Tech Trends Articles
Reading Time: 4 minutesHISTORY OF WORLD BACKUP DAY There isn’t much history behind it, as the first celebration of this geek holiday was in 2011. World Backup Day is a decade and a half old. It started when a Reddit user wrote about losing their hard drive and wished someone had reminded them how important backups are. Ismail…
Reading Time: 6 minutesHow 40 years ago the Apple Macintosh iconic personal computer forever changed how we think about computing.
Reading Time: 3 minutesHedy Lamarr, the Austrian-American actress and Hollywood legend known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” is remembered today, November 9, on the anniversary of her birthday for her pioneering work on the technology that would become the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communications systems.
Reading Time: 3 minutesInformation Reformation: 5 Ways Martin Luther and the Gutenberg movable type printing press presaged the Internet explosion of information.
Reading Time: 7 minutesHISTORY OF THE INTERNET: OVER 50 YEARS AGO On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 PM, a computer grad student at UCLA named Charley Kline sent a message to SRI. (Stanford Research Institute.) It was the first connection between computer networks. The Internet began! We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys…
Reading Time: 5 minutesHISTORY OF THE IBM PC: 44 YEARS AGO 44 years ago this week, the IBM PC was released. On August 12, 1981, IBM announced its first “personal computer,” though it had previously been renowned for its IBM System/370 mainframe computer. I operated one of these mainframes in a raised-floor data center back in the early…
Reading Time: 4 minutesOBSIDIAN AND AI Imagine using OpenAI to summarize a note’s content in your Personal Knowledge Management (PMK) System. It is possible, if you build your PKM using Obsidian! What would it be like to summarize the content of that note? Better yet, what if you could chat with the AI about the content? You can do…
Reading Time: 5 minutesHISTORY OF GMAIL Twenty years ago, on April 1, 2004, Google released Gmail to limited beta testing for only 1,000 users outside Google. Here’s the original press release. A few months later, I got an invitation to the beta, which was not opened to the general public until 2007. What follows is the story of…
Reading Time: 2 minutesHISTORY OF WALTZ DAY: 123, 123 December 31, 2023, or 12/31/23, is Waltz Day. A day like this is unique, occurring only once a century. For many, this will be the only time in their life they see this kind of date. Waltz Day? Though it has nothing to do with the annual National…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSIX BLADES Today, while I was at the pharmacy waiting for a script to be filled, I thought I’d wander down the Shave Needs aisle and see the latest. Five Blades Years ago, scientists realized that a single blade was not enough for a clean shave and added a second, and then a third,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesAI in Big Tech Earning Reports: the Race is On The hottest tech topic of late has been Artificial Intelligence. You can’t read a news article on tech that doesn’t discuss AI. For example: Two weeks ago, the Big Tech companies reported their financial results: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Apple reported strong sales. …
Reading Time: 6 minutesHISTORY OF APPLE LISA, PART 2: MEET ITS CREATORS This week at the Computer History Museum’s “Happy 40th Birthday Lisa” event, Katie Hafner, former Computerworld writer, interviewed several of the creators of the Apple Lisa. Many more of the original development team were in the audience. This article follows my previous article on the History…