Tag: history of technology
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I’m sitting in frontof a computer, looking at its graphical user interface with overlapping windows on a high-resolution screen. I interact with the computer by pointing and clicking with a… more ›
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As we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, could we say when our current era really started? I’d argue that it didn’t start with a single… more ›
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Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing are all celebrated as computer pioneers, but the name of John von Neumann, a brilliant Hungarian-American mathematician once nearly as well known in… more ›
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OVER A THOUSAND years ago, the ancient Khmer civilization emerged as a powerful cultural and political force in what is now Cambodia and came to dominate much of Southeast Asia. Between… more ›
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‘The pen is a virgin,’ wrote Filippo de Strata in the late fifteenth century, but ‘the printing press is a whore.’ And that wasn’t the half of it. Born into a wealthy… more ›
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Who’s the data controller of the blockchain? Who even owns things like Bitcoin and Ethereum? The short answer is nobody and everybody; everybody in this case is the thousands of… more ›
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Research libraries preserve classic texts, films and recordings, but when it comes to video games, it gets complicated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/01/12/video-game-preservation-emulation/ more ›
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Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots have been part of the human imagination for thousands of years. Robots have histories that extend far back into the… more ›
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Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d… more ›
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Oculus Rift launched in March 2016. Depending on who you ask, it’s “already” been five years or it’s “only” been five years since we shipped that first consumer VR headset.… more ›