It was a bit surreal to stand in the middle of Times Square and hear a throng of revelers chant “NASA! NASA!” as if the space agency had just won a gold medal in the Olympics. They were cheering the successful landing of …
History
Photos: The Places Facebook Called Home
Please Don’t Call It Trash-80: A 35th Anniversary Salute to Radio Shack’s TRS-80
Quick — name the most important personal computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II–that’s fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even …
Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Future of U.S. Space Exploration After Curiosity
In four days, NASA’s Curiosity rover will hopefully survive its “seven minutes of terror” and land safely on the surface of Mars. What comes next for U.S. space exploration?
Techland decided to ask famed astrophysicist Neil …
How Government Did (and Didn’t) Invent the Internet
Last night, I happened across an article by Slate technology scribe Farhad Manjoo. He was responding to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by the Journal’s former publisher Gordon Crovitz. And when Manjoo explained …
10 Classic Toys That Deserve a Second Life
Favorites from our youth and how we think they could be improved — with technology!
Clamshell! The Story of the Greatest Computing Form Factor of All Time
How do you tell if a new technology product is a brilliant breakthrough?
Listening to its creators doesn’t work: Tech companies have an annoying tendency to promote everything as a brilliant breakthrough. And tech journalists …
AOL’s Longest-Running Employee on the History of AOL Chat Rooms
Last month, Sean Parker of Napster fame launched Airtime.
Amid the hoopla of the launch — attended, for some reason, by Jimmy Fallon and Snoop Dogg — Parker told an anecdote about meeting his business partner, Shawn …
Steve Jobs or Bill Gates: Who Will Be Remembered 50 Years from Now?
Tim Bajarin is the president of Creative Strategies Inc., a technology industry analysis and market intelligence firm in Silicon Valley. He contributes to the “Big Picture” opinion column that appears every Monday on …
Five Years Ago Today, the iPhone Went On Sale
Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone, which goes on sale in the US today, will struggle to break into the mainstream because of a lack of a 3G connection and low demand for converged devices, according to research.
International
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A Brief History of Cats on YouTube
According to the New York Times, scientists at Google’s X lab have been hard at work creating a “neural network” of 16,000 computer processors. Once switched on, this virtual brain did what any reasonable human would do: it …
Atari at 40: Catching Up with Founder Nolan Bushnell
Once upon a time, back in the 1960s, there was a videogame called Spacewar!
It was remarkably ingenious and addictive, and probably would have become a pop-culture phenomenon if it weren’t for its one downside: You could only …