Thirty-five years ago, on April 16 and 17, 1977, more than twelve thousand proto-geeks flooded into San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. They were there to attend a new event called the West Coast Computer Faire, and the room …
Fourteen Ways to Celebrate the Apple II’s 35th Birthday
You probably weren’t paying attention when a tiny company called Apple Computer introduced its second product, the Apple II microcomputer, at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and 17, 1977. (I wasn’t.) You may never have …
Photos: The Apple II Turns 35
Hands On with Barnes & Noble’s New Nook Simple Touch E-Reader with GlowLight
More than most technologies I can think of, the E Ink screens used in monochrome e-readers such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch and Amazon.com’s Kindle Touch present a stark set of tradeoffs. If you don’t mind the lack of …
CloudOn: A Better Way to Do Microsoft Office on Your iPad, for Free
From Quickoffice to Documents to Go to Apple’s own iWork programs, there’s no shortage of iPad apps that let you view and edit Microsoft Office documents. But as anyone who relies on Office to do real work can tell you, there are …
Wavii: The World Reorganized to Look like Facebook
Before the dawn of Facebook, the notion of organizing information into never-ending feeds of terse status updates would have sounded like gobbledegook. But Facebook proves that when it comes to keeping track of your friends’ …
Dear Facebook: Here’s How to Not Screw Up Instagram
First, an important disclaimer: I’m not predicting that Facebook is going to ruin Instagram, the wonderful photo-sharing service for smartphones which it is acquiring.
True, when I think of startups Facebook has acquired, I …
Toshiba’s New Tablets Loom Large (and Small, and Medium-Sized)
In their never-ending, so-far-unsuccessful quest to give the iPad a run for its money, makers of Android tablets have produced models in a dizzying array of sizes. It doesn’t seem to be helping, and the novelty is wearing off. …
Improbable PC Pioneer: Commodore’s Jack Tramiel, 1928-2012
The PC industry is so young that a remarkable percentage of its most significant figures are still with us. But it lost a key one on Sunday when Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, died at 83. Commodore was one of the first …
TiVo Gets Comcast’s Xfinity on Demand
I have a gazillion boxes of various sorts connected to the two TVs in our household, but the longest-serving one is my TiVo DVR. I got it when I moved into my present home and signed up for Comcast cable TV — and I still …
The Story of the Death (and Rebirth) of Polaroid Film
In 2008, Polaroid discontinued a product that seemed to be pretty much obsolete in the digital age: instant film. Except that it wasn’t obsolete at all. A lot of people still liked taking Polaroid photos and found things in the …
Hipmunk’s Mobile Travel Apps Can Now Check Your Calendar
Hipmunk, the clever tool for searching for flights and hotel rooms, just got a little more clever. It’s adding a new feature to its iPhone, iPad and Android apps that sucks in your calendar appointments and visualizes them, so …
