Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as […]
After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans […]
It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that […]
It hasn’t been that long since humans figured out how to create power grids that integrated multiple generators and consumers. Ever since AC won the battle of the currents, grid operators have had to deal with the issues that come with using AC instead of the far less complex DC. Instead of simply targeting a […]
In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing else on the market, and had a price tag to match—retailing at $9,995, or the equivalent of over $30,000 today. It […]
Do you ever look at the news, and wonder about the process behind the news cycle? I did, and for the last couple of decades it’s been the subject of one of my projects. The Raspberry Pi on my shelf runs my word trend analysis tool for news content, and since my journey from curious […]
From the very dawn of the personal computing era, the PC and Apple platforms have gone very different ways. IBM compatibles surged in popularity, while Apple was able to more closely guard the Macintosh from imitators wanting to duplicate its hardware and run its software. Things changed when Apple announced it would hop aboard the […]
Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abandoned the 386 in 2012, and Torvalds openly mused if the time was right to make further cuts for the benefit of modernity. It […]
Some Mondays are worse than others, but April 28 2025 was particularly bad for millions of people in Spain and Portugal. Starting just after noon, a number of significant grid oscillations occurred which would worsen over the course of minutes until both countries were plunged into a blackout. After a first substation tripped, in the […]
It’s an inconvenient fact that most of Earth’s largesse of useful minerals is locked up in, under, and around a lot of rock. Our little world condensed out of the remnants of stars whose death throes cooked up almost every element in the periodic table, and in the intervening billions of years, those elements have […]