Blast from the Past Archives - The Digital Reader

1,172-Character Japanese Typewriter (video)

7 January, 20217 January, 2021Blast from the PastLeave a comment

The average typewriter had up to 40 keys and could type around 60 characters. Originally made in Japan in the late 1940s, the Toshiba Typewriter Model BW-2112 had over 1,000...Continue reading

The Internet Archive Recovers 490,000 Music Files “Lost” by MySpace

5 April, 20195 April, 2019Blast from the PastOne Comment

It’s not fair to expect a platform to host content for free forever (cough Flickr cough) but when MySpace deleted a dozen years worth of content last month, users were...Continue reading

The First Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is Now Available Online

13 December, 201813 December, 2018Blast from the PastOne Comment

The Encyclopedia Britannica is now little more than an entry in the annals of the history of encyclopedias, but at one point it was one of the preeminent reference tools for...Continue reading

Guest Post: Science Fiction Was Around in Medieval Times – Here’s What it Looked Like

12 September, 201812 September, 2018Blast from the PastOne Comment

Science fiction may seem resolutely modern, but the genre could actually be considered hundreds of years old. There are the alien green “children of Woolpit”, who appeared in 12th-century Suffolk...Continue reading

Interactive Fiction is the Little Market That Could

11 September, 201811 September, 2018Blast from the Past, e-Reading Software7 Comments

There’s a post referenced in tomorrow morning’s link post that touches on interactive fiction. That piece claims IF is a new idea that is changing the market. The former claim...Continue reading

Guest Post: Eight Surprising Things it’s Time You Knew About Gulliver’s Travels

4 December, 201720 December, 2017Blast from the Past, Uncategorized2 Comments

Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift. Widely recognised as the leading satirist in the history of the English language, Swift found his way into the world 350 years ago on November...Continue reading

Old Coot Hates Modern Internet

2 July, 20172 July, 2017Blast from the Past10 Comments

There’s been no end, in the nearly a quarter of a century since the modern internet began, of detractors talking about how wonderful things were before it existed. People were smarter...Continue reading

A Time Capsule Associated With Jules Verne Has Been Discovered in the French Pyrenees

7 April, 20179 April, 2017Blast from the Past6 Comments

A French university has just announced what sounds like the plot for a new TV show. A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and historians from the Paris Descartes University and The Explorers Club...Continue reading

Guest Post: Seven Academic Books That Helped to Shape Modern Britain

24 January, 201724 January, 2017Blast from the Past, Book CultureLeave a comment

To celebrate the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books over the course of modern history, seven specialists share the book they believe has been most influential on modern British...Continue reading

Guest Post: The Myth of the Disappearing Book

1 November, 201613 May, 2017Blast from the Past, Book Culture, DeBunking3 Comments

After years of sales growth, major UK publishers reported a fall in their e-book sales for the first time this year, introducing new doubts about the potential of e-books in...Continue reading

The Gothic Novel: How Gothic Buildings Became Synonymous With Horror, and the Supernatural

30 October, 201630 October, 2016Blast from the Past, Book CultureOne Comment

Thanks to innumerable movies, Gothic architecture has long been associated with horror, Halloween, and the supernatural. The mere mention of Dracula or Frankenstein conjures visions of arched windows, a desolate...Continue reading

Guest Post: How a Volcano in Indonesia Led to the Creation of Frankenstein

15 September, 201615 September, 2016Blast from the PastOne Comment

As the summer of 2016 draws to a close, we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most famous novels in the English language, a work...Continue reading

Publishing Industry Fads Have Been Happening for Nearly 300 Years

15 May, 201617 May, 2016Blast from the Past2 Comments

If you thought that the way the publishing industry jumps on the latest werehamster/interurban fantasy/cyclops detective/moody vampire/hipster zombie* fad is a new development, you would be wrong. Atlas Obscura has...Continue reading

Blast From the Past: Hands On With Amazon’s First Accessible eReader, the Kindle Keyboard (video)

11 May, 201617 May, 2016Blast from the Past, e-Reading Hardware, Kindle3 Comments

Yesterday’s news about the new Voiceview for Kindle accessibility feature has lead many news sites to proclaim that it is Amazon’s first accessible ereader. Given that the feature came bundled...Continue reading

1985 Pop-Up Book Takes Us Inside the PC (video)

12 April, 201628 October, 2016Blast from the Past, PaperOne Comment

The latest pop-up books can take us on a tour of the White House or remind us of the phobias we’d rather forget, but that’s nothing compared to what has...Continue reading