History – www.chrisrcook.com

Netscape Navigator User Demographics circa 1996

So this lunchtime Period Sites in Period Browsers (PSPB) threw up an interesting bit of history – a brief overview of Netscape Navigator users circa 1996.

York Minster, West Front / James Valentine (between 1860 and 1879)

An old photo of what was, back then, a rather new view.

The cost of a PDP-11 circa 1971

Whilst trying to track down the cost of memory for a PDP-11 I stumbled across The PDP-11 FAQ and it’s rather excellent collection of early 70s PDP-11 price lists. It’s a fun little list, rammed through of interesting little nuggets – today it’s hard to imaging it but in 1972 a line printer would have set you back at least 12,000 USD. That’s almost 92,000 USD in 2025 prices!

Demons, Exorcisms, and the Scientific Method

This is interesting; Heresy, witchcraft, Jean Gerson, scepticism and the use of placebo controls covers a late 16th Century French attempt to apply a proto-scientific method to demonic possession and, in effect, implement a placebo-controlled trial.

The First Longships Lighthouse at Land’s End, Cornwall

A lovely shot of the first Longships Lighthouse taken in the 1860s by William May. The long exposure fuzz on the ocean is an artefact of the then-available photography process rather than an artistic choice.

Behind the Bamboo Curtain – Spying on China During Mao’s Cultural Revolution / ITN (1967)

An interesting historic look by ITN at monitoring Mao’s China from 1967.

A Viaduct for Staithes

A little more from my trawl through “The North Eastern Railway – Its Rise and Development“ – this time it’s a nice (and, as far as I can tell, unique) shot of the Whitby, Redcar and Middlesbrough Union Railway’s viaduct over Staithes Beck, just south of the village itself.

Described as a ‘light iron viaduct of novel construction’, it has an almost American feel to it and looks very out of place look to the modern eye. Given the failure of that particular line – even before the car and the van out competed it – It’s certainly not something we’ll ever see rebuilt again.

Prints of York’s Old Station

Not quite a Tour of Old York but, whilst scrabbling around in the Internet Archives library, I came across two rather wonderful illustrations of the first York station and the sidings that used to extend towards Lendal Bridge.