Long Reads

Longer explainers,
fewer dead ends.

Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.

In 1947, Harvard’s Mark II ran on roughly 13,000 electromechanical relays, stored numbers across 100 registers, and read instructions from punched paper tape, turning thousands of clicking metal switches into a Navy calculator vulnerable to dust, loose contacts, and one famously misplaced moth

The famous moth in the Harvard logbook is often told as the origin of the word "bug" in computing. The truth is more interesting: the joke only works because engineers had already been calling faults bugs for more than sixty years.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers sitting side by side in the same room — he chose the @ symbol to separate user from machine because it was the only punctuation on the keyboard nobody was using

The story of how a bored engineer at a Cambridge research firm picked an obscure typewriter symbol in 1971 and, without meaning to, gave the internet its most recognisable punctuation mark.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

How did a single computer worm written by a Cornell graduate student in November 1988 crash roughly 6,000 machines and force the internet to invent security?

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a 99-line C program escaped from an MIT computer and began spreading through the fledgling internet. By morning, an estimated 10 per cent of connected machines were unusable — and network security, as a discipline, had to be invented in a hurry.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

When you tilt a smartphone, gravity shifts microscopic silicon fingers inside its accelerometer by only a few nanometres, changing the capacitance between them and producing the electrical imbalance the phone reads as a new direction for down

Every smartphone contains a silicon structure smaller than a grain of rice that senses gravity by measuring how far a comb of tiny fingers moves when you tilt the device. The distances involved are a few nanometres — smaller than a strand of DNA.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

A microwave oven works because water molecules have a slight positive and negative end — the magnetron flips an electric field 2.45 billion times a second, and the molecules twist back and forth so fast the friction becomes heat

The familiar hum of a microwave oven hides a small piece of quantum-era engineering: a wartime radar tube, a resonant metal box, and the fact that a water molecule is very slightly lopsided.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

The retina of the mantis shrimp carries twelve types of colour receptor to the human eye's three — and yet experiments suggest it sees colour worse than we do, using the extra channels for speed instead of subtlety

The mantis shrimp has the most elaborate colour vision hardware ever found in an animal eye, but behavioural tests suggest the extra receptors are not for finer discrimination. They are a shortcut, trading resolution for reaction time on a coral reef where milliseconds matter.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

When a lightning return stroke heats a channel only centimetres wide to roughly 30,000 kelvin, about five times the temperature of the Sun’s visible surface, the air expands so violently that the pressure wave rolls across the ground as thunder

A single lightning stroke lasts a few tens of microseconds, but in that flash it drives a slender column of air to temperatures no natural process on Earth's surface can match. The bang that follows is the air itself getting out of the way.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

In October 1957, a beachball-sized aluminium sphere called Sputnik 1 began sending 0.3-second pulses on two radio frequencies from orbit, signals amateur operators around the world could receive, making the space age suddenly audible from Earth

The Soviet Union's first satellite weighed just 83.6 kilograms and carried nothing but two radio transmitters, yet its steady beep from orbit rewrote geopolitics, science and the imagination of a generation.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat before roughly 1,000 computing professionals in San Francisco and demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and shared-screen editing in one 90-minute session, a concentrated glimpse of the interactive computer future later remembered as the Mother of All Demos

On 9 December 1968, a Stanford researcher spent 90 minutes showing a room of engineers a working future — windows, a mouse, live video collaboration — decades before any of it reached a desk.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jul 27, 2026