Tech Explained
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 60 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Explained
The IBM 305 RAMAC stayed in production until 1961, weighed more than a ton, stored five million characters on fifty spinning platters, and still drew customers because the alternative was a room full of punched cards
Tech Explained
In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves and heartbeat two days after she and Carl Sagan agreed to marry, and NASA pressed the compressed minute onto Voyager’s Golden Record as a private love signal now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth
Tech Explained
Every Apollo guidance computer that flew to the Moon had its software literally woven by hand at a Raytheon factory outside Boston, where women threaded copper wire through tiny magnetic cores to encode each bit as either a one or a zero, a process the engineers nicknamed LOL memory for Little Old Lady.
Tech Explained
When Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko landed a top-secret MiG-25 at a Japanese airport in September 1976, American engineers tearing it down expected to find titanium and microchips, and instead they found vacuum tubes, rivets popped by hand, and a stainless steel airframe so heavy it could only fly fast in a straight line.
News
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
Lifestyle
In 1959, a Soviet research team in Novosibirsk began breeding silver foxes for nothing but tameness, and within forty generations the animals had floppy ears, curled tails, piebald coats, and a bark, traits no one had selected for but which appeared on their own once fear was removed.
News
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.
Tech Explained
In May 2017, an NSA contractor named Reality Winner mailed a printed classified document to a news outlet, and federal agents identified her within days because the yellow tracking dots on the page named the exact printer in her office and the minute she had pressed print.
News
In August 2006, naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor waded into a remote grove in Redwood National Park and pointed a laser rangefinder at a tree that turned out to be 380 feet tall, and the National Park Service has refused to disclose its location ever since, fearing the foot traffic alone would kill it.
Tech Explained
Inside a six-walled wedge-foam chamber on Microsoft's Redmond campus, the background sound is so far below human hearing that visitors start to perceive the grinding of their own joints, the rush of blood in their ears, and eventually a faint ringing that turns out to be the firing of their own nerves.
Lifestyle
Psychology suggests people who browse social media but never post or comment aren’t passive — they’ve simply opted out of the performance while retaining access to the information, which is a sign of quiet self-awareness
Computing
In 1964, IBM risked its entire corporate empire on the System/360, a chaotic gamble to make all of its future machines compatible with the same software — and the architecture proved so robust that modern enterprise mainframes today are still running sections of binary code written more than sixty years ago
Computing
In 1982, a Soviet pipeline suddenly exploded with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon, and the disaster was traced back to a stolen piece of Canadian pipeline software — and years later, it was revealed the CIA had intentionally allowed the KGB to steal the code, after subtly altering the software's logic to trigger a catastrophic pressure surge months down the line.
Gaming
In the early 1980s, a Dutch radio broadcaster figured out how to transmit video games over standard commercial radio broadcasts — and teenagers across Europe would sit with blank cassette tapes waiting for the local station to broadcast a series of high-pitched squeaks and buzzes that they could record and load into their home computers
Computing
In 1988, a graduate student launched an experimental script to measure the size of the internet, and a tiny programming oversight caused it to accidentally replicate out of control — infecting ten percent of all connected computers in hours and creating the world's first massive digital crisis.
Tech Explained
In November 1988, an unmanned Soviet space shuttle called Buran flew a full orbital mission and landed itself in a blizzard at Baikonur without a single human input, and three years later the country that built it no longer existed.
Tech Explained
In 1901, sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera pulled a corroded lump of bronze out of a Roman shipwreck, and it sat in an Athens museum for half a century before anyone realised they had found a 2,000-year-old computer that could predict eclipses 19 years in advance.
Tech Explained
When Boeing 747-400 pilots needed to update their navigation database as late as 2020, a technician would walk onto the flight deck with eight 3.5-inch floppy disks and feed them one at a time into a slot beside the captain's seat, because recertifying anything newer than the 1989 avionics would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tech Explained