Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.
For a few strange months in 2000, Sony's new games console sat awkwardly on the same US export-control list as cruise-missile guidance computers — because the Emotion Engine inside it really was that fast.
In June 1991, Nintendo publicly ditched Sony at the Consumer Electronics Show and announced a rival CD partnership with Philips. Sony, humiliated, kept building anyway — and five years later shipped the PlayStation.
The three big squares in a QR code's corners aren't decoration — they're what lets a phone lock onto the pattern from any angle, and the code itself is built to survive being torn, stained, or partly scribbled over.
More than a century after a Dutch physicist saw mercury's resistance vanish in a bath of liquid helium, superconductivity remains one of the strangest, most useful accidents in modern physics.
Modern processors run on switches so small they're measured in atoms. At about 3 nanometres, a transistor gate is roughly 15 silicon atoms wide — and physics is starting to push back.
On 28 February 2017, an Amazon Web Services engineer trying to debug a slow billing system typed a command with one wrong parameter — and took down a large fraction of the visible internet for nearly four hours.
The Wi-Fi in a busy café isn't weak — it's just full of devices politely waiting to talk. The lag you feel is the sound of an invisible queue.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable carried Queen Victoria's greeting to President Buchanan in August 1858, then died within weeks. Its brief life rewired how the world understood distance — and laid down the template for the fibre-optic cables now humming beneath every ocean.
On the evening of 2 November 1988, a small program written by a Cornell graduate student escaped into a nascent internet of about 60,000 machines and paralysed roughly a tenth of them, forcing the United States to invent an entire discipline in response.
