6 min read Allison Marsh is a professor at the University of South Carolina and the codirector of the Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology & Society. This early 1990s keyboard for the Bloomberg Terminal featured a trackball, speaker, and … Read more
For the two decades of Windows, the scroll bar control had just a few basic operations. (For expository purposes, let’s assume that the scroll bar is vertical.) There are five mouse targets: The arrows at the ends of the scroll … Read more
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something twisting and turning, rhythmic and precise. It was only when I was directly in front of the Saigon street stall that I realized what was unfolding: the owner, a smiling … Read more
The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant coffee required developing techniques … Read more
ACME, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet Security Preamble I would like to share with you this article I wrote about the ACME protocol, which I “fell in love with” about ten years … Read more
Recently I’ve been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to … Read more
The original 128K Mac from 1984 came with a single Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz that could only run one app at a time. Yet today’s Macs come with multiple CPU cores that can comfortably run several substantial … Read more
(An homage to one of my favorite pieces on the internet: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages) Early History: Various automata were built powered by water, clockwork or steam. Redditors at the time argue that they … Read more
Here is where the story gets interesting. Why did Felt choose to display the numbers in a 9 to 1 sequence? It wasn’t a widespread notion at the time. After all, the knowledge of arithmetical devices was not as widespread. … Read more
At 1:15 p.m. on Monday, August 8th, 1904, a British physician named M. H. Gordon took some soil he had “richly impregnated with a living emulsion” of the virulent bacterium, Serratia marcescens, and sprinkled it near a lamp post in … Read more