The popular history of technology usually starts with the personal computer, and for good reason: that was the first high tech device that most people ever used. The only thing more impressive than the sheer audacity of “A computer on every desk and in every home” as a corporate goal, is the fact that Microsoft accomplished it, with help from its longtime...

This Article is available as a video essay on YouTube I was born in 1980, which technically makes me a part of Generation X; there is at least one data point, though, that makes me a millennial. In 2021 Fast Company conducted a survey about what constituted middle age; millennials defined it as 35 to 50, while Generation X said 45 to 55 (Baby Boomers...

It really is a valley: There, right in the middle of the Santa Clara Valley, formed by the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west and the Diablo Range on the east, lies the once-sleepy city of Mountain View. Mountain View was dominated by the U.S. Navy’s Moffett Field in 1955, when William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs,...

The original Pixel was released in 2016 at the end of interesting, at least when it came to smartphones. Two years earlier Apple had finally knocked down every barrier limiting iPhone growth, releasing the large-screen iPhone 6 worldwide, including on the elusive China Mobile; Samsung, meanwhile, had consolidated the high-end of Android. Over the ensuing...

Railroads were, in theory, an attractive business: while they cost a lot to build, once built, the marginal cost of carrying additional goods was extremely low; sure, you needed to actually run a train, which need fuel and workers and which depreciated the equipment involved, but those costs were minimal compared to the revenue that could be earned...

This Article is available as a video essay on YouTube I’ve long maintained that if the powers-that-be understood what the Internet’s impact would be, they would have never allowed it to be created. It’s hard to accuse said shadowy figures of negligence, however, given how clueless technologists were as well; look no further than an operating system...