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If you spend any amount of time using the Internet as we know it today, chances are you have suffered some inconvenience from the variety of interpretations of the various “standards” used to create...
View ArticleBabbage's 19th-century "difference engine" on display in Mountain View
Charles Babbage is cited as the father of modern computing — although perhaps “uncle” would be more accurate, since his designs never actually saw completion and computing is based on totally...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, LISA!
Is it ironic that this $10,000 computer only sold 10,000 units? Released on January 19, 1983, LISA (Local Integrated Software Architecture) was a gigantic flop, but paved the way for the success of...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, BBS!
WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes...
View ArticleYou know what's fun? Napoleon: Total War
An idea of how much I enjoyed playing The Creative Assembly’s, by way of Sega, Napoleon: Total War pretty much all weekend long: I just ordered all four parts of Max Gallo’s biography of Napoleon from...
View ArticleToday in history: the flight data recorder
It’s not entirely clear to me that March 17 is the actual birthday of the so-called “Black Box”, but who am I to argue with Wired’s This Day in Tech? According to them, the idea for the flight data...
View ArticleHappy birthday, NCSA Mosaic!
Good golly, was it really seventeen years ago that NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released? How far we’ve come in the nearly two decades since images were first rendered inline with text. Now we take it for...
View ArticleGadgets of days gone by: Palm III
This week at CrunchGear, we’re looking back at some of our favorite gadgets from the not-so-distant past — old phones, computers, media players, toys… those devices that still stand out in our...
View ArticleFirst Ever Sketch Of Alexander Graham Bell's Telephone Concept
It was only 135 years ago, today, that Alexander Graham Bell was awarded his patent for the telephone. And here we have one of his first sketches of the magical device. To this day, it’s unsure if he...
View ArticleA Watch Created In 1969 Could Sense Heart Attacks… But Wait, There's More
In 1969 a young inventor patented a unique heart-attack-sensing watch that used the wearer’s pulse to regulate the time. That’s right: there are no quartz crystals or tuning forks in here. The system...
View ArticleAn Ode To The Polaroid SX-70
Good old Harry McKraken gives the Polaroid SX-70 – one of the most amazing instant cameras in the world – more than its due. Created in 1972, this Polaroid flattened down to a little over an inch in...
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UK’s “Domesday Reloaded” Archives On Touch-Table At Bletchley Park
Among the forward-thinking digital projects of the computing silver age was the Domesday Project, which aimed to preserve mid-eighties life in the UK by means of digitizing slide photos and text...
View ArticleHere, Waste The Evening: Prince Of Persia Source Code Posted To Github
It’s not every day that you see code like this: *——————————- * Superimpose “Turn disk over” message *——————————- FLIPDISKMSG lda #flipbox ldx #>flipbox jmp superimage Yep. That’s assembly language,...
View ArticleWhere The Free Software Movement Went Wrong (And How To Fix It)
Klint Finley Contributor More posts by this contributor Daemon And Influx Author Daniel Suarez On Why Innovation Has Stalled Forget Mega-Corporations, Here’s The Mega-Network The biggest change I’ve...
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Chrome For iOS Bug Shows Private Browsing Search History In Google Mobile...
Update: Google has gotten back to us to let us know that this is an unfortunate but unavoidable loophole that comes with building a browser on iOS. It’s noted in the company’s support docs around...
View ArticleA Brief History Of Uber
Uber epitomizes disruption. The company has changed the way we think about grabbing a ride, incorporating the same technology we take for granted today into a brand new experience for consumers and an...
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Add Another Layer To History With StoryCorps’ Great Thanksgiving Listen
This is the time of the year when you see a million “how to survive the holidays with your family” guides appear. Even for people who actually like their relatives, Thanksgiving is often so hectic it’s...
View ArticleLibrary of Congress will no longer archive all public tweets, citing longer...
The Library of Congress announced today that it will no longer add every public tweet to its archives, an ambitious project it launched seven years ago. It cited the much larger volume of tweets...
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How aerial lidar illuminated a Mayan megalopolis
Archaeology may not be the most likely place to find the latest in technology — AI and robots are of dubious utility in the painstaking fieldwork involved — but lidar has proven transformative. The...
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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey gets an educational mode — complete with quizzes
In my review of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I was blown away by the authenticity and level of detail in the game world. The game itself — well, it was fine. But the highlight was ancient Greece in all...
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