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More Anniversary in 2005
Gumby 50th Year
Gumby, Pokey and Friends are having a 50th birthday party- August 5th and 6th at Club Z in San Francisco. Check back for developing details. There will be live music, special quests, and a great many people who have worked with Gumby throughout the years. Check back often for futher details!
http://www.gumbyworld.com/birthday_party_info.html
Gumby! Still popular today because the values which Art Clokey endowed to Gumby, came straight from the heart
http://www.gumbyworld.com/index_05_27_05.html
In the early 1950's, Art Clokey produced commercials for Andersen's Pea Soup using elements of stop motion and live action. Coca Cola and Budweiser saw these and hired Art to produce a series of spots featuring their products. These commercials used slap stick humor a la Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain
In 1955 while studying under Slavko Vorkapich at USC Film School, Art produced a student film called Gumbasia. It was clay animation shot to the beat of jazz music. Art showed this to Sam Engel of 20th Century Fox. Sam paced the floor a few times and then said: "Art, that's the most excting film I've ever seen. We've got to go into business together." Art thought that he was going to work with Sam's current live action projects with the likes of Sophia Loren, but then Sam continued: "Can you make little clay figures and animate them into children's stories? I want to improve the quality of childrens TV." Art and his wife Ruth both felt the same way about the need for better childrens programing because of their one year old daughter. So Art told Sam yes he could do that.
http://www.premavision.com/studio/index_art.htm
http://www.gumbyworld.com/
SLINKY SLINKY
The History of the SLINKY
Richard James and Betty James
Richard James, an engineer, was conducting an experiment with tension springs.
During the experiment, one of the springs fell to the floor and began to "walk"
By Mary Bellis
“What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, And makes a slinkity sound?"
"A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, Everyone knows it’s Slinky…”
"It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's a wonderful toy"
"It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun for a girl and a boy"
Richard James and Betty James invented the slinky in 1945.
Richard James was a naval engineer trying to develop a meter
designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. He was working
with tension springs (1943) when one of the springs fell to the ground.
He saw how the spring kept moving after it hit the ground and an idea
for a toy was born.
Richard remarked to his wife Betty, "I think I can make a toy out of this."
Richard then spent the next two years figuring out the best steel gauge and
coil to use in making the toy and Betty James found a name for the new toy after discovering in the dictionary that the word "Slinky" is a Swedish word meaning traespiral - sleek or sinuous.
The Slinky was successfully demonstrated at Gimbel's Department Store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the 1945 Christmas season and then at the 1946 American Toy Fair. Richard nervous at the first demonstration of his toy convinced a friend to attend and buy the first Slinky.
However, this turned out to be unnecessary as 400 Slinkys were sold
during the 90 minute Gimbel demonstration.
Richard and Betty James founded James Spring & Wire Company with $500
dollars to mass produce their creation; and later founded James
Industries in 1956. Today, all Slinkys are made in Hollidaysburg,
Pennsylvania using the original equipment designed and engineered
by Richard James. Each Slinky is made from 80 feet of wire.
Over a quarter of a billion Slinkys ® have been sold worldwide.
Around 1960, Richard suffering from a mid-life crisis left his wife,
six children, and Slinky Empire to join a religious order/cult in Bolivia.
Betty James then took over as CEO of James Industries.
Betty rescued the company from the debts left by her husband's generosity to his religion. She moved the
company to its current Hollidaysburg location from Philadelphia and began an active advertising campaign
complete with the famous Slinky jingle
Richard James died in 1974.
Betty James also replaced the original Slinky material
of blue-black Swedish steel with silver colored American
metal. She added other Slinky toys: Slinky Jr.,
Plastic Slinky, Slinky Dog, Slinky Pets, Crazy Eyes
(glasses with Slinky-extended fake eyeballs) and Neon
Slinky. The Slinky brand was sold in 1998 to Poof Toys.
Betty James of James Industries, creator of the classic
Slinky toy, was inducted into the Toy Industry
Hall of Fame in 2001.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blslinky.htm
James Industries
P.O. Box 407
Slinky Avenue
Hollidaysburg, PA 16648
(814) 695-5681
http://www.poof-slinky.com/
Slinky.org
Pac-Man turns 25
After all these years, he's still munching dots, chomping power pellets, and eluding Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Help the old guy celebrate his birthday by recalling his career, and your love for him.
Pac-Man World 3 preview
Pac-Man Pinball Advance
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Remembering RAMAC & More
The RAMAC stored 5 megabytes of data on its 50 disks.
Remembering RAMAC
Posted on Thu, May. 26, 2005
THE FORERUNNER OF TODAY'S HARD DRIVES BUILT 50 YEARS AGO IN DOWNTOWN SAN JOSE
By Michael Bazeley
Mercury News
Today's iPod-toting hipsters have no idea how much they owe to an unremarkable little building in downtown San Jose.
It was there, at 99 Notre Dame Ave., nearly 50 years ago, that a small band of IBM engineers developed the RAMAC, the first system for storing data on magnetic disks. The refrigerator-size beast was a technological breakthrough, and it's considered by most to be the forerunner of today's hard drives.
The invention of this bulky assembly of 50 spinning platters is being honored tonight by a worldwide engineering association as a ``milestone moment'' in engineering. It's an honor that could further help efforts to create a museum honoring the innovation performed at the former IBM lab.
``This recognition moves it from being viewed as a piece of machinery to a revolutionary computer system,'' said Al Hoagland, director of the Institute for Information Storage Technology and a professor of electrical engineering at Santa Clara University.
In computing circles, the RAMAC's reputation is already well-established.
Before the advent of magnetic disk storage, computers stored their information on rolls of magnetic tape or coded punch cards. Retrieving information could take hours or days. And banks and other companies often processed their data just once a week.
In 1952, East Coast-based IBM opened its first West Coast lab at the Notre Dame address in San Jose. Rey Johnson was installed as manager.
The lab's team wasted little time making history. One of its first projects was to develop a storage device that could process data in real time. The result was a machine that took advantage of a new technique called the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.
At the heart of the RAMAC machine was a 20-inch high spindle of 50 spinning disks. Two feet wide, the disks were coated with magnetic iron oxide paint, similar to that on the Golden Gate Bridge.
A mechanical arm with a read/write head would move up and down alongside the spindle until it located the disk with the correct data, and then slide in between the spinning platters to scan the appropriate track. The whole process took a second.
The machine was innovative in several ways. Its 5 megabyte storage capacity was massively large for the time. And it allowed users to quickly dive into a stack of data and randomly gain access to the information they needed, a feat beyond the reach of punch cards and magnetic tape.
``It was a radical innovation,'' said Hoagland, who worked for IBM for 28 years.
Transactions that might take days to process before could now be accomplished in minutes, Hoagland said.
``It changed the way we handled banking, for instance,'' said Currie Munce, vice president of research at San Jose-based Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. ``We never would have had the Web and what came with it without that high-speed random access.''
The RAMAC was a big success for IBM. Big Blue made more than 1,000 of the machines over a five-year period, helping establish the company's dominance in mainframe computing.
Today, just a few of the original RAMACs are known to exist. One sits outside Hoagland's office on the third floor of the engineering building at Santa Clara University. On loan from IBM, the machine is being restored by students. Two years into the project, the students have restored much of the machine's sheen and coaxed many of its key parts back into working order.
Hoagland hopes to have a fully functional RAMAC by next year, in time for the 50th anniversary of its unveiling by IBM.
``At this point, I don't see any showstoppers,'' Hoagland said.
The RAMAC's specifications are laughable by today's standards. Some hard drives are as small as a quarter and can store 100 billion bits of data per square inch, 50 million times that of the RAMAC.
Hitachi, for example, recently announced the development of ``Mikey,'' a one-inch hard drive weighing just 14 grams and able to hold up to 10 gigabytes of data. The company is also testing a new method of aligning data bits on hard disks vertically instead of horizontally. The new orientation could allow companies to increase hard drive storage capacity tenfold, Munce said.
``I think things like micro-drives will change the way we consume digital entertainment,'' he said.
Hoagland's goal is to preserve the legacy of the hard-disk innovation in San Jose. As director of the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center, he has been pushing to create a museum at 99 Notre Dame Ave. He may get his wish. The San Jose City Council recently passed a resolution promising to begin discussions around the idea. And a couple of city council members are due at tonight's ceremony, organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
``My dream,'' Hoagland said, ``is if you think of the RAMAC, you think of Rey Johnson and you think of 99 Notre Dame Ave.''
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Contact Michael Bazeley at
mbazeley@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5642, and read his blog at
http://www.siliconbeat.com.
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Volcanic Eruptions of 1980 at Mount St. Helens
At 8:32 Sunday morning, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.
Shaken by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale, the north face of this tall symmetrical mountain collapsed in a massive rock debris avalanche. Nearly 230 square miles of forest was blown over or left dead and standing. At the same time a mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward and drifted downwind, turning day into night as dark, gray ash fell over eastern Washington and beyond. The eruption lasted 9 hours, but Mount St. Helens and the surrounding landscape were dramatically changed within moments.
In 1982 the President and Congress created the 110,000-acre National Volcanic Monument for research, recreation, and education. Inside the Monument, the environment is left to respond naturally to the disturbance.
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/mshnvm/
Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam - Washington State, USA
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/
Video: Mount St. Helens' Eruption Day, 1980
Interactive: Anatomy Of A Volcano
http://www.kirotv.com/mountsthelens/index.html
Mount St. Helens Silver Lake Visitor Center
http://www.parks.wa.gov/mountsthelens.asp
Seattle PI.- Path of destruction: The lateral blast
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/mountsthelens/laterblast.shtml
National Geographic Slide Show
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/forcesofnature/forces/v_img_1_1.html
http://www.weyerhaeuser.com/citizenship/publicoutreach/sthelens/anniversary.asp
Mt St Helens' recreation guide.
http://welcome.tdn.com/index.php?location=mount_st_helens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_St_Helens
Mount St. Helens was known as "the Fuji of America" because its symmetrical beauty was similar to that of the famous Japanese volcano. The graceful cone top, whose glistening cap of perennial snow and ice dazzled the viewer, is now largely gone. On May 18, 1980, the missing mountaintop was transformed in a few hours into the extensive volcanic ash that blanketed much of the Northwestern United States and into various other deposits closer to the
mountain.
The Daily News' website devoted to Mount St. Helens.
http://www.tdn.com/helens/
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Anniversary In 2005