Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Venetian blinds tilt their slats using hidden strings
Your dusty window coverings are a marvel of frustrating string theory. Pulling the plastic rod spins a tiny gear inside the top rail, which physically twists…
Discover moreWhat happens when a computer process is orphaned
Operating systems have bizarrely tragic terminology. When a main application crashes or shuts down while its sub-tasks are still running, those child tasks…
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The internet was once tested with carrier pigeons
Tech nerds love a ridiculous inside joke so much they will literally write official documentation for it. Known as RFC 1149, it thoroughly details how to…
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Why Game Boy Printer photos disappeared
Capturing tiny, pixelated memories was completely thwarted by the harsh passage of time. The portable printer used receipt-style thermal paper, meaning any…
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Before arrow keys, letters moved the cursor
Before the luxury of dedicated arrow keys, navigating a screen was an absolute nightmare of memorization. Ancient keyboards lacked directional arrows…
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Solar phone chargers require absolutely agonizing wait times
Strapping a sleek panel to your backpack promises completely infinite clean energy while hiking deep in the woods. Sadly, the highly tiny surface area of…
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Air-gapped computers never connect to outside networks
When an installation absolutely cannot be compromised, they physically sever it from the rest of the world. These isolated systems have zero outside…
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The creepy dancing baby that went viral in 1996
If you want to know what peak humor looked like in 1996, it was a terrifying, deeply unsettling 3D render of an infant doing a cha-cha slide. Long before…
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A mirror can fool machine vision
Sophisticated optical recognition matrices can identify thousands of minute variables but are completely defeated by a shiny piece of glass. Because cameras…
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Hand drills convert a crank rotation into a spinning chuck
Before batteries made everyone lazy, drilling a hole meant furiously turning a side handle. A large vertical gear meshes with a tiny horizontal gear connected…
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Through-hole components stick long metal legs into boards
Before robots could place microscopic flecks of silicon on flat pads, hardware featured long metal pins. You had to physically drill holes through the board,…
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The solid crystals that replaced vacuum tubes
Because nature's rocks just weren't quite good enough at manipulating electrons. Transistors replaced massive, fragile, heat-spewing vacuum tubes by utilizing…
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Video game villagers live by meaningless routines
Next time you envy the simple life of a virtual villager, remember they exist in an endless purgatory of chores. To simulate a living world, digital entities…
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Cellular roaming relies on complex global routing tables
Using your phone abroad is a minor miracle of bureaucracy. Your connection gets tossed through international gateways, utilizing archaic signaling protocols…
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That screen protector might be your actual display
Prying up the corners of a scratched protector is a high-stakes game of visual roulette. Because modern folding units use soft, integrated layers that look…
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The PC turbo button that made computers slower
Giving users a button titled 'Turbo' makes them feel incredibly powerful, until they realize it does the exact opposite. This famous button didn't speed…
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Hydroelectric dams spin metal wheels with falling water
Despite billions of dollars in infrastructure, hydroelectricity is essentially just putting a water wheel in a stream on steroids. The massive concrete…
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Jean Armour Polly coined the phrase surfing the internet
Instead of some visionary cyberpunk author, the most famous idiom for browsing the web was actually invented by a librarian in 1992. She needed a snappy…
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When a computer had no screen or keyboard
If you bought a consumer PC in the mid-1970s, you were basically just buying a box of blinking lights. Machines like the Altair 8800 had no monitor or…
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The keyboard letters that won't rub off
Cheap keyboards paint letters onto plastic, which rubs off after a year of sweaty typing. High-end keycaps use two separate molds of different colored…
Discover moreCarmen Sandiego made geography feel like a game
When developers realized that memorizing capital cities was profoundly agonizing for students, they hid an entire educational curriculum inside a…
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Some spacecraft phone home with just 20 watts
Sending telemetry billions of miles across the void doesn't require a raging reactor, just incredibly focused radio waves slowly whispering data back to Earth…
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Airplane mode forces your phone to charge much faster
Severing your device from the outside world is the ultimate charging hack. When operating normally, your smartphone constantly bleeds battery power by…
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Why birds don't get shocked on power lines
They aren't magically immune to raw electrical power; they just stubbornly refuse to provide a path to ground. Because both of their feet are on the same…
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