4/23/21 Report - Interpretation of Finds: One Way Things Get Broken and One Type of Error. NASA Launch Seen By Treasure Coast.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Source: See LiveScience link below.

A metal detectorist scouring an ancient hillfort has uncovered "one of the biggest Iron Age weapon hoards in western Germany," according to archaeologists at the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe (LWL).

The hoard contains more than 150 objects, including deliberately bent weapons, such as 40 spearhead and lancehead tips, swords and fragments of shield bosses (round structures at the center of a shield); tools; belt hooks; horse gear; three silver coins; bronze jewelry; and one fibula, or lower leg bone, Manuel Zeiler, an archaeologist at LWL, told Live Science.

Here is the link.

Iron Age warriors bent the swords of their defeated enemies, ancient hoard reveals | Live Science

That tells you one way that items can get bent or broken - intentionally by enemies.

Also, this is one more of the important discoveries that have been made by detectorists in recent years.

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As you know, it can be difficult to determine the age of found items.  One thing I've learned from experience is that the possible date for items can be earlier than is generally acknowledged.  

Recently I noticed that Steve Jobs was receiving a lot of credit as an amazing visionary for talking about telecommunting back in the 1990s.  That is not so amazing if you know that it was telecommunting was actually taking place a decade or more earlier and written about a couple decades earlier.

Most people think of social media as occurring on personal computers linked by the internet, but that is not the way it started.   I was doing it in around 1979 before the age of personal computers.  And I thought I remembered telecommuting being described futuristically in a book entitled The Electronic Cottage, circa 1980, but I can' find any such book listed anywhere.  Maybe I'm thinking of the book Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler.   I'm not sure about the book that described it now, but I know I was actually telecommuting by1980.

I had moved from an office in the Peachtree Towers in downtown Atlanta to South Florida when I was developing flight training materials for Eastern Airlines. I worked with a group of software developers that was mostly located in Rockville, Md. but I was telecommuting from my home in South Florida while developing software for Eastern, headqaurtered in Miami.  We didn't call it telecommuting then.

I had a computer terminal in my home that was linked to a large mainframe computer in Minneapolis that was the center of an international network.  In the 1970s this system had what we now call email and forums, as well as other advanced software for chatting, sharing computer screens, etc.  On that system email was called pnotes (personal notes), forums were referred to as groupnotes, and chatting was called talk-mode.

My point is that all that existed decades before the public generally became aware of it, and Steve Jobs made his celebrated talk about telecommuting.  Telecommuting was done before the age of personal computers.   People don't realize that, but it is a part of computer history.  

We actually used early forms of flat plasma display screens with touch panels in the 1970s.    The flat panel plasma display screen was invented by Don Bitzer of the University of Illinois.

Here is one similar to one that I used.

And below is an advertisement showing a later IST terminal (I still have one like it in a closet) that was used to access the mainframe computer in Minneapolis (shown on the right).

The network consisted of computer terminals (dumb input/output devices) connected to the mainframe computer in Minneapolis by the telephone system.

Control Data, founded by five fellows from the original UNIVAC project, had a large commitment to computer-based education in the 1970s.  They installed online learning systems in schools and not-for-profit organizations and companies around the country.  There was actually one University of Miami professor that paid something like $400 a month to have a learning system installed in his home for his children some time in the early 1980s.

So you would enter a command on the terminal, and in 0.2 sec. or less, the Minneapolis computer would send the output to the display terminal over the phone lines.  Now personal computers, rather than a centralized computer does the processing, but other than that it is very similar.  Of course the community of people on the network was much smaller, but there were hundreds.

When I first did this, you would remove the cover of a phone (no cell phones then) and attach the terminal to the telephone using alligator clips.  Later came acoustic couplers.  I still have one around somewhere.  

My point, in addition to talking about an early bit of computer evolution that is already being forgotten, is that there is a huge amount of history that is not acknowledged when people talk about firsts.  Things usually happen well before they become known by the larger public.

So what I'm saying today is that what is thought to be the earliest possible date for things, especially found items, is often wrong.  Things often exist and things happen well before they become acknowledged in the general public awareness.  

I could give many more exmaples, but I'll just mention one more thing.  In my recent reading I was surprised by the level of discussion of a round earth presented by St. Augustine in 400 something AD.

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I just watched the space launch.  Viewing was good on the Treasure Coast.  The bright ascending orange light was only lost behind the clouds a couple of times.  I saw the separation and was able to track two bright white lights descending almost to the ocean, where stage 1 was captured by the drone boat.

Our technological accomplishments are amazing while our society descends into a new dark ages.

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It was nice and breezy this morning, but the surf is only around three feet.

Happy hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net