Time travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!
1968 – Intel Is Born
Andy Grove, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1978.
Intel Corporation was born 45 years ago this week in Mountain View, California, by Gordon E. Moore, Robert Noyce and Arthur Rock. Intel started out as a manufacturer of semiconductors but within a year of its founding had developed SRAM that was twice as fast as their next competitor. By the 1980s they dominated the DRAM (used in personal computing) market and have followed the shifting states of computer technology (with various ups and downs) to the most recent shift to solid state drives since 2008.
1867 – Reinforced Concrete Foreshadows Canyons of Steel
William E. Ward House of Rye Brook, New York, made entirely of reinforced concrete
French gardener Joseph Monier filed for a patent for reinforced concrete 167 years ago today. He began tinkering with concrete reinforced with steel when he found he could not find suitably sturdy flowerpots for his garden and began to make concrete with mesh embedded inside. He exhibited his inventions at the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris and received his patent the same year. The first structure to be built entirely of reinforced concrete (including the roof!) and was a mansion completed in 1875 in Rye Brook, New York, built with concrete because of its owner’s fear of fire. Monier went on to patent uses for his invention in pipes, columns, beams, bridges and buildings. And hence the concrete jungle that is the modern city as we know it.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
