Reading List

Satellite internet was once seen as a holy grail of connect-anywhere online access. It hasn’t worked yet, but the promise is closer than ever.

How one of the most famous computer bugs of all time, the Intel Pentium floating-point division glitch, blew out of proportion into a PR crisis.

Most people remember bulletin board systems as having chunky text-based graphics. One developer tried fixing that, but RIPscrip ran head-first into the web.

From knockoff Bart Simpsons to CafePress ripoffs, what the long association between T-shirts and bootlegging tells us about copyright.

FrontPage tried to solve an important problem in the early-internet era—the idea of making web design accessible to mere mortals—but the code wasn't so hot.

With PCMCIA (also known as PC Card), it was easy to upgrade our old laptops. But for years, the tech was relegated to a depressing bureaucratic fate.

How I found home networking nirvana with powerline networking, a technology that might be called poor man’s ethernet. No drilling involved.

Compaq Portable 386 I read a lot on the web about technology, cars, music and media. If you'd like to keep up with me, join my/Extra...

Businesses want to show up on the front page of a specific search term, and they’re willing to annoy you to get a backlink from you. Please never do this.

The evolution of self-stick adhesives, which are basically everywhere—and had a particularly awful name when they were first introduced.

The history of color bars, the most common television test pattern out there, and what they actually do. (Also, Netflix has some weird test programming.)

How the top-level domain evolved from a solution to a technical problem into something with lots of cultural and marketing value.

Looking back at Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and considering why Intel now finds itself in the same position PowerPC did 15 years ago.

The in-flight entertainment system was once a novel idea that kept passengers enthralled. Now in the COVID-19 era, it’s both outdated and a serious germ hazard.

The Print Shop, Brøderbund’s most popular app when that meant a whole lot, had a huge impact on computing. So why is it in the bargain bin these days?