Hey Thoughty2 here.
We like to define things by their age and sometimes it’s a very important piece of
information, especially when it comes to stuff like dating, safety equipment or that jar
at the back of your fridge; don’t open that, you will regret it.
When it comes to estimating the age of a person, we mainly go on their appearance but when
it comes to ideas, products or technology, then we often think about things associated
with them.
For instance, you would think a video games company would have started no more than 50
years ago, because of how new the industry is.
But this doesn’t always work.
So today, just like that time you swiped right on your friend’s grandma, we’re looking
at things much older than you expected.
Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, Samus Aran; these are the names of some of the greatest video
game characters of all time, as well as many pets and probably a few unfortunate children
whose parents thought it would be a cool name.
As one of the very earliest video game companies, obviously you know Nintendo has been around
for a fair while but, very surprisingly, they were founded in 1889.
That’s right, a video game company was founded over 120 years ago.
Obviously there was no personal computing back then, there weren’t even TV screens.
So was Mario based on a real-life game where men dressed-up as plumbers would crush turtles?
Well Nintendo actually started out as a playing card company, set up by Fusajiro Yamauchi.
In fact, they still make playing cards today.
In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the grandson of the founder, went to visit the United States
Playing Card Company.
He saw that despite them being the biggest card company in the world, they were still
just in a small office.
This didn’t fit the grand ambitions he had for Nintendo.
He tried out many ventures and over the following years Nintendo ran a taxi company, a TV network,
a food brand and even a series of love hotels.
So Zelda could have been a type of rice and Perfect Dark could have been a very gloomy
erotic penthouse.
But it was Nintendo’s shift to toys in 1966 that got them where they are today.
They saw the potential of the light gun and how people could interact with a screen.
This led to the hand-held Game & Watch series and then, in 1983, the Famicom and NES.
Interestingly, Mario was actually named after Mario Segale, the landlord at the American
Nintendo office, who allegedly let them pay their rent late when they were struggling.
He also ate magic mushrooms and saved a princess from a giant evil turtle, but this is probably
just a coincidence.
Emoticons are so common that your mum is likely to just text you “chicken leg, snowflake,
angry face” when she’s mad that your dinner is getting cold.
But the first emoticons are over 150 years old.
Morse code had its own form of abbreviation, with certain numbers being given a meaning
so as to save on unnecessary tapping time.
1 was “wait a minute”, 13 was “I don’t understand”
and 22 was “Love and Kisses” although this became 88 at some point later on, maybe
we needed four times as much love and kisses in the world.
These aren’t really emoticons though.
A transcript of an Abraham Lincoln speech in the New York Times from 1862, contains
the line "(applause and laughter ;)" like an inside joke for Lincoln.
There is some debate as to whether this was intentional or just a typo.
There was no autocorrect in the time of Abracadabra Lincoln, so there could have been a lot of
milkshakes in his spleen…
I mean mistakes in his speech.
There is no doubt about the emoticons in Puck magazine in 1881 though since they are clearly
labelled.
These may be the first documented emoticons.
Scott Fahlman, an early computer scientist, is credited as creating the happy and sad
emoticons we know today :-) :-( since he described them on a message board on 19th September
1982.
The smiley was to indicate jokes but he also mentioned “it is probably more economical
to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.”
It’s a laugh a minute down in IT apparently.
Speaking of paperwork, it used to be a difficult thing to get to people, before the world went
digital.
And if you wanted something faster than relying on the postman, then you turned to the fax
machine.
Through the 80s and 90s, fax was really your only option to send reports, contracts and
offensive doodles of your boss, across the country in an instant.
Although it wasn’t until the mid-60s that commercial machines came onto the market,
the first ever fax was made all the way back in 1843, over 30 years before the telephone.
And like Alexander Graham Bell, it was another Scotsman, Alexander Bain, who invented the
fax machine.
Perhaps there is something about the cold, grey Scottish climate that made them find
any way possible to avoid leaving the house.
The first commercial service was with Giovanni Caselli’s Pantelegraph.
Senders would use non-conducting ink and write on a sheet of tin.
A metal stylus would move across the sheet and would register the current, which would
cut out every time it passed over the ink.
The pattern of the electrical current was sent via telegram and a machine on the other
end would print it out by using paper soaked in chemicals, which would react and stain
the page when a current passed through it.
The biggest difficulty was synching up the machines, so they used large, heavy pendulums
to stop the receiving machine from only printing the first half of the document, and your girlfriend
receiving a fax saying “My dearest Susanne, I’ve found someone else.”
Yeah… good luck explaining to her that it should have ended with “to fix the leak
on my roof”.
Modern communication has made a lot of old tech redundant and the language and form is
constantly changing.
But as with the emoticon, some of the things that we associate solely with internet culture,
actual pre-date it by quite some time.
And that is very true of the @ symbol.
The earliest record we have of it is from 1345, in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek
chronicle.
But its usage was relatively common place when recording trade.
One theory is that it started as an ‘a’ inside an ‘e’ to denote “each at”
rather than just “at”.
If you wrote “10 apples at $2” it might be confusing whether it was $2 for all of
them, or $2 each i.e. $20 total.
This symbol could have been used to avoid that confusion.
But others think it was for monks writing the Latin “ad”, since they were always
looking to abbreviate to save on ink and time, as everything was done by hand.
It was also commonly used in Spain and Portugal from the 16th century to mean arroba, a unit
of weight.
These days, many languages have a different nickname for it.
The Koreans call it snail, the Danish call it elephant’s trunk, the Slovaks call it
pickled herring and the Dutch sometimes call it little monkey’s testicle.
You do not want to see Holland’s browsing history.
Many great linguists have come from the second oldest university in the world; The university
of Oxford.
It has been around in some form since 1096.
That’s only 30 years after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, you know the only date you
can actually remember from history class.
And here’s a fact that will destroy everything you thought you knew about history, Oxford
University is actually older than the Aztec Empire, which began in 1325.
Only the University of Bologna has existed for longer, being founded in 1088.
Although Bologna is older, Oxford is surely the more famous, a name that is respected
around the globe.
Its alumni include Sir Walter Raleigh, who led a lot of the English colonisation of North
America, the great architect Sir Christopher Wren, actor Emma Watson, that bloke who created
the internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee and authors JR Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, C.S.
Lewis and Dr. Seuss among others.
Now here’s a snack that is far older than you’d expect.
I’m not talking about that egg sandwich that you bought in a moment of madness from
the gas station, it’s popcorn.
Corn was domesticated in Mexico some 9,000 years ago and we have found evidence of popcorn
that is 5,600 years old, made by Native Americans down in New Mexico, so it’s a true American
classic.
The oldest existing snack brand in the states is Baker’s Chocolate, founded by John Hannon
and Dr. James Baker in 1764.
It was originally called Hannon’s Best Chocolate but when Hannon disappeared on a sailing trip
in 1779, Baker took his chance.
After all, life is like a box of chocolates; you eat them all yourself as soon as you get
the opportunity.
And our final item also comes from an old snack; spam.
But we’re not talking about the disgusting, pre-cooked canned meat, that became popular
in the post war period.
No, we’re talking about the never ending stream of annoying messages.
It’s no coincidence that they share the same name though.
The idea comes from an old Monty Python sketch in a café, where nearly every item on the
menu includes spam, with some baked beans thrown in there somewhere.
When early internet chat rooms began, some users would repeatedly type “spam” in
order to shift a line of text off-screen, since you wouldn’t have the ability to scroll
through conversations like we do now.
So it became the common word for sending out unwanted messages to many people, with no
thought as to who would be reading them.
But this concept was not unique to the world of the internet.
In 1864, many British politicians were deeply irritated by a telegram many of them received,
a message from Messrs Gabriel of 27 Harley Street, that gave the opening times of their
dental practise, hoping for more business.
But none of them would bite and we’ve not smiled kindly on spam ever since.
That’s about it for today, I need to go now as I must reply to Mister Jakande’s
email, he says there’s $6 million waiting for me in a trust account, and all he needs
from me to release the funds is a small deposit of 1%, I can’t miss this opportunity.
Thanks for
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