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Every post on the site, newest first.
190 posts
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Sega Genesis and the console wars: how a hedgehog took half the market from Nintendo
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The Zimmermann Telegram, or how a decoded cable brought America into the war
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The Medici Bank and the invention of modern finance
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Soref's laminated padlock, or how a Milwaukee workshop closed the security gap
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Perreaux's steam velocipede
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The Iron Bridge, or how a Shropshire gorge became the template for everything that followed
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The Cassini survey: four generations to map a kingdom
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BlackBerry 850: the device that made email check you
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The welt that made shoes worth keeping
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Breguet's wristwatch, or the timepiece that arrived fifty years too soon
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Beni Hasan's wall of wrestlers: Egypt's oldest sports record
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Smalltalk and the machine it was built for
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Samuel's checkers player: the program that coined machine learning
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Gabriel de Clieu's water ration
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One script for all China: the Qin standardization, 221 BCE
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The dissertation that named the web
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Vim: from Vi IMitation to Vi IMproved
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Harvard Mark I: the machine that took up a wall
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Benz Patent-Motorwagen: a wall in Mannheim and the birth certificate of the automobile
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Sylvester Roper's steam velocipede
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Mongolian wrestling and the world's first crowd
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The Nintendo Entertainment System, or the console Nintendo refused to call a console
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Frank Miller's one-time pad
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Marco Polo and the money made of trees
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Sargent's time lock, or how a Rochester locksmith made coercion useless
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Kintai-kyō: the five wooden arches of Iwakuni
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Mercator's projection: the map that straightened the sea
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IBM Simon, or the first computer you could also make calls on
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The McKay stitcher, or how a hollow needle ended the age of the hand-sewn shoe
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John Harrison's H4 and the Longitude Prize
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BASIC, or the language designed to be learned in an afternoon
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The Logic Theorist: a machine that proved theorems before AI had a name
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Dead on arrival: how the VOC broke Yemen's coffee monopoly
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Brahmi script: from Ashoka's pillars to three billion living letters
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Enterprise JavaBeans and the era of the application server
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BBEdit, or what a cancelled compiler left behind
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Colossus: the machine that Britain built, classified, and ordered destroyed
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Lenoir's Hippomobile: eleven kilometres on a coal-gas engine
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The video game crash of 1983
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The Playfair cipher, or the one the Foreign Office refused
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The jiaozi, or what happens when your money needs its own ox cart
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Yale's cylinder lock, or how the portrait painter solved the front door
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Pont Neuf: the bridge that gave Paris its river back
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The map that named America
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The DynaTAC 8000X, or the phone that finally left the car
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The straight last: when shoes finally learned left from right
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Huygens's pendulum clock: fifteen minutes become fifteen seconds
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ALGOL 60: an improvement on nearly all its successors
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Dartmouth, 1956: the summer that named a field
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Seven beans and a long walk from Mocha
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Latin alphabet: how a borrowed script conquered the world
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Design Patterns: the catalog that gave software a common language
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Brief, or the keyboard that other editors had to imitate
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Konrad Zuse's Z3: the computer the war didn't notice
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Hancock's Enterprise: London's first scheduled motor bus
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Donkey Kong: the game that made Nintendo
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Jefferson's wheel cipher, or the invention the army made twice
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The Arab dinar, or the coin that erased the emperor's face
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The Great Lock Controversy of 1851
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The Rialto Bridge, or how Venice bet on a single arch
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The Hereford Mappa Mundi: the world as it was meant to be
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Joel's handoff patent, or how the cellular network learned to keep a call alive
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Louis XIV's red heels: when footwear was a court credential
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Galileo's pendulum, or the clock he never lived to build
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COBOL, or how a committee invented the world's most durable programming language
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Shannon's chess paper and the problem it was really solving
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Pasqua Rosée and London's first coffeehouse
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The Greek alphabet, or how borrowed consonants became the world's first vowels
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Three-tier architecture, or how the application server ate the fat client
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Alice Pascal: the editor that refused to let you make a mistake
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The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or the basement machine that unmade ENIAC
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De Rivaz's hydrogen carriage: the first internal-combustion automobile
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Pac-Man, or the game designed for people who didn't play games
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Bellaso's cipher, or three centuries filed under the wrong name
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The Byzantine solidus: the gold coin that ran the medieval world
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The Chubb Detector lock: security with a memory
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Old London Bridge, the crossing that became a city
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The Book of Roger: al-Idrisi maps the world in silver
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The chopine, or how Venice balanced status on a fifty-centimetre platform
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Peter Henlein's pomander, or the clock that fit in a hand
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Lisp, or the language that ran before anyone knew it could
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Turing's imitation game
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Hakem, Shems, and the first coffeehouse
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The Phoenician alphabet, or how twenty-two consonants built the rest
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Seven boxes in Washington
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Turbo Pascal: the whole IDE in thirty-eight kilobytes
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Shannon's switching circuits, 1937
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Trevithick's Puffing Devil: up Camborne Hill on Christmas Eve
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Space Invaders: the glitch Nishikado kept
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Trithemius's Polygraphia: the abbot's grid that launched three centuries of polyalphabetic ciphers
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The aureus and the long debasement
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Bramah's challenge lock: a 200-guinea dare that stood for sixty-seven years
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Anji Bridge: the flattest arch in the ancient world
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Tabula Peutingeriana: seven metres of Roman roads
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Touch-Tone: Bell's push-button phone and the day dialing became a command
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The Salisbury clock, or the machine that forgot to have a face
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The poulaine, or how a pointed toe became a matter for Parliament
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Fortran, or the compiler nobody believed in
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McCulloch and Pitts, or a mind made of thresholds
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Qahwa and the Sufi monks of Aden
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Oracle bone script, or how the Shang talked to their ancestors
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EMACS, or the macro that became an editor
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The machine at the end of the hallway
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The trust that outgrew its name
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Cugnot's fardier: the first machine to move under its own power
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The Atari 2600, or the machine Bushnell sold Atari to build
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Alberti's cipher disk: the wheel that broke frequency analysis
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The Roman denarius, or the coin that named money
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The precise lift, or how a Hoxton locksmith beat the pick
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Ptolemy's Geography and the grid that outlasted Rome
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The car phone, or how eighty pounds of vacuum tubes first put a telephone on the road
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The mechanical escapement, or when clocks learned to tick
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The turnshoe, or how medieval cordwainers sewed the seam inside
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The first assembler
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Turing's machine, or the question no algorithm can answer
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The Indus Valley script, or what five signs can hide
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vi, or the editor that made modes out of necessity
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What the module doesn't tell you
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Pong, or the game Alcorn built to learn his job
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Al-Kindi's frequency analysis, or how counting letters broke every substitution cipher
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The ban liang, or the coin that outlasted its empire
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The guild masterpiece, or the keyhole that wasn't there
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Trajan's Bridge, or how to cross a river by moving it first
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Eratosthenes measures the Earth, or how a shadow told the whole story
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The call across the Atlantic, or how Rocky Point and Rugby shrank the ocean
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Su Song's clock tower, or the machine that told the whole sky
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Han dynasty silk shoes, or the hierarchy sewn into every sole
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Short Code, or the first time a machine did the translating
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Frege's Begriffsschrift
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Egyptian hieroglyphs, or how language learned to last
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ed: the editor that still ships with every Unix
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Simula 67, or how a Norwegian harbor simulation gave software its objects
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The Hollerith tabulator, or how counting Americans built a company called IBM
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Computer Space, the world's first coin-operated video game
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The Kama Sutra cipher, or why secret writing was the forty-fourth art
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The Lydian stater
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The incense clock, or how China measured the night in smoke
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The barbed-spring padlock
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The Pont du Gard, or how Rome moved a river across a gorge
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Ctesibius's clepsydra, or the water clock that fixed itself
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The wheel that replaced the operator
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Roman caligae, or why the empire marched on hobnails
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Plankalkül, or how to invent a programming language during an air raid
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Boole's algebra of thought
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Cuneiform: the script that could say your name
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What the flowchart hides
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QED, or how fifteen years of mathematics became a search command
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Ada Lovelace's Notes on an engine that never ran
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Spacewar!, or the game no one thought to sell
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The Caesar cipher, or how a shift of three kept Rome's orders from Gallic hands
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The shell that circled the world
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The Roman warded lock
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Anaximander's world map, or how a philosopher drew the whole earth
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The Arkadiko bridge, or the oldest arch still standing
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The undertaker who put telephone operators out of a job
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Babbage's Difference Engine, or the most expensive one-seventh of a calculator
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Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, or let us calculate who is right
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The scytale, or how Sparta encrypted its orders
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Greek krepis and kothornos — the shoe as theater
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The Babylonian world map, or how an empire drew the edge of everything
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The Egyptian clepsydra, or how priests told time without the sun
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The bridge at Girsu, or the world's oldest crossing
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The Mesopotamian shekel, or how a weight became money
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Structured programming: sequence, selection, iteration
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The letter that killed the goto
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TECO, or the editor that was also a programming language
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Tennis for Two, or the physicist who didn't notice what he'd done
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OXO, or the video game that Cambridge kept to itself
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The New Haven exchange, or how a switchboard made from teapot lids wired a city
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Bell's telephone, or how nine words traveled down a wire
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Ada Lovelace's Note G, or the first program for a machine that didn't exist
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The Jacquard loom, or how a silk weaver programmed a machine
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Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner, or what a pedometer started
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Pascal's Pascaline, or how a teenager tried to spare his father from arithmetic
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The slide rule, or how a clergyman's shortcut ran the world for three centuries
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Napier's bones, or how a Scottish laird made multiplication optional
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Llull's Ars Magna, or how a troubadour built the first reasoning machine
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Al-Jazari's musicians, or the first machine you could reprogram
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Al-Khwarizmi, or how a name became a word
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The Antikythera mechanism, or the computer the sea kept
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The Prior Analytics, or the first argument written in letters
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Egyptian papyrus sandals — footwear as social code, c. 1500 BCE
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The abacus, or how humanity learned to compute with pebbles
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Ötzi's shoes, or the engineering in a glacier
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The Areni-1 shoe, and the art of making leather last
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The shadow clock, or how Egypt turned sunlight into hours
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Proto-cuneiform tokens: the first writing was a receipt
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The wooden lock, or the first machine for keeping people out
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Fort Rock sandals, the oldest shoes in the world
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The Abauntz map, or how a hunter scratched the world onto a stone