Time Travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world

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1908 – The first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan.

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The Ford Model T (colloquially known as the Tin Lizzie, T‑Model Ford, Model T, T, Leaping Lena, or flivver) is an automobile that was produced by Ford Motor Company from October 1, 1908, to May 26, 1927. It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that opened travel to the common middle-class American; some of this was because of Ford’s efficient fabrication, including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting.

The Ford Model T was named the most influential car of the 20th century in the 1999 Car of the Century competition, ahead of the BMC Mini, Citroën DS, and Volkswagen Type 1. With 16.5 million sold it stands eighth on the top ten list of most sold cars of all time as of 2012.

Although automobiles had already existed for decades, they were still mostly scarce and expensive at the Model T’s introduction in 1908. Positioned as reliable, easily maintained mass market transportation, it was a runaway success. In a matter of days after the release, 15,000 orders were placed.[11] The first production Model T was produced on August 12, 1908 and left the factory on September 27, 1908, at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan. On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan.

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1962 – Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring is published, inspiring an environmental movement and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

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Silent Spring is a 1962 environmental science book by Rachel Carson. The book documented the detrimental effects on the environment—particularly on birds—of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims unquestioningly.

In the late 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to the American public. Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, but it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, led to a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and inspired an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1996, a follow-up book, Beyond Silent Spring, co-written by H.F. van Emden and David Peakall, was published. In 2006, Silent Spring was named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by the editors of Discover Magazine.

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1964 – Tracy Camp, American computer scientist and academic is born.

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Tracy Kay Camp is an American computer scientist noted for her research on wireless networking. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was the Co-Chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014 and she was the co-Chair of ACM-W from 1998 to 2002.

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1966 – Stephanie Wilson, American engineer and astronaut is born.

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Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew on her first mission in space on board the Space Shuttle mission STS-121, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison.

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1983 – Richard Stallman announces the GNU project to develop a free Unix-like operating system.

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GNU is an operating system and an extensive collection of computer software. GNU is composed wholly of free software, most of which is licensed under GNU’s own GPL.

GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”, chosen because GNU’s design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code. The GNU project includes an operating system kernel, GNU HURD, which was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). However, non-GNU kernels, most famously Linux, can also be used with GNU software; and since the kernel is the least mature part of GNU, this is how it is usually used. The combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel is commonly known as Linux (or less frequently GNU/Linux; see GNU/Linux naming controversy).

With the April 30, 2015 release of the Debian GNU/HURD 2015 distro, GNU OS now provides the components to assemble an operating system that users can install and use on a computer. This includes the GNU Hurd kernel, that is currently in a pre-production state. The Hurd status page states that “it may not be ready for production use, as there are still some bugs and missing features. However, it should be a good base for further development and non-critical application usage.”

Due to Hurd not being ready for production use, in practice these operating systems are Linux distributions. They contain the Linux kernel, GNU components and software from many other free software projects. Looking at all program code contained in the Ubuntu Linux distribution in 2011, GNU encompassed 8% and the Linux kernel 9%.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the project, views GNU as a “technical means to a social end” or in other words is a technical avenue to pursue social justice. Relatedly Lawrence Lessig states in his introduction to the 2nd edition of Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society that in it Stallman has written about “the social aspects of software and how Free Software can create community and social justice.”

Development of the GNU operating system was initiated by Richard Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a project called the GNU Project which was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups by Richard Stallman. Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at the Lab so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU components as free software. Richard Stallman chose the name by using various plays on words, including the song The Gnu.

The goal was to bring a wholly free software operating system into existence. Stallman wanted computer users to be “free”, as most were in the 1960s and 1970s – free to study the source code of the software they use, free to share the software with other people, free to modify the behavior of the software, and free to publish their modified versions of the software. This philosophy was later published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985.

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1998 – The Google internet search engine retrospectively claims this as its birthday.

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As of September 2013, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries. Google celebrated its 15-year anniversary on September 27, 2013, although it has used other dates for its official birthday. The reason for the choice of September 27 remains unclear, and a dispute with rival search engine Yahoo! Search in 2005 has been suggested as the cause.

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2010 – Limor “Ladyada” Fried Open source hardware summit keynote (HD video)

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2013 – Introducing the Adafruit Keg Bot #piday #raspberrypi

The Adafruit Keg Bot is a team project by everyone at Adafruit! We wanted to see how we could augment a kegerator with cool hardware from the Adafruit store and make it active online.

Our first experiment was to hook up a liquid flow meter to a Raspberry Pi and have the keg tweet every time someone drinks from it! Follow @AdafruitKegBot for updates.

For now the keg has birch beer, but we’ll be getting a beer beer kegerator soon and will mod that one up as well! Post your feature suggestions in the comments. Read more.


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