Karolson & Hobshack
And, yes, I admit, before I blogged this I googled Karolson and Hobshack -- just in case I had actually missed something. Almost as charming is the equally whimsical account of the origin of the Simon game.The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers' children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.
[...]
The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:
"I am alne. North-fire. South-water. East-earth. West-Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute."
Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine's keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack's office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:
"I am cming. Head East in the evening."
Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson's imagination.
Recent Related Entries
Famous Programmers From Adleman to ZimmermannLook who's up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper:Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler,...
Immune Attack
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won't get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting.Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of...
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Wired:The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we...
Inside Google Book Search: U.S. copyright renewal records available for download
Inside Google Book SearchFor U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are...
Collaborative Authorship Made Easy
A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog:The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it,...
Leave a comment