pplpod

In 2004 the Motorola Razr V3 landed among chunky plastic handsets like something dropped from orbit: impossibly thin, clad in anodized aluminum, with a keypad etched from a single sheet of metal and a snap that made hanging up feel like a statement. It turned the phone from a tool into a status symbol people left on restaurant tables. Motorola responded by flooding the market with variations throu...

In 2006 more than a hundred engineers, executives, and designers gathered to hold a funeral for a discontinued gadget. The gadget was Aibo, Sony's robot dog, born in the company's Computer Science Laboratory in the 1990s. Dr. Toshitada Doi and AI expert Masahiro Fujita began with a prototype called Mutant that tracked a yellow ball and threw karate strikes. Fujita's insight was that a robot built...

Winamp greeted new users with a bleating llama and a boast about whipping its backside. Behind the joke was a real fix for a 1997 problem: MP3 playback strained weak desktop processors. University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev wrapped a simple Windows interface around AMP, an efficient decoding engine written by Tomislav Uzelac, and released it as shareware. They asked users...

In 1978 Dan Bricklin sat in a Harvard Business School classroom watching a professor build a financial model in chalk. Every time one number changed, each figure that depended on it had to be erased and recalculated by hand. Bricklin imagined a grid where the computer did that work instantly. With Bob Frankston he formed Software Arts in Arlington, Massachusetts, and the two spent a winter in an a...

In 1983, two teenagers in Edmonds, Washington, lay rigid and face down in the outfield during a baseball game, stayed that way for several innings, then got up and left. Scott Amy and Joel Marshall called it face dancing. The same odd idea surfaced again at a 1986 disco party in Berlin, in an unaired 1994 Tom Green prank in Ottawa, and in 1997 in Taunton, England, where schoolboys Gary Clarkson an...

IBM Watson won a million dollars on national television, tried to become a cancer doctor, drifted through a string of odd jobs, and was finally sold for parts. The idea began in 2004, when an IBM manager at a steakhouse saw diners abandon their meals to watch Ken Jennings on his 74 game winning streak. Under principal investigator David Ferrucci, the 2006 prototype answered about 15 percent of clu...

In late 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner launched Beverly Hills Internet, a small web host in Southern California with an unusual way of organizing the early web. Pages lived in virtual neighborhoods named for real places, such as Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and each address was a street number with neighbors on either side. By mid 1995 anyone could claim two megabytes of free sp...

Eric Migicovsky took his idea for a smartphone-connected watch through Y Combinator, earned real revenue during the program, and raised $375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper. Venture capitalists still turned him down, wary of the tooling, inventory, and recall risks of hardware. So in April 2012 he renamed his company Pebble Technology and put the watch on Kickstarter with a $100,000...

The Curta was a mechanical calculator small enough to hold in one hand, nicknamed the pepper grinder and the math grenade. Its inventor, Curt Herzstark, grew up in his family's calculating machine business in 1930s Vienna and set out to shrink a desktop machine to pocket size. His answer was to replace the usual row of ten stepped drums with a single central drum ringed by input sliders, and to ha...

William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, persuaded financier Arnold Beckman to give him $1 million for a lab in Palo Alto, then mostly fruit orchards. He recruited eight young scientists, among them Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, and Jean Hoerni, after putting each through psychological and intelligence tests. Then the dream job soured. Shockley recorded phone calls, forbade s...

John von Neumann's colleagues included Nobel laureates and the founders of quantum physics, and some of them half seriously suspected he was not human. Born in Budapest in 1903 to a wealthy banking family, he knew calculus by age eight and read a 46 volume world history for pleasure. His tutor, Gabor Szego, is said to have wept on seeing the boy's reasoning. At 19 he was publishing work on set the...

Ray Tomlinson created networked email, gave the @ symbol its modern meaning, and then declined to own a cell phone. Born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York, and raised in the village of Vail Mills, he was the son of a carpet mill worker and a dry cleaner's employee. He studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, did a co-op with IBM, and went on to MIT, where the ear...

Life magazine called it the first electronic person in 1970. Shakey was a top-heavy stack of boxes on wheels, built at the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center with DARPA money after a 1964 proposal for intelligent automata aimed at reconnaissance. It carried a television camera, sonar range finders, a radio antenna, and bump detectors. Project manager Charles Rosen watched...

In 2008 a guest conductor four feet three inches tall, dressed like a small astronaut, led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through The Impossible Dream. It was ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and it was never meant to be sold. The project began in 1986 at a research center in Wako, Japan, with a single goal: make a machine walk on two legs. The early E series models were little more than heavy mecha...

In November 1999, stickers on grocery store bananas asked how many calories were in the fruit and pointed shoppers to a web address. That was Ask Jeeves, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1996 on a simple bet: people should be able to type a question in plain English instead of learning keyword and Boolean syntax. A cartoon valet borrowed from P.G. Wodehouse made the idea obvious to novices, and...

Adobe Flash began in 1993 as SmartSketch, a drawing program FutureWave built for pen computers running the doomed PenPoint operating system. When that platform failed, the company added frame by frame animation and relaunched it in 1995 as FutureSplash Animator. Because it drew with vector math instead of heavy pixel files, it could stream full color animation over a dial-up modem. Adobe passed on...

Albert Gonzalez looked like an ordinary IT guy from Miami. He bought his first computer at 12, reportedly hacked NASA at 14, and by his early twenties ran Shadow Crew, an online marketplace where about 4,000 members traded 1.5 million stolen credit and ATM cards along with fake passports and Social Security cards. When the Secret Service's Operation Firewall caught him in Newark carrying 15 fake c...

On March 5, 1975, a group of electronics hobbyists gathered in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, California, to look at an Altair 8800. The machine had no screen and no keyboard. It came as a kit of loose parts, was programmed by flipping toggle switches, and answered in blinking red lights. Its manuals were poor and its parts often defective, so anyone who wanted one to work needed other peop...

In 1994 the Japanese auto parts company Denso Wave had a bottleneck. A standard barcode held about 20 characters, so workers sometimes scanned up to ten labels on a single box of parts. Engineer Masahiro Hara was asked for one label that could hold far more, handle kanji, and scan in a fraction of a second. Playing Go on his lunch breaks, he saw that a two-dimensional grid of black and white could...

We still say we are dialing a number, though the dial itself is long gone. In 1892 Almon Brown Strowger's automatic exchange in La Porte, Indiana, removed the human operator but made callers tap out each digit on three push buttons, one press at a time. The rotary dial, introduced around 1907, handed that counting to a machine. Pulling the wheel forward only wound a spring. The signal went out on...

In the early 1990s a formatted document sent from one computer to another often arrived scrambled, with shifted paragraphs, broken fonts, and missing images. In 1991 Adobe co-founder John Warnock launched the Camelot Project to fix that with a simplified form of PostScript, the page description language Adobe had built for printers. The result was the Portable Document Format, released as a free s...

In 1978 Milton Bradley launched a beeping plastic saucer at Studio 54, the most exclusive nightclub in New York. The toy was Simon, and its origin lay in someone else's failure. At a 1976 trade show, inventors Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison of Marvin Glass and Associates saw Touch Me, an Atari arcade memory game with four identical black buttons and harsh, rasping sounds. Baer liked the game...

In October 2011, days after the world mourned Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie was found dead at 70 in his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone. The news first spread through a short online post by former colleague Rob Pike. Few outside computing noticed, yet the iPhones and MacBooks that made Jobs famous ran on foundations Ritchie built: the C programming language and the Unix ope...

Coat a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil in Vantablack and the ridges disappear. What remains looks like a flat hole cut out of the world. Unveiled in July 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems, the UK company founded by Ben Jensen, the original material is a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.965 percent of visible light. Photons enter the gaps between the tubes, ricochet unti...

In June 2006 a 95 second video appeared on YouTube, shot on a Logitech webcam in a bedroom dressed with thrift store furniture and a pink feather boa. Its star, a homeschooled 16-year-old named Bree, talked about her strict religious parents and her purple monkey puppet, and viewers adored her. She became the most subscribed channel on the site and the first to reach 50,000 subscribers. She was al...