Results for: tech time warp
Tech Time Warp: Linus Torvalds Introduces Linux
They say hindsight is 20/20, which is why Linus Torvalds’ Aug. 25, 1991, message to a MINIX newsgroup is so humorous now: “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) … it...
Tech Time Warp: When Internet Explorer Was Cool
Let’s time-travel back to August 1995, when Bill Gates and his company introduced the world to Internet Explorer 1.0. Making its debut on August 16, 1995, this wasn’t the IE you later spurned for Chrome and Firefox. No, this was...
Tech Time Warp: The story behind five everyday tech terms
Given technology’s fast pace, it’s easy to forget someone in 1995 would look at you like you were from Mars if you mentioned your Bluetooth. Turns out the stories behind commonly used tech terms are fairly fascinating. For instance, thank...
Tech Time Warp: Koobface worm begins to spread
Back in August 2008—when you were still juggling Facebook and MySpace profiles—unsuspecting social networkers found their machines infected by Koobface, a particularly nasty computer worm. Koobface (an anagram for Facebook) caught its victims by tempting them with tantalizing Facebook links...
Tech Time Warp: Apple begins work on the Lisa
While everyone else was at the beach during the summer of 1979, Steve Jobs began work on—you guessed it—another product that would change the world. The Lisa, introduced to the marketplace in 1983, was Apple’s first foray into personal computers...
Tech Time Warp: Email Outage Chaos
The Internet makes life so much easier … except when it doesn’t. Just like a bad cold makes you appreciate breathing through your nose, an Internet outage makes you realize your reliance on email and texts and streaming services. The...
Tech Time Warp: The First Case of Ransomware
The WannaCry ransomware attack once again brings the need for backup and security solutions into focus, but ransomware is nothing new. The first case of ransomware, chock-full of “truth is stranger than fiction” details, occurred in 1989. The PC Cyborg...
Pioneers in Tech: An Wang, a key player in technology’s core memories
The layperson might not immediately name An Wang as a 20th-century technical giant, but we certainly should. The Chinese American computer engineer invented the magnetic pulse transfer controlling device, which, as you will learn in this edition of Pioneers in...
Pioneers in Tech: Happy birthday to Chief Yahoo David Filo
You’ve heard of Ben and Jerry, but are you as familiar with Jerry and David? Unless you’re a keen watcher of Silicon Valley, perhaps not. But the website founded in 1994 as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide...
Pioneers in Tech: Happy birthday to AI pioneer John McCarthy
This week’s Pioneers in Tech takes a look at John McCarthy, the technology pioneer who coined the term “AI” back in 1955. Born Sept. 4, 1927, McCarthy first used “AI” in his proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, a gathering...
