Tag: origin

Microsoft Bob, the spiritual great-grandfather of Siri?

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The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas talks to the team inside Microsoft who developed Comic Sans, and while the big takeaway is that the font was inspired by ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ is this little gem to rewrite history: My job was to match products to fonts, sort of like a marriage broker. Comic Sans was designed for Microsoft Bob, which in many ways was a precursor to Cortana or Siri – for people who had problems with computers. Presumably the Office Paperclip heralded Alexa?

The Ambassador of Doctor Who

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But then, take 51 years that include "I am single-handedly responsible for the heart and soul of Doctor Who," and stack them against the lifetime of almost anyone else. It’s hard, given that, to see David Whitaker as anything other than what he was: a wizard. Philip Sandifer on David Whitaker.

The Doctor’s origin is actually laid out in The Mind Robber. Fact?

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I’ve been following Philip Sandifer’s fanatastic blog as he steps through and analyses each Doctor Who story starting from 1963 (and its counterpart, Adventures With The Wife in Space on Tachyon TV), but his last post has just blown my mind. He’s up to the final few stories of Patrick Troughton, specifically The Mind Robber: The primary threat in this story is that the characters will become fictional. This is, of course, a brilliant use of existential horror and one of the highlights of the story. But thinking about that from a remotely human perspective, it does not actually make