The recent announcement of a planned merger between AT&T and T-Mobile here in the U.S. led me to compile a (rough and partial) time-line of recent mergers in the telecommunications industry (or at least a big chunk of it - I've ignored the cable industry, for example).

I'm pleased to share with the SIGCIS community a resource on Internet history that I was totally unaware of until a friend of mine sent me the link a couple of weeks ago: an oral history of the Internet compiled and edited by Vanity Fair magazine. It begins (as many Internet histories do) with packet-switching and Paul Baran, who (as some Internet histories are not) is realistic about his contribution:

An interesting story appeared recently from Nancy Scola at The Atlantic on a little-known event in Internet history (yes, it was only 14 years ago, but in Internet Time, history started yesterday!)

Atlantic blogger John Hendel reports on the phenomenon of computer dating in the 1960s. These services operated by comparing questionnaires that would-be romancers submitted by mail, returning a list of potential matches some days or weeks later (in a similar fashion to job-matching systems of the era).

The upcoming televised matches between IBM's Watson and Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter seems like a good time to reflect on the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field.

Paul Ceruzzi has pointed the mailing list to this video, commemorating the life of Digital Equipment founder Ken Olsen, who died on Sunday. (See also the discussion onSlashdot and the New York Times obituary).

The latest discussion on the SIGCIS mailing list surrounded the impending release of a new volume (or sub-volume, rather) in Donald Knuth's computer science masterwork, The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 4A is now in print from Addison-Wesley. Paul Ceruzzi announced this development earlier today:

An interesting piece from Ars Technica last month described the divergence between the set of plant species that have been collected by botanists and the set of plant species that have been cataloged into the set of known species.

A group of engineers have done emulation one better. In a a fantastic piece of reverse engineering, they have re-constructed a full-on software simulation of the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, the heart of the Apple, Apple II, Commodore PET, and a number of other early microcomputers and video game consoles.

Just a quick one-off link this time. Given the growing interest I sense in the community in the labor history of computing (see, for example, the recent IEEE Annals issue dedicated to the subject), I thought people might be interested in a recent story from the L.A. Times.