Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.
The internet's naming system rests on 13 letters. Behind each letter is a globally distributed cluster of servers, and one of them lives in a former Royal Air Force bunker in Hampshire.
The 1973 oil embargo emptied Dutch motorways on Sundays and gave a rattled generation of parents, planners and protesters the political opening they had been waiting for. What followed was decades of quiet infrastructure work.
When a file is deleted, the operating system usually crosses out its entry in the filesystem's index and marks the underlying space as free — but the data itself stays put until something else needs the room.
YouTube's origin story is a small comedy of failure: a dating site nobody used, a placeholder clip about elephant trunks, and a pivot that reshaped the internet within eighteen months.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group spent six years arguing over quantisation tables, colour spaces and block sizes. What they settled on in 1992 still shapes almost every image the web serves today.
In 1988 Sony was a consumer electronics giant with no foothold in video games. Seven years later it had a console on shelves that would go on to outsell the Nintendo 64 by roughly three to one.
The submarine cables that stitch the continents together are astonishingly slender, and astonishingly full. A single glass strand thinner than a human hair can now push more than 20 terabits a second across an entire ocean.
The reason a café Wi-Fi crawls at lunchtime isn't bandwidth or the router being "overloaded" — it's that every device in the room, and often the room next door, is politely queueing to speak on the same slice of radio spectrum.
On the evening of 2 November 1988, a worm written by a 23-year-old student slipped onto the ARPANET and multiplied until administrators at MIT, Berkeley and NASA were pulling cables from walls. Within a week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded the first Computer Emergency Response Team.
