Brand Necrophilia, part 7
Today I learned that Netscape is owned by Facebook.
AOL renamed the Netscape Communications Corporation to New Aurora Corporation, and transferred the Netscape brand to themselves. AOL sold the former Netscape company, now known as New Aurora Corporation, to Microsoft, who in turn sold them again to Facebook. The former Netscape company is currently a non-operating subsidiary of Facebook, still known as New Aurora Corporation. The Netscape brand remained with AOL.
That makes Facebook the current owner of the cookie patent, so I was hoping that this meant that they are now embroiled in the Forever War with ValueClick, but I now see that it was settled in 2010. Bummer!
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Tags: brand necrophilia, computers, copyright, corporations, doomed, nscp, retrocomputing
Font Archaeology
Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC)
The time it takes for the phosphor to become fully activated is actually longer than the pulse representing the timing to draw a single pixel (40 nanoseconds). Meaning, if we were to attempt to display just a single pixel, the phosphor on this particular spot will never reach its full activation level resulting in a fuzzy image of varying brightnesses between dimmer, thin strokes and heavier, thick strokes. So the typography has to adjust for this, by streching the pulses to double width (80 ns), at least, in order to provide an even image and legible text and to work around the shallow flanks of the screen intensification. [...]
To provide for this, the VT-terminals employ a special technique, called dot stretching: The individual rows of a character matrix as in ROM are modified on-the-fly by prolonging any pulses for an active pixel for yet another pixel. Where there's a single pixel in ROM, there will be two on the screen, where there are two in a row, there will be three displayed. (This is equivalent to OR-ing a word with itself by an offset of one pixel or bit to the right.)
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Tags: computers, glitch, retrocomputing, the future