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Explainers

Clear answers about the tech you already use, without leftover jargon.

Jun 8, 2026 When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 Masahiro Hara and Denso engineers built the QR code in 1994 to help Toyota suppliers scan car parts from any angle… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes wrote LAP6 for the LINC computer from her parents' Baltimore home, testing an interactive… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 When Grace Hopper wanted to explain a nanosecond to admirals who kept asking why satellites were slow, she handed each… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 When Doug Wheelock came home after 163 days in space, he said he had craved the aroma of leaves, grass, flowers, and… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 When Frank Maixner’s team reconstructed Ötzi the Iceman’s 5,300-year-old stomach bacterium in 2016, the Helicobacter… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 When Cingular chief Stan Sigman backed the original iPhone before its 2007 unveiling, he accepted terms American… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 8, 2026 Every year, roughly two billion new smartphones, laptops, and tablets ship with a key arrangement designed in the 1870s… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 6, 2026 Tristan Harris, Google's former design ethicist, told the US Senate that the pull-to-refresh gesture on nearly every… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 6, 2026 In 1969, László Bélády and two IBM colleagues published a paging-machine anomaly showing FIFO could make four memory… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 5, 2026 When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 5, 2026 The colour magenta does not exist anywhere in the spectrum of visible light, and your brain manufactures it on the spot… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 5, 2026 On 28 May 2009, Google demoed a product called Wave on stage at I/O for 80 minutes and got a standing ovation from… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 5, 2026 When Clair Patterson set out in 1948 to measure the age of the Earth using lead in meteorites, his samples kept coming… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
Jun 4, 2026 The IBM 305 RAMAC stayed in production until 1961, weighed more than a ton, stored five million characters on fifty… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team