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 1995, Microsoft shipped a cartoon-house interface called Bob, led by Melinda French, who married Bill Gates while it was in development — it demanded twice the memory of a typical home PC, sold roughly 30,000 copies, and was dead within a year, leaving behind the font Comic Sans and the animated assistant that became Clippy.

Microsoft Bob arrived on March 31, 1995, as a cartoon house. Click the clock and you got a calendar; click the pen and you got a word processor; click the checkbook and you got finance software.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre a year, does not reach sexual maturity until around age 150, and a specimen carbon-dated by Danish researchers in 2016 was estimated to be at least 272 years old, meaning it was already swimming the North Atlantic when Mozart was composing symphonies.

When marine biologist Julius Nielsen pulled the lens from the eye of a five-metre Greenland shark in his Copenhagen lab, he was holding tissue that had started forming before the United States existed.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground

When Michel Siffre's support team called down to tell him the experiment was finished, he did not believe them.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

When Apple shipped iOS 12 in June 2018, a small feature called Screen Time slipped onto every iPhone with a counter nobody had quite prepared for — a tally of pickups — and within a day Tim Cook was telling CNN the number of times he picked up his own phone was simply too many

Buried in the weekly Screen Time report Apple shipped with iOS 12 in June 2018 was a number called pickups — every time a hand reached for the iPhone, woke the screen, and unlocked it, the tally went up by one.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

When NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite in 2005, an amateur radio operator in Canada named Scott Tilley picked up its signal in January 2018 while hunting for a classified spy satellite, and the spacecraft turned out to be still spinning, still powered, and still trying to phone home after 13 years of silence.

On the night of January 20, 2018, an amateur radio operator and electrical engineer named Scott Tilley sat in his backyard…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

The original iPhone Steve Jobs unveiled in January 2007 could not record video, could not copy and paste text, could not run a single third-party app, and could only reach the internet over 2G — and Jobs spent ninety minutes on stage at Macworld arguing, one missing feature at a time, that every absence was actually a design decision.

Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, held up a slab of glass and aluminum…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.

On the morning of July 27, 1866, the SS Great Eastern dropped anchor in Heart's Content, Newfoundland, with 1,686 nautical miles of insulated copper cable trailing behind her across the floor of the North Atlantic.

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, then kept the patent open until phone cameras and a 2020 pandemic turned the factory square into a daily ritual on restaurant tables

Masahiro Hara was trying to make a factory scanner read faster when his team at Denso built the QR code in 1994, a…

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 hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.

Jerry Ehman was sitting at his kitchen table in suburban Ohio a few days after 15 August 1977, flipping through a stack of…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026