Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The tiny piano that helped create digital code
When your ISP throttles your bandwidth, you can quietly curse Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot. This French telegraph operator got so fed up with tapping out Morse…
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How an NSA expert’s son crippled the early internet
The ultimate act of teenage rebellion used to be crashing the family car, but Robert Tappan Morris opted to crash the entire nascent internet instead. In…
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The astronomer who built a weather network
Discovering an entire planet wasn't enough to appease Urbain Le Verrier's ego. After pinpointing Neptune using nothing but math and sheer arrogance, he got…
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The 1970s system that brought text to British TVs
Long before dial-up tones haunted our nightmares, the UK government thought they had perfected the internet. The Viewdata system was a ludicrously expensive…
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How a bad interface caused a nuclear accident
Next time your software crashes because of a hidden button, remember that a bad UI literally caused the worst nuclear accident in US history. The 1979 Three…
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The sci-fi spaceship computer that was just an Acorn board
Hollywood has a long history of just gluing random tech parts together and calling it a spaceship. The Acorn System 1 was an early, ultra-nerdy single-board…
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Windslow Burhoe acoustic crossover neurons
Audio engineers are basically playing god with copper wire. When Winslow Burhoe was designing high-end speaker crossovers, his complex inverted-dome tweeter…
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The tiny metal disk built to outlast civilization
We are casually trusting our entire digital legacy to hard drives that die in five years, so the Long Now Foundation decided to be the adults in the room.…
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How tiny packets made the modern internet possible
If the internet tried to send files as single, massive chunks over dedicated phone lines, a single downloaded JPEG would bankrupt you. Welsh physicist Donald…
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The 200-ton machine that streamed music by telephone
Long before Spotify bled your wallet, Thaddeus Cahill built a 200-ton, basement-filling synthesizer that transmitted early electronic music over telephone…
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The Enigma upgrade that made codebreaking easier
When the supposedly unbreakable Enigma machine wasn't unbreakable enough, the Luftwaffe introduced the 'Uhr' (Clock) in 1944. This nightmare box plugged into…
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The Soviet network bureaucracy killed before it began
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union had a chance to beat America to the internet, but their own politicians strangled the project in its crib. The OGAS network was…
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The TV that fried its own circuit boards
The Philco Predicta looked like a beautiful sci-fi television, but its insides were an absolute engineering dumpster fire. To mass-produce these mid-century…
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IBM once stored data with a giant robotic tape picker
Before hard drives got cheap, IBM's solution for mass storage was a terrifying electromechanical beast that literally whipped magnetic tape around. The 1964…
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A poem helped keep the internet from choking
The entire internet relies on a traffic control system invented by a woman who literally wrote a poem about it. Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree…
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The first personal computer had no microprocessor
The world's first commercially available personal computer didn't even have a microprocessor inside it. Released in 1971, years before Apple was a glint in…
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How ARPANET got rival computers talking
Getting early computers to talk to each other was like forcing aggressive rival cults to share a single kitchen. In 1969, ARPANET solved this via the 1822…
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How a Hawaiian radio network helped create Wi-Fi
Because running copper telephone wires between volcanoes is a logistical nightmare, researchers at the University of Hawaii in 1971 just built a radio-based…
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How nuclear fears shaped the internet
The modern internet's ability to seamlessly route your social media is a direct byproduct of Cold War existential dread. In the early 1960s, Paul Baran was…
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Google Docs' collaboration trick dates to 1989
You hate collaborative document editing when your coworker's cursor deletes your sentence, but Clarence Ellis had to figure out how to make that nightmare…
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The radio station that has buzzed since the 1970s
If you love the idea of a Cold War relic ominously buzzing into the void for decades just to prove it isn't dead, tune into 4625 kHz. The UVB-76 'Buzzer' is a…
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The towers that carried calls across America
The entire mid-century US telephone grid relied on brutalist concrete monoliths blasting microwaves at each other across the countryside like a game of…
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How one bad update nearly broke the early internet
The internet's first apocalyptic meltdown wasn't a malicious hack; it was just a garbage status update that went extremely viral. In 1980, the ARPANET—the…
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The computer that modeled Britain’s economy with water
Trying to explain economics is boring, so a rogue engineer built a computer out of perspex tanks, sluices, and colored water to literally visualize liquid…
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