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 just 1.024 MHz and 4KB of RAM. To compare: the av...
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Imagine owning a fortune… but being locked out of it. That’s exactly what happened to Stefan Thomas, a programmer who was given 7,002 Bitcoin back in 2011 for making a video about crypto....
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You’ve heard it a hundred times: “Please switch your device to airplane mode.” But have you ever wondered what actually happens if you don’t? Airplane mode disables your phone’s ability t...
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Long before Zoom meetings and TikTok streams, the first webcam in history had a surprisingly humble mission: to monitor a coffee pot. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge g...
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Before the World Wide Web, there was ARPANET — the U.S. government-funded project that laid the foundation for the modern internet. In its early days, the network was small and experimental…...
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If you grew up before flat screens, you probably remember the strange whine or buzz that old TVs made when turned on. That sound wasn’t imaginary — and it came from something called a flybac...
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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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In 1993, the U.S. government proposed a small hardware chip called the Clipper Chip, meant to be embedded in phones and computers. The goal? Allow federal agencies to access encrypted commun...
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In 1947, computer scientists working on the Harvard Mark II, one of the earliest electromechanical computers, noticed a malfunction in the system. Upon inspection, they found the cause: a d...
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Perched off the coast of Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel is one of the most surreal places in Europe. At first glance, it looks like a medieval village rising out of the sea — complete with an a...
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