Pondering why, in the internet era, it has become so common for big tech companies to treat their power users like dirt. (Yes, this is about Google Reader.) | Continue reading
How Linksys’ most famous router, the WRT54G, tripped into legendary status because of an undocumented feature that slipped through during a merger. | Continue reading
How the Brannock Device, a measuring tool you’ve definitely seen but don’t know the name of, made it a lot easier to figure out our shoe size. | Continue reading
Why you can’t find the groundbreaking search engine AltaVista on the web anymore. Friends don’t let friends visit digital.com without knowing the truth. | Continue reading
How Sony screwed up 15 years of goodwill with developers and open-source users by removing Linux support from its console—support hacked back in anyway. | Continue reading
How a court battle involving groundbreaking disk-compression software foreshadowed Microsoft’s status as an antitrust darling. | Continue reading
Local newspapers have already faced issues with outsourcing and an array of cuts for years. But the threat is changing—and you should know what it looks like. | Continue reading
The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent. | Continue reading
An examination of quizbowl’s technological evolution, from radio broadcasts to question archives and Discord tournaments. | Continue reading
How the NES Advantage, thanks to its long pop-culture reach, came to define the concept of a good controller in the 8-bit console generation. | Continue reading
Most people remember bulletin board systems as having chunky text-based graphics. One developer tried fixing that, but RIPscrip ran head-first into the web. | Continue reading
Have we let the LED indicator light go too far? These lights are everywhere, and they make it hard to sleep. Here’s a case for some less-annoying indicators. | Continue reading
The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.) | Continue reading
Looking back at Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and considering why Intel now finds itself in the same position PowerPC did 15 years ago. | Continue reading
The case for minimal web browsers: Perhaps the problem with the modern web browser is that there’s just too much stuff. What if we cut things down? | Continue reading
It ain’t just about Windows, macOS, or Linux. Also-ran or fairly obscure operating systems, like OS/2, are everywhere—in some cases, hiding under your nose. | Continue reading
Pac-Man’s fun and addictive nature captured public imagination and kicked off an entire culture of video game mastery that’s still going strong today. | Continue reading
Many early ISPs—particularly AOL—weren’t ready to offer unlimited internet access in the mid-’90s. That is, until a surprising disruptor appeared: AT&T. | Continue reading
Why do people believe con artists? Part of it might come down to the fact that we want to believe in something that’s too good to be true. | Continue reading
Unless you work in a restaurant, you may not know what the Aloha point-of-sale system is. But if you do, you’ve probably seen it everywhere. | Continue reading
The story of the MailStation, an information appliance that didn’t do much, really, except send email. That, somehow, makes it even more interesting today. | Continue reading
The résumé, a document that largely gained prominence in the past half-century, was once a key part of getting a job. Soon, it might just disappear entirely. | Continue reading
Technology vendors like SAP may rake in billions of dollars a year helping big companies build complex tech infrastructures, but they screw up—often. | Continue reading
For more than 25 years, this newsletter author has been snarking wise about weird news. Here’s the tale of This is True, one of the first inbox success stories. | Continue reading
Nintendo copied Apple, while Apple copied Braun. Why are there so many electronics made of white polycarbonate, no matter the decade? | Continue reading
How Elf Bowling, the incredibly popular viral game from 1999, gained an unfounded, false reputation as a piece of malware and spyware. | Continue reading
Over the past 35 years, our views on privacy and Caller ID technology have totally flipped. The concern used to be about the caller. Now, it’s the recipient. | Continue reading
Pondering the success that Penn Jillette, the loud half of Penn & Teller, found as a sometimes-rebellious big-name computer magazine columnist in the ’90s. | Continue reading
That time the company behind the GameShark cheating device came up with a dial-up online service for the Nintendo 64. SharkWire strangely targeted 7-year-olds. | Continue reading
The DualDisc format, which combined CDs with DVDs, led a fleeting and ephemeral existence, despite a heavy push from the music industry. What happened? | Continue reading
How we keep screwing over yesterday’s technology due to an intent focus on what we’re doing today. The problem of planned obsolescence is getting worse. | Continue reading
Mechanical keyboards have become hip again, despite near-complete disinterest in the form by mainstream computer-makers. The little guy is picking up the slack. | Continue reading
The Trapper Keeper is a beacon of nostalgia, but genericized branding and school rules have pushed it off to the side. Good luck finding a new one in 2018. | Continue reading
Why USB ports changed the world for the better, or what I learned from a futile month of trying to get a 25-year-old webcam working on a modern PC. | Continue reading
Interactive text adventures were a big part of the early days of gaming—and still lots of fun today. Who needs fancy graphics when you have your imagination? | Continue reading
For more than 100 years, the cool breezes of air conditioning have taken hold around the world. It took us about as long to even consider the side effects. | Continue reading
Video games are full of unused content that developers assumed would never been seen. A group of digital archaeologists, however, are proving them wrong. | Continue reading
How HTML helped, then hindered, the evolution of email, or why all those fancy marketing emails you get in your inbox still rely on HTML tables in 2019. | Continue reading
Before Windows became a fact of life for most computer users, a scrappy upstart named GeoWorks tried taking Microsoft on. It failed, but it gave us AOL. | Continue reading
Vintage technology has powered the innards of the NYC subway system for decades—and sometimes, it surfaces in interesting ways. This one’s for you, OS/2 fans. | Continue reading
The battle to replace the standard expansion slot in the IBM PC reflected an effort by two sides of the PC world to gain control. Spoiler: The clone-makers won. | Continue reading
The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap to support your modern computing needs. If it doesn’t work for them, it might just work for you. | Continue reading
Does the PowerPC-based Mac Mini G4 make a useful daily driver in 2019? We wrote this article with it, so we know the answer. | Continue reading
The Trump administration tell-all scribe has a history with digital publishing that goes way back. In fact, he edited one of the first guides to the internet. | Continue reading
The story of the world’s first Electronic University, which came to life a lot earlier than you might expect given that moniker. Modems were involved. | Continue reading
Microsoft’s late-era Windows Phone 7 did away with a decade of evolution. Its Photon project tried to do the same—while keeping the Windows Mobile legacy alive. | Continue reading
For a short period in the early 1980s, giant satellite dishes ruled the land. It was a rare moment when big telecom wasn't in control. That quickly changed. | Continue reading
Looking with fresh eyes at the Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times’ extremely misguided attempt to bring the wiki concept to the newspaper editorial page. | Continue reading