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 is easy to forget how strange it is. The alphabet...
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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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Every September, the technology calendar suddenly becomes crowded. New phones appear within days of one another. Operating systems move from summer previews to public releases. Chipmakers an...
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In 1901, divers working an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera recovered statues, ceramics, glass and a badly corroded mass of bronze. The wreck had carried valuable cargo...
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Few keyboard shortcuts have acquired a reputation beyond computing itself. Ctrl-C means copy, Alt-Tab switches windows, but Control-Alt-Delete became something larger: a universal gesture of...
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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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For years, the basic experience of generative AI could be reduced to a remarkably simple exchange: you type something, the machine types something back. Ask for a summary, a translation, an...
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In 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission made history by landing humans on the Moon. But what’s mind-blowing is the technology they used: the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had a clock speed of ju...
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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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Was the Apollo Computer Really Powerful Enough to Go to the Moon? One of the most fascinating facts about the Apollo Moon landings is how little computing power was available at the time....
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