Maybe the reason why social networks fade away over time is simply generational. Picnic, an emerging social network with momentum, exemplifies this point. | Continue reading
The New York Times has the most robust online archives of any newspaper, but it’s proving difficult to square their handling of a recent controversy. | Continue reading
Why FeedBurner, a service that Google once bought for $100 million, has become the one service it literally can’t kill. Here's why the service lingers. | Continue reading
In a world of media conglomerates, do regular folks have a shot at building TV for themselves anymore? In one rural Georgia mountain town, the answer is yes. | Continue reading
How IBM bet big on the microkernel being the next big thing in operating systems back in the ’90s—and spent billions with little to show for it. | Continue reading
The web wasn't common in 1992, but presidential candidates notably took baby steps toward the internet that year—Ross Perot in a bigger way than most. | Continue reading
What can modern newsletter authors learn about newslettering from an era when people actually mailed these things? A lot, according to this book I bought. | Continue reading
The evolution of online word games before Wordle made them popular again. You haven’t lived until you’ve played Acrophobia. | Continue reading
Before hard drives became the main way for us to back up our stuff, they were a key evolution for the business world. They were also huge and costly. | Continue reading
What I learned about trying to run my own cloud from a few weeks of trying to run the whole dang thing myself. (Hint: I found myself trying multiple solutions.) | Continue reading
Many retro computing enthusiasts have to deal with the headaches of decayed rubber and plastics. Here’s some advice from museum professionals and lab members. | Continue reading
A case in favor of browser tab minimalism, or closing the tabs you’re not using. Sometimes, information overload has its limits. | Continue reading
The JingPad A1, a flashy new tablet from Linux-land, shows a ton of potential, though you might want to wait for a few rounds of software updates first. | Continue reading
The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over. | Continue reading
From PCX to TGA to VRML, considering a number of image formats that the world forgot. Not every image standard is going to last, no matter how pretty it is. | Continue reading
Pondering the way that physical objects, like newspapers and photos, degrade over time, and why digital objects won’t fade in exactly the same way. | Continue reading
Pondering how a meme from a quarter-century ago might have gone over in today’s much-more-mature creator economy. | Continue reading
The chatter around breaking up Facebook makes it a great time to talk about why the last effort to break up a communications giant, AT&T, didn’t really work. | Continue reading
How a pencil made out of compressed particle boards became a schoolyard fad—and what that pencil line has to do with Olestra. | Continue reading
Giving some well-deserved appreciation to the LAMP stack, a key building block of the modern-day internet that you use daily. It’s everywhere. It may never die. | Continue reading
Considering the fact that many early online networks relied on volunteers to help build up their base—until one such network, AOL, got too big. | Continue reading
What the heck is a Kensington security slot, and why does your computer probably have one? And how well does it really work, anyway? | Continue reading
Why the PC industry standardized on multimedia in the early ’90s, and why that standardization effort didn’t really last. | Continue reading
Assessing the landscape of the app store concept in the years before it became an idea “originated” by Apple. The prior art is strong with this one. | Continue reading
How a pair of books with dramatically diverging philosophies came out in the same year—and fittingly, the more upright one became better known. | Continue reading
For decades, technical users looking down on the less knowledgeable have set the stage for a lot of bad online discourse. Can those users break the chain? | Continue reading
How one of the most famous computer bugs of all time, the Intel Pentium floating-point division glitch, blew out of proportion into a PR crisis. | Continue reading
How a networking software company with an unusual approach to competition nearly convinced Apple to bring MacOS to Intel computers in the early ’90s. | Continue reading
Discussing the process of degaussing a CRT screen, which is a surprisingly awesome way to spend a Saturday afternoon with a magnet. | Continue reading
A look back at 2001, a pivotal year for online gaming. The big-name publishers weren’t really ready, but fan games more than filled the gap. | Continue reading
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