Douglas Adam’s Desk and Office in 1996?

This appears to be Douglas Adam’s nicely messy office and his cable spaghetti’d computer setup – complete with what appears to be a fantastic stack of external SCSI drives. Taken from this clip of October 1996’s ‘Break The Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins‘, this footage was likely filmed in the summer of that year.

HMS St. Vincent Takes In Sail

An interesting little bit of history today; one of the few surviving bits of film of a British warship under sail to be taken while she was still part of the Royal Navy.

First laid down in Devonport in 1810 and launched just before Waterloo in 1815, HMS St. Vincent – a 120-gun first-rate ship of the line – managed to hang on as an armed training vessel until she was scrapped in 1906.

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Tours of Old York #2: The Streets of York, 1988 and Now

And, having found another old video of York on YouTube, it’s time for another Tour of Old York. Alas, the the YouTube video doesn’t seem to be embeddable on any old random website but – in better news – it does seem to be tagged with a permissive licence that allows me to rehost it here…

The streets of York in 1988, Russell Webster (Via Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed))
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Jamie Zawinski’s notes on the early days of the Netscape/Mozilla Transition

On January 20th, 1998, Netscape laid off a lot of people. One of them would have been me, as my “department”, such as it was, had been eliminated, but I ended up mometarily moving from “clienteng” over to the “website” division. For about 48 hours I thought that I might end up writing a webmail product or something.

That, uh, didn’t happen.

Jamie Zawinski
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Tours of Old York #1: 70s York in Flood

York in flood during (apparently) the late 70s. At about 30 seconds in there’s a lovely shot of a very wet pre-flood defence Marygate. Later on, at around one minute forty, you get a shot along Wellington Row and across the River – notably showing the build that there before the construction of the General Accident (now Aviva) Building. There are also some nice shots of The Kings Arms and the bottom of the Museum Gardens in flood.