On August 11, 1994, a man in Philadelphia sat down at a computer and bought a CD. The album was Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, the price was $12.48 plus shipping, and the seller was a young company called NetMarket. Nothing about the object...
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Pour cornflakes into a bowl. Add cold milk. Pick up a spoon. You have made breakfast — unless, according to one of the internet’s most persistent culinary arguments, you have accidentally ma...
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There is a moment at almost every birthday party when the room changes. The lights dim, a cake appears, tiny flames tremble above the icing and everyone waits while one person silently makes...
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Few breakfast foods come with a better internet story than Corn Flakes. According to the version repeated across social media, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented the famously plain cereal in t...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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High on a mountain in late spring, a patch of snow can suddenly look as though someone spilled watermelon juice across it. The surface turns pale pink, rose red or even crimson, sometimes st...
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Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that seems to describe everything at once. It can mean the system that recommends a song, the software that detects a suspicious bank...
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Long before Mario jumped over his first barrel, before the Game Boy disappeared into millions of backpacks and before families swung Wii Remotes in front of television screens, Nintendo sold...
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Open a familiar rectangular world map and something strange happens to the planet. Greenland appears enormous, sometimes looking almost comparable to Africa. Russia stretches across the top...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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