Compartir a través de

"I saw it on the web, it must be true!"

  • Artículo

In college, I wrote an article for an April Fools edition of our ACM newsletter about how the Illiac was to become the newest mail server for students. The best part of the article (in my humble opinion) was the image that was “enhanced using Adobe Photoshop software“: I pasted in a picture of my friend (then the sysadmin for the students' servers) on top of a commonly used photo of the Illiac.

A couple of years later, a computer museum in Italy put together a web page about the history of computers, and they looked around for a picture of the historic Illiac to include in that web page (probably using https://images.google.com)... and you can probably tell where this is going:

Say hi to my friend Joe: https://www.computermuseum.it/history/generazione-2.htm
See the original: https://ems.music.uiuc.edu/history/illiac.html

I love the web.

(Update 2/5: Another thing about the web, those referrer headers are pretty useful... Max, the owner of www.computermuseum.it , saw the hits from this blog and fixed the picture! I'm bummed, but at least he archived the faked one too :-) You can see the faked one here:
https://www.computermuseum.it/images/history/faked-illiac.jpghttps://www.acm.uiuc.edu/banks/15/7/ )

(Update 5/10: Here's the archive link to the original page: https://web.archive.org/web/20020209111053/https://www.computermuseum.it/history/generazione-2.htm)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I blogged a few years ago about how I did an April Fool's edition of my college's ACM's newsletter. What...
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    Thats hilarious. Maybe you should contact them and see how smart they actually are.
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    Too funny.
    -Mathew Nolton
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    My only question: how in the world did you find they used your photo?
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    Charlie: Another friend of mine was using images.google.com to look for pictures of the illiac, and he recognized Joe in the picture on computermuseum.it.
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    Wow! What a post to brighten up my day. :-)
  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2004
    That was soooo funny. Thanks.
  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2004
    KC, you forgot the ® when refering to Adobe® Photoshop® software!
    Be careful, you could be sued for that ;-)
  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2004
    From Max, owner of personal web site ComputerMuseum.it:
    I love the web too! Thanks to referrer list I saw many visitors from this page coming to ComputerMuseum.it. Me and my friends have laughed a lot when we saw the faked picture on my site! I have never noticed it before... It's like the movie Forrest Gump. Now I have put online the right one!
    Many greetings from Rome, Italy
    Max
  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2004
    So where do we see the faked one now?
  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2004
    IMO, you should have kept the fake one, Max :-)
    There is the big History and the smaller one.
  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2004
    Ok, here it is:

    http://www.computermuseum.it/images/history/faked-illiac.jpg