A bitcoin cannot be held in your hand. It does not represent a legal claim on a company, pay a dividend or give its owner a stream of rental income. There is no warehouse containing one bar of gold for every digital coin. Yet people exchang...
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Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
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Imagine two identical buildings on the same street. One has a broken window that is repaired the next morning. The other has a broken window that remains shattered for weeks. Graffiti appear...
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On an autumn Sunday in the United States, a peculiar national clock starts ticking shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Televisions switch on. Fantasy lineups receive one last nervous inspect...
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Suppose engineers invent a computer chip that performs the same calculation using half as much electricity. The obvious conclusion is that electricity consumption should fall. Now suppose th...
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Technology is supposed to age quickly. Phones become obsolete, startups disappear, frameworks fall out of fashion and yesterday's revolutionary software becomes tomorrow's migration problem....
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Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
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The idea of launching an object into space was born of a scientific and political ambition that changed the course of history. The first artificial satellite, launched in 1957, was not jus...
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Long before Steve Jobs took the stage, IBM released the Simon Personal Communicator in 1994 — considered the first real smartphone. It could make calls, send emails, store contacts, manage c...
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Apollo Guidance Computer vs. Modern Computers: What’s the Real Difference? In 1969, NASA sent astronauts to the Moon using a spacecraft controlled by a computer with less power than today...
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