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Shorpy is the 100 year-old Photoblog. Well, the blog is not 100 years-old.

Found via Dinosaurs and Robots.

It was never designed for playback — it’s a phonautogram, and it predates Edison’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by 20 years.

Which is a misleading statistic, because the big deal about MHLL was the playback. It’s like having videotape before the television….

Deardorff, Folmer and Schwing, Contessa Nettel, Featured Cameras at ClickonDavid.com

Prints made by processing the film found in old cameras.

Although we shamefacedly admit to owning not just one but several digital cameras, this cartoon from PVPonline captures out attitude towards the new-for-the-sake-of-newness perfectly.

Once again, bOINGbOING has contributed to the betterment of mankind by pointing the way to The postcards of the Keown-Boyd Family. One Mr. Sent of London has procured a wonderous assembly of one family’s postcard correspondence from the years 1898 to 1922, and is sharing them with the world via his “fotoblog”.

Though we are unfamiliar with these so-called “fotoblogs” (or why the word should be spelt so poorly), we thank Mr. Sent for utilizing the moderne to preserve these lovely artifacts.

One fails to find the words that describe Vákuum TV. That is because the site is in Hungarian, a language with which we can do nothing but point at and titter. As near as we can discern, the perpetrators have adapted Edison’s kinetescope projection technique for viewing by pressing one’s forehead against a television tube. The one-minute videos, silent pantomimes of performance art, all have a common theme of “X realizes that Y, and kills himself”. We are sure that Edison would have approved.

Yet more casual wanderings have brought us to the The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images, an archive founded by a commercial and fine artist who started collecting in the 1960’s.

The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images is one of the most comprehensive archives of Victorian and Edwardian graphic ephemera in the world. This amazing collection of material culture contains more than 250,000 printed and handwritten paper artifacts from the 1800s and early 1900s. The finest examples of ephemera are represented here, including calendars, greeting cards, trade cards, product labels, paper dolls, tickets, postcards, scrapbooks and sheet music. These objects feature colorful images that symbolize the customs, attitudes and ideals of Victorian and Edwardian life: innocent children, garden-fresh flowers, romantic couples, holiday traditions, fashionable women, humanized animals and cigar-smoking gentlemen.

Most of our images span one hundred years, from 1820 to 1920. But we also have illustrated books that date from 1589 and cigar box labels as recent as 1959. More than three hundred fifty years of graphic arts are depicted in a combination of breadth and beauty that makes The John Grossman Collection of Antique Images unique.

Somebody (probably those boffins at MeFi) introduced us to Toogle Image Search, a Google-like image-hunter that returns your result converted into a colorful ASCII-graphic.

What—you were expecting utility?!? Begone with ye.

Benjamin C. Pierce has constructed a photographic gallery of ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer that was among—if not—the first digital computers.

For someone who came of age in the second half of the computer revolution, the immediately surprising thing about ENIAC is its physicality. It is a machine in the most literal sense, built from huge metal boxes, massive cables, thick copper wires joined by gobs of solder, panels full of dials, bank upon bank of vacuum tubes. Looking again, the second surprise is the beauty and intricacy of its individual parts. A single tube, responsible for just one numeral in a decimal ring counter, contains a thicket of wires, planes, and baffles. If you peer very closely, a microcosm of strange and enigmatic scenes begins to unfold.

These images of ENIAC express the wonder I felt when, as a child, I came to understand what a computer is: not just a calculating machine, but a tool for amplifying imagination, making it possible to weave structures of pure abstract symbols and see them rendered as concrete things, real places. This is pure magic.

SCP would like to thank Mr. Pierce for his labors, and the kind people at BoingBoing.