.

Rob also created a complementary montage of Every Next Product Ever in 30 Seconds.

“Still Life” by artist Scott Garner is an interactive picture that can be tilted by the viewer, causing the objects in the picture to be tossed about the frame (video). Garner created the effect with a framed TV, swivel mount, spatial sensor, and 3D software.

via MAKE

“Algorithmic search for love” by Austrian artist Julian Palacz is an art installation featuring a search engine that can sift through films for a spoken word or phrase (video). After the viewer enters a search term, a supercut-style montage of relevant clips is displayed by a projector.

In a time in which digital cultural assets far outweigh analog, the ease with which we can now amass and exchange material has resulted in large personal collections of media data (music, films, series etc.). Julian Palacz has devised and developed a search engine that is able to enter text to search personal film and video archives for spoken language. An individual collection of films thus becomes a database of keywords and every spoken word or phrase in the archives can be searched. By entering a sentence like “i love her”, all film or video clips with this phrase will be shown in sequence.

via The Creators Project

The Samsung Transparent Window is a 46 inch transparent LCD display that is a combination touchscreen computer and window (video via MobileNations). The display can perform a variety of functions familiar to tablet users. There’s even a “blinds” app that blots out unwanted natural light. The display is entering production later this year.

via The Next Web

This 1960 IBM ad touts the capabilities of SAGE, a massive Cold War-era automated system for tracking and destroying incoming enemy bombers. The heart of the system was the IBM AN/FSQ-7 computer, which at 275 tons is still the world’s largest computer. Each computer had 55,000 vacuum tubes, required a half acre of floor space, and operated on punch cards. There were 52 AN/FSQ-7 computers around the country. SAGE was retired in the early 1980s.

Here are photos Scott Beale shot in 2006 of the SAGE on display at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

via Retronaut

video via chiklit, photo via MITRE

Steve Jobs, microprocessor pioneer Ted Hoff, and other Silicon Valley luminaries discuss the arrival, in the 1970s, of the microprocessor. The video is part of the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

via Brain Pickings

The Restart Page simulates the rebooting process of a variety of operating systems from computer history. It was created and designed by Soon in Tokyo and built by rehabstudio.

via Daring Fireball

Techno-Dunce is a 1980s film short that shows a frustrated student trying to grasp technology in a school computer lab. She gets teased and then the whole thing turns into a hilarious ‘quasi-rap’ music video which apparently aired on MTV. It is from a longer (never-completed) film called siliconia made by Lange, Celia, Calbert and Cedric Lai of LVL Productions.

Thanks to my brother Andrew for the tip!

Artist Chris DeLorenzo created this adorable set of Picture Alphabet Keyboard Stickers in 2009 to “transform your typing experience into something playful”.

We used to learn our alphabets by reading those classroom banners that associated each letter with an animal or object. These days as kids become increasingly computer dependent at an early age I thought it was about time to adapt an old method to a new medium.

via Curiosity Counts

CPU Wars is a simple trump card game in which computer processors (and their specifications) are pitted against one another. The game’s creator, Harry Mylonadis, collected 30 processors spanning the past 40 years of computer development in order to create the game’s cards. He’s raising funds for the game on Kickstarter.

The MirrorBook Air is a compact mirror designed to look like a tiny Apple MacBook Air laptop.

Here is a little gadget that will appeal to fans of Cupertino. The MirrorBook Air is a small pocket mirror design which incorporates the famous MacBook Air from Apple. Practical, beautiful and incredibly fun!

via The Next Web

“The History of 3D in Games” is the opening exhibition of The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, a new museum in Oakland that is dedicated to video games and other interactive art. The exhibition will feature nearly 20 3D video games from 1982-1996, and all will be available for play (video preview). “The History of 3D in Games” opens Saturday, December 3 from 10am to 5pm. Entrance is free with donations accepted at the door.

Since we first wrote about the museum back in April, it has progressed from a Kickstarter project to a physical space and collection in Oakland. The museum is currently only open for events, but regular visiting hours are planned for 2012.

Off Book | Generative Art – Computers, Data, and Humanity is the latest short web documentary from the ongoing PBS Arts series that explores the fascinating joint computer and human art creation practice known as generative art. This episode of Off Book speaks with generative composer Luke Dubois, generative artist Scott Draves and game designer Will Wright about their experiences and thoughts with making this unique art form.

An intriguing combination of programmers, artists, and philosophers, these creators embrace a process that delegates essential decisions to computers, data sets, or even random variables. This allows important metaphors to arise in their work, calling attention to the relationship between humans and the computers that surround us, the mountains of information we generate, and the powerful impact that technology has on our relationships with each other.

The Seven Deadly Keys T-Shirt by Sticky Comics, based on their awesome comic.

Cindermedusae by Polish artist Marcin Ignac are 3D jellyfish models that are generated by an algorithm with parameters than can be adjusted or left entirely random. The models will be featured in the art book writtenimages.net—the content of each book will be individually created by art generating programs like Ignac’s, in effect making each book unique.

via Chris Messina

DrawTop is an adhesive vinyl sticker that turns the backside of a laptop screen into a handy whiteboard. It is available for purchase in a variety sizes, for use on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. DrawTop is by Ryan Mitchell and Erik Fogg.

via The Awesomer

Circuit board sculpture artist, Steven Rodrig of PCB Creations, has a new one-of-a-kind piece titled The Royal Data Throne. Essentially, it’s a tiny art toilet, standing in at just 12 inches high, for dumping data.

Some say it couldn’t be made, but I had to, The Royal Data Throne is a place where data is…disposed. This is a fun sculpture that is full of detail, it has guts in the tanks and a secret hiding place for your..data under the lid, a fun and one of a kind piece to brag about.

We previously wrote about one of Steven’s circuit board creations in the post, Data Sandals, Art Sculpture Footwear Made Using Printed Circuit Boards.

via Technabob

John McCarthy has died at age 84. He was a legendary computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of AI, coining the term Artificial Intelligence. He also invented the Lisp programming language.

via Hacker News & Wendy M. Grossman

photo by null0 & Chuck Painter

Kids are asked “What is a computer?” on a 1984 episode of Sesame Street.

via Adam Lisagor

Clocks for Robots is a design concept for a clock that shows the time in human readable digits and in a computer scannable data matrix code (video). The code also provides location data, so the clock could be used as a line-of-sight check-in for smartphones. The concept is by UK-based design consultancy Berg.

In a way, our clock in the cafe is kind of like holding up today’s newspaper in pictures to prove it’s live. It is a very narrow, useful piece of data, which is relevant only because of context.

via Wired

Make Pixel Art by XOXCO is a web and iPad app for creating computer graphics the old fashioned way: pixel by pixel. The beta web app is available for free, while the iPad app is still in development.

via Ben Brown

The Seven Deadly Keys on Sticky Comics

“All About Polymorphics” by Simon Ramo is a charming and surprisingly understandable 1959 stop motion animation about the concept of polymorphic computing, an adaptable processor architecture that was very much theoretical at the time. In fact, it took nearly 50 years for a polymorphic computer to be developed by Raytheon (in 2007). Many of the concepts in the film apply to other contemporary technologies such as parallel processing, cloud computing, peer-to-peer filesharing, and the architecture of the Internet.

The film can be downloaded from the Prelinger Collection of the Internet Archive.

via Brain Pickings

Our friend Jason Scott, a computer historian, archivist and documentary filmmaker who made Get Lamp and BBS: The Documentary, has just announced that he is making three new documentaries that he is funding through the Kickstarter project he just launched: The Jason Scott Documentary Three Pack. The three new documentaries are as follows:

The 6502 – a documentary about the MOS 6502 chip and the art of assembly language programming

Tape – a meditation on the medium of tape, its rapid falling out of favor, and the nature of recording our lives and loss

Arcade – a video podcast series about the place of arcades, these worlds we enter to have fun with machines

Nearly forty years ago, computer science graduate students Ed Catmull, Fred Parke, and Robert Ingebretsen created this film demonstrating the cutting edge in 3D computer graphics. The film includes a 3D animated rendering of Catmull’s hand, a face created by Parke, and fascinating making-of footage. Catmull, an early pioneer of computer graphics, later went on to co-found Pixar Animation Studios.

via Nerd Plus Art & The Next Web