Search Results: History of operating systems

A 17th-century visual manual on how to load and fire a musket.

Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic evolved a unique way to write vowels... with consonants! See how in this episode of Thoth's Pill: an Animated History of Writing. You're back in the ancient Middle East, where seemingly everyone's...

Watch ancient Sumerians figure out how to use pictures to write sounds for the first time in history. See why the Egyptians disagree with their approach. Meaning writing (logographs) let early writers get civilized and document their thoughts...

The Korean alphabet is better than yours. Meet the king who invented it and watch him work his linguistic magic in this chapter in the history of writing. You wake up in another palace. This time you're in Korea. The first face to greet...

From Egyptian hieroglyphs to your alphabet, watch these miners turn fancy symbols into simple scratches that were all about the sounds. First marvel at hieroglyphic inscriptions in the shadow of the great pyramids. Once you grasp how those...

The property includes five aflaj irrigation systems and is representative of some 3,000 such systems still in use in Oman. The origins of this system of irrigation may date back to AD 500, but archaeological evidence suggests that irrigation...

Pipes and cisterns installed by Peisistratus at the Acropolis for the supply of fresh water in Athens. 6th century BCE.

Watch prehistoric pictures turn into written words as ancient civilizations around the world learn to write for the very first time! You took Thoth's Pill. Now your journey continues. Leave the cave days behind and take a leap into history...

Watch this ancient Chinese scribe figure out how to use a fixed set of characters to write limitless words in his language. How? By combining meaning writing (logographs) and sound writing (rebus)! The result is a set of helpful hints...

Your vowels were invented in Greece, giving birth to the first "true" alphabet. Watch as your new toga-clad friend turns your consonant abjad into a consonant-vowel alphabet. It's such a useful mapping of letters to sounds that neighbor...