Results for: tech time warp
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: Joan Clarke, Bletchley Park codebreaker
The stories of the women of Bletchley Park—the secret British codebreaking facility during World War II—are only now becoming known, much like those of the “hidden figures” of NASA. How women helped break the unbreakable Thousands of women worked at...
Pioneers in Tech: Frederick McKinley Jones, inventor of mobile refrigeration
We can thank inventor Frederick McKinley Jones, for the proliferation of food choices we enjoy on a daily basis. The modern grocery store—which houses tropical fruits, exotic imported cheese, and frozen sushi-grade fish—was first made possible by Jones’ 1941 invention,...
Pioneers in Tech: Sandra Bullock, Academy award winner, actress, producer, internet pioneer
Your socials may have been buzzing in the past few days with an exciting bit of resurfaced news. One of America’s most popular actresses—known for her girl-next-door persona and rise to stardom in the 1990s—is also a pioneer in technology....
Pioneers in Tech: Happy birthday to the mayor of Silicon Valley
This week marks the 98th anniversary of the birth of Robert Noyce, often called the “Mayor of Silicon Valley.” He got the name from not only his tech innovations, but also his tech culture innovations. Interestingly, his career path could...
Pioneers in Tech: Robert Fano, a man of many gifts
Technology pioneer Robert Fano’s contributions to computer science are many—so many, indeed, that it would be best to frame them as his Massachusetts Institute of Technology colleague (and fellow innovator) Fernando Carbato did. Fano, he said, had “at least four...
Pioneers in Tech: Honoring John Atanasoff, inventor of the digital computer
Born Oct. 4, 1903, John Vincent Atanasoff is not just the inventor of the electronic digital computer—he’s the legally proclaimed inventor of the digital computer. On March 19, 1972, in the case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, a judge ruled that...
