From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 131:
Early computers used printers as their sole output. When programmers at various large traditional computer companies were first given monitors, they immediately duplicated the printer interface on their green, glowing screens, giving rise to the term “glass Teletype.” With this lavish investment of more than 20 minutes of design time behind them, they saw no need to update the interface for the next thirty years.
From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 91:
For those not well-versed in English folk story tradition, “The Three Bears” is the story of a young juvenile delinquent who breaks into a neighbor’s house, vandalizes it, and manages to kill herself while trying to escape. Good parents read it to their children, instead of letting them watch all that violence on television.
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 376:
The very first shot in the Mercury program was named Little Joe-1, ready for firing August 21, 1959, on Wallops Island. Half an hour before the planned take-off time there was suddenly the noise of a rocket roaring and smoke enveloped the launch pad. When the smoke cleared, literally speaking, Little Joe was still standing there; the escape tower and the dummy Mercury capsule had taken off without it.
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 361:
In 1959 the newly appointed Astronomer Royal of England, Australian-born Richard van de Riet Wooley, told the British press that space travel was “utter bilge.” Ever since, the British Interplanetary Society has had a fine time giving him reports such as “An American named Carpenter has penetrated utter bilge for the fourth time.”
The Atlas missile was a highly capable launch vehicle due to its very low structural mass. The place where the greatest mass saving was realized was in the fuel tanks which were, in effect, giant, load-bearing, stainless steel balloons whose strength came not from their dime-thin walls, but from their internal pressure. Without that pressure, the Atlas would have collapsed under its own weight, but, kept properly pressurized, it could throw a circa 1954 hydrogen bomb 5,500 nautical miles, or, more significantly, launch Mercury capsules, and countless other non-lethal payloads into Earth orbit, or beyond (for instance, they launched the first probes to Venus and Mars). But, while it was being developed, the “balloon tank” made a lot of people nervous.
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 328:
The tank of the Atlas consisted of stainless steel which was no thicker than a dime at any point. Generals—and later congressmen—worrying about what would happen if somebody dropped a wrench on such a tank were conducted to a test version of the “stainless steel balloon” that was stiffened by pressure and offered a choice of assorted mallets to see whether they could dent it. In each case the general or congressman grew tired before he had even succeeded in producing a mark that could be seen.
As I understand it, to this day, if you see an Atlas missile on display, hidden in the background somewhere will be a compressor working (or ready to switch on automatically) 24/7 to maintain the necessary level of pressure in its tanks.
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 390:
Except for GT-III the Gemini spacecraft were not given names as the Mercury capsules had been. GT-III did have a name; it was called the Molly Brown. The name was chosen by the command pilot of the flight, Virgil Ivan Grissom. Grissom (generally known as “Gus”) had had to swim to safety when his Mercury capsule Liberty Bell 7 sank after the second suborbital flight. At the time GT-III was being readied, there was a successful musical show on Broadway called The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Grissom had decided that if a name could help to keep his second capsule afloat that would be the one. NASA officials were a bit reluctant to accept “Molly Brown” but when Grissom suggested “Titanic” as his alternative choice they gave in.
It can hardly be a coincindence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as beautiful as an airport."
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect that in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current location of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
— The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams, pp. 13-14.
(And that was before the advent of the TSA.)
He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head.
“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in [the office] for six months but I’ve gone mad.”
“Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?”
“When do hedgehogs start hibernating?”
“Sometime in Spring, I think.”
“I’ll be in shortly after that.”
— So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams, pg. 54.
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