Technology: January 2008 Archives

On January 31, 1958, the U. S. launched Explorer 1 into orbit, America's first successful satellite launch. The Soviets had already launched two Sputniks, including one with the dog Laika. Vanguard, our first attempt at matching the USSR, crashed and burned in December 1957. We could have beaten Sputnik into space, but President Eisenhower didn't want to use a military ballistic missile derived from the German V-2 for the civilian space program. When Vanguard failed, Wernher von Braun and his team at Redstone Arsenal got the go-ahead to use their Juno I rocket for Explorer I.

Cuffy Meigs has a blog entry about the Explorer I semicentennial, with newsreel clips (narrated by Ed Herlihy!) of the Vanguard disaster and the Explorer launch and links to more articles about the event.

(The Explorer launch newsreel also includes an item about the founding of the United Arab Republic, a union of Egypt and Syria, which began on February 1, 1958, and ended three years later.)

If you're interested in space history, you owe it to yourself to visit the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, one of the top space museums in the entire world, and just a four-hour drive from Tulsa. They have an excellent presentation of the Space Race between the United States and the USSR, starting with the German rocket program during World War II. The story is told with documents, text, movies, and artifacts, including a V-2, the Mercury Liberty Bell VII, Gemini X, and Apollo XIII capsules, and Soviet space vehicles and full-scale engineering models. The museum has the biggest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside the old Soviet Union.

Don Singleton, the longtime president of the Tulsa Computer Society, has launched a new tabloid newspaper called Tulsa High Tech. The first issue is out, and you can find it at library branches, coffee houses, and other locations around town, including Coffee House on Cherry Street, DoubleShot Coffee Company, and Shades of Brown.

Here, from the advertising rate card, is a kind of mission statement for the paper:

Tulsa High Tech is a new free newspaper which is solely advertiser supported. It will be distributed throughout the greater Tulsa area, covering information for the novice computer users, end users, small business owners, developers, and IT Professionals. We will include news on many different "High Technology" related organizations in Tulsa including Tulsa Computer Society (TCS), Tulsa Users of Macintosh Society (TUMS), Tulsa AutoCAD (TAUG), ASM Tulsa, Microsoft IT Pros of Tulsa (OKITP), Tulsa Java Users Group, Tulsa Linux Users Group (TLUG), Tulsa Small Business Server User Group (Tulsa SBSers), Tulsa SQL Server Group, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group (TSPIG), TulsaDevelopers.NET, and other computer organizations, as well as graphic art, amateur radio, and other engineering, science, or other technology related organizations. We are offering to list their meetings and publish other information about their group in return for their members helping us take copies of the newspaper to businesses near where they live or work.

While there are a number of computer and technology-related user groups and classes around town, there hasn't been a central place to find that information. That is the niche that Tulsa High Tech seeks to fill.

The premier issue includes a review of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, a story on how to recognize "phishing" e-mail scams, a profile of Helping Tulsa (an organization that refurbs computers for use by non-profits here and overseas), a "Beginners' Corner" column covering some e-mail basics, a review of a 3D visualization program called Vue.

You may be wondering, in this age of e-mail and the World Wide Web, what point there is in putting out a technology newspaper. The answer is that many of the people who would benefit most from connecting with local computer user groups and classes are those who are least able to find those resources online. A tabloid paper at the local wifi coffee shop or library is an accessible way for computer users to find the help they need.

Don would like to know if others share his vision for this kind of publication. If you would like to advertise, help distribute papers, or otherwise make this paper happen, please contact him via the Tulsa High Tech website.

P.S. Don compares Tulsa High Tech to the I/O Port newsletter published in the late '90s by TCS. But of course, a few regular features of I/O Port won't appear in the new paper as times have changed. He's posted a PDF of the June 1999 I/O Port issue. It's a real walk down memory lane from the days of dial-up, complete with BBS listings and access numbers for local Internet service providers like Internet Oklahoma (IOnet), Galaxy Star, Telepath, and Webzone.

MORE: Don Singleton has posted a couple of comments; I think they're worth reposting out here.

Michael, thank you very much for mentioning TulsaHighTech

If anyone is with a group that would like to be listed in TulsaHighTech, if they want an ad in the paper, or if they know of a place that would be willing to distribute the paper, and if they can pick up some for it, they can email me at donsingleton@cox.net or call me at 622-3417

One other thing in the premier issue was an announcement for a Photoshop Workshop that Paula Sanders is hoping to start. This is one reason why I feel Tulsa needs a regular paper like TulsaHighTech, because she tried to publicize her new workshop in the Tulsa Whirled and they did not even run her listing, even though they had it way before the deadline, and it was sent directly to the person in charge of the column. She is going to hold one additional meeting in February, but if no one shows up again she is going to drop the idea.

This is not just a Photoshop class, it is an effort to create a high level exchange of ideas and techniques between established artists that use Photoshop.

Emphasis added. There's value in promoting cross-pollenization of ideas among computer users.