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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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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If someone asks when World War II ended, the safest short answer is 1945. If they ask for the exact date, history becomes more interesting. Was it May 8, when Nazi Germany's defeat ended the...
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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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