Collaborate Disseminate
Cherry has been around since the 1950s and is best known for its mechanical keyboard switches, but the company has only been defined by its switches in the past decade. Here’s why. Continue reading The Company That Makes Mechanical Keyboards Clack
The Clapper was in the same category—and owned by the same guy—as the Chia Pet. Nonetheless, the somewhat primitive device introduced millions of people to the idea of simple home automation. Would we have Alexa without it? Continue reading How the Clapper Came to Define Modern Home Automation
Lessons from the music industry’s initial consumer-hostile reaction to the Napster saga. Going from $16 CDs to unlimited streaming is really hard. Continue reading How the Music Industry Messed Up Legal Streaming the First Time Around
The story of solder, the unsung hero of the digital revolution that benefits from a low melting point. It’s what keeps the circuits attached to the silicon. Continue reading The Art of Soldering
The history of the fake electronics that you sometimes see in furniture stores or in houses for sale. No, that 60-inch flat-screen TV doesn’t turn on. Continue reading The Real Industry Behind Fake Electronics
The evolution of the modern cell phone ringtone—and the Ukrainian guy who wants to give Apple’s default noises a refresh. Continue reading How Did Our Default Ringtones Become So Grating?
The evolution of the global positioning system, the greatest non-internet idea to come out of the Space Race, and why the military initially hobbled it. Continue reading The Military-Industrial Complex Roots of GPS
The story of the PDF, the file format that’s become one of the internet’s defining information tools. It’ll be with us after we’re long gone. Continue reading Why the PDF Is Secretly the World’s Most Important File Format
In a few short years, the graphics card company 3Dfx Interactive provided a polygon-laden shock to the PC world—then fell apart, fast. What happened? Continue reading 3Dfx Brought the GPU Industry to Life But Didn’t Live to See It Thrive
Internet Relay Chat beat Slack to real-time chat by decades and helped define much of our early online culture, yet way more people use Slack. Why is that? Continue reading Why Did Slack Win Out Over IRC, Anyway?