Results for: tech time warp
Tech Time Warp: The Love Bug Bites
One might say more than 3 million computer users had a bad date on May 4, 2000. In this week’s edition of Tech Time Warp, we’re going back to the day those users downloaded the ILOVEYOU virus, a Visual Basic...
Tech Time Warp: The Sasser worm teaches a lesson
In this week’s edition of Tech Time Warp, we’re traveling back to early May 2004, when computer users worldwide learned a hard lesson: Don’t procrastinate when it comes to installing a security patch. Users at the Taiwanese post office, the...
Tech Time Warp: Tandy heats up PC clone wars
In this week’s Tech Time Warp, we’re going back to the early days of the Tandy Corporation. Tandy became a player in personal computers with the 1977 introduction of its TRS-80 at RadioShack stores—but that was far from Tandy’s only...
Tech Time Warp: On the hunt for technology easter eggs
Have you ever typed “answer to life, the universe, and everything” into Google? In a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Google returns “42” as a calculator result. Or perhaps you’ve explored the police call box on the...
Tech Time Warp: The End of Google Pranks on April Fools’ Day?
Out of respect for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Google abstained from its traditional April Fools’ Day tomfoolery during 2020 and 2021. Now in 2022, it appears the pandemic has ended a 20-year streak of online pranks. For this...
Tech Time Warp: Jean Sammet changes her opinion of computers
In this week’s Tech Time Warp, we’re going back to programming in the 50’s. Introduced in 1959, the programming language COBOL—common, business-oriented language—is still heavily in use today, with an estimated 200 billion lines of code relied upon by government...
Tech Time Warp: First domain name registered in 1985
File this away for your next pub quiz: The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985, by Symbolics Computer Corporation, a company that specialized in single-user machines running the LISP programming language. For this week’s...
Tech Time Warp: The great Michelangelo scare
Thirty years ago, PC users around the world were left saying “Huh?” after the much-hyped Michelangelo virus turned out to be, well, not much. The virus’ enduring legacy might say more about the media than about a security risk, as...
Tech Time Warp: The origins of the Cult of the Dead Cow
The high plains of Lubbock, Texas—a conservative, church-going area of the country to be sure—are not where you would expect a group of “hacktivists” to have gotten its start, let alone the group that coined the term “hacktivism.” But the...
Tech Time Warp: The history of the indestructible QR code
In the hazy “before times” of late 2019 and early 2020, the QR Code was the butt of many jokes. A QR Code seemed passé—almost like putting “e” or “I” at the beginning of a new device’s name and considering...
