Technology worth knowing
Ideas that make
tomorrow clearer.
Ideas, stories, and context on the technology that's changing our world — without the hype.
Curated for curious minds
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Fresh perspectives on the tools, ideas, and invisible systems shaping our world.
A little wonder
Tiny facts.
Big rabbit holes.
Technology is full of details hiding in plain sight. We collect the ones that make you stop and look twice.
The first computer bug was an actual bug.
In 1947, engineers found a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer, causing a malfunction — the origin of the term "debugging."
Your phone has more compute than the Apollo missions combined.
The guidance computer that landed Apollo 11 on the Moon had about 64KB of memory. A modern smartphone has millions of times more.
The @ symbol predates email by centuries.
Used by merchants since the 1500s to mean "at a rate of," it was repurposed for email addresses in 1971 simply because it wasn't used in names.
Most of the internet's traffic happens in silence.
Automated bots — crawlers, scrapers, and monitoring tools — account for a large share of all web requests, far outnumbering human visitors on many sites.
USB was designed to be reversible from the start.
It just took 15 years, one failed connector generation, and a lot of frustrated users before USB-C actually delivered on that promise.
Wi-Fi doesn't stand for anything.
It's not an acronym for "Wireless Fidelity" — that was a marketing backronym invented after the fact. The name was chosen because it sounded catchy.
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