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Explainers

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

May 31, 2026 Almost all of the world's internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 31, 2026 In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 30, 2026 In 1985, registering a .com domain cost nothing, required a technical request rather than a shopping cart, and produced… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 29, 2026 In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 carrying a map that uses 14 pulsars to pinpoint Earth's exact position in the Milky… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 29, 2026 In 1962, a single missing character in NASA's guidance software doomed Mariner 1 just minutes after launch By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 29, 2026 In 1985, a 14-year-old in Britain could legally drive a Sinclair C5 down a dual carriageway at 15 miles per hour with… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 29, 2026 In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 28, 2026 In 2014, a simple counting glitch known as the "Gangnam Style bug" forced YouTube to completely rewrite its core… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 28, 2026 In the early 1970s, a phone phreak nicknamed "Captain Crunch" became famous for a startling trick By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 28, 2026 When General James Mattis joined the Theranos board in 2013, he had already spent a year pushing Elizabeth Holmes's… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 When a massive solar storm hit Earth in 1972, it triggered a series of magnetic fluctuations so severe that it… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 In 2020, Philipp Heck’s team dated forty presolar grains from Australia’s Murchison meteorite and found stardust as old… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn's atmosphere at 70,000… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 When Konrad Zuse switched on the Z3 in his Berlin workshop in May 1941, he had just built the first programmable… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 At Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory on the Shirahama coast, biologist Shin Kubota has watched the… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team
May 27, 2026 In August 1993, Garry Trudeau spent a week turning Apple's new Newton MessagePad into a Doonesbury joke, including a… By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team