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Dec 23, 2020

Once upon a time, we put a quarter in a machine and played a game for awhile. And life was good. The rise of personal computers and subsequent fall in the cost of microchips allowed some of the same chips found in early computers, such as the Zylog Z80, to bring video game consoles into homes across the world. That...


Dec 18, 2020

Months before the first node of ARPANET went online, the intrepid easy engineers were just starting to discuss the technical underpinnings of what would evolve into the Internet some day. Here, we hear how hosts would communicate to the IMPs, or early routing devices (although maybe more like a Paleolithic version...


Dec 11, 2020

Humanity realized we could do more with stone tools some two and a half million years ago. We made stone hammers and cutting implements made by flaking stone, sharpening deer bone, and sticks, sometimes sharpened into spears. It took 750,000 years, but we figured out we could attach those to sticks to make hand axes...


Dec 8, 2020

The written word allowed us to preserve human knowledge, or data, from generation to generation. We know only what we can observe from ancient remains from before writing, but we know more and more about societies as generations of people literate enough to document their stories spread. And the more documented, the...


Dec 5, 2020

Following the Renaissance, Europe had an explosion of science. The works of the Greeks had been lost during the Dark Ages while civilizations caught up to the technical progress. Or so we were taught in school. Previously, we looked at the contributions during the Golden Age of the Islamic Empires and the Renaissance...