ReadWriteWeb

We call it "IT," and the reason is because a physicist first realized that information, like any other subatomic phenomenon, was both a particle and a wave. It was a product unto itself, and Dr. Jacob "Jack" Goldman created the environment for the concept to take root.

I know you're thinking Xerox PARC. Actually, I was thinking the Ford Motor Company.

The iPhone, some of its earliest reviewers had said, was so unlike anything that had previously been called a telephone - so much so that it instantaneously un-defined everything heretofore that had gone by that name, making itself the singular specimen. No other device, I've read a hundred times now, had a similar effect on technology and design.

Rewind the clock just 34 years. Before the iPhone, there was an Apple that deserved an even greater superlative.

This is not an Apple-bashing piece. It is also not an attempt to cut an American icon down to size at a time when we're remembering the magnificent contributions of its fallen founder. This is about how failure makes us better.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard, seen, or read comparisons of Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison since early yesterday evening. Jobs did not invent anything - not the personal computer, not the MP3 player, not the tablet. But besides that fact, there are certain other stark similarities. One: Jobs, like Edison, was a fierce competitor who sought to control not only the delivery channel for his products, but the market surrounding those products. Two: Like the finest scientist, Jobs studied his failures and Apple's very carefully, and unlike Microsoft, built his next success upon the smoking ruins of his failures.

JavaScript creator Brendan Eich has spoken out against the perception that JavaScript was an arbitrary or random success. In a comment at Hacker News Eich explains the historical context from which JavaScript emerged and how it was unlikely to have happened any other way.

In comment at Lambda the Ultimate, Eich wrote: "History has reason and rhyme as well as chance, it is not all and only random. For my part, there was little 'arbitrary' in what I did, including the mistakes -- some of those weirdly recapitulated early LISP mistakes."

Neal Stephenson once wrote that BeOS was the Batmobile of operating systems (Windows was a station wagon, MacOS was a European sports car and Linux was a free army tank). It was created in 1991. In 1997 its legendary file system, BFS was created. Be Inc sold to Palm in 2001, and BeOS was to become the foundation of PalmOS 6, which was never used in a Palm device. However, the ideas beyond BeOS live on Haiku, an open source clone of the OS.

Ars Technica has an interesting retrospective on the BeOS file system, BFS, which is now in use in both Haiku and SkyOS. BFS had many forward looking features, including 64-bit data structures, journaling and metadata support.

The impression most people in the West have of the Arabic world, and the wider Muslim world, is sometimes crazy, sometimes reasonable, but always provisional. It's unavoidable that people only have time, and mental space, to understand so much about a culture not their own. But in this case, there is an aspect of Arab history that even many Arabs don't know. They invented agriculture.

To be more accurate, they moved farming from a folkway to a science; and they did it in Europe, or at least codified it there, in Al-Anadalus, Muslim Spain. Now, with the Filāḥa Texts Project, a group is using online collaboration to make these Andalucian writings on our common agricultural heritage accessible to everyone.

How do you visualize your thoughts? Are your dreams more like a sit-com or a documentary? English historian David Starkey thinks his thoughts and work are best represented through mobile applications after seeing his book, Crown and Country, turned into a rich media app.

The goal of Starkey's app -- Kings and Queens -- is to bring his book, and history, to life. If you are familiar with the history of the British monarchy, it is one of the most fascinating tales of intrigue, betrayal, politics and power in the history of the world. The topic was begging to be brought to interactive life. Starkey's app is not just a splendid way to blend documentary and books but could signal the future of literature by looking into the past.

Last week, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a highly idiosyncratic (read: inaccurate) portrait of American revolutionary figure Paul Revere to the media. Now, a struggle has broken out on Wikipedia over Ms. Palin's version of history.

Her version was that Paul Revere rode through Boston, ringing a bell, to announce to the British that the colonials were preparing to fight. This is not remotely true. He rode silently, to let the revolutionaries know the British were en route.

Update after the jump.

We've mentioned the library at the monastery of St. Gall before, in our article "Check the Original Sources: Digital Manuscripts Online." If you're interested in the middle ages or in the digitization of our history, you'll come across Switzerland's St. Gall. Its library is so extraordinary it has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

St. Gall isn't resting on its admittedly substantial and ancient laurels. It has now helped to create an entire website devoted to a very important subset of its manuscripts, the St. Gall Monastery Plan website is devoted to "the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages."

Now if there's one oddball fixation we revel in here it's ancient sound. Whether it's Babylonian language, Shakespeare's accent or chirping Mayan temples, we're going to pull you aside like an irritatingly insistent music fan who just knows he can turn you on to Hawkwind.

Well, it's that time again, folks. This time, it's the sound of the two trumpets, one bronze and the other silver, that were buried with the boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamum. They laid sealed away for over 3,200 years in the Pharaoh's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, until that tomb was opened up by Howard Carter in 1922. It was played for the first time in for a BBC recording in 1939.