pplpod

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...

On January 22, 2004, Google quietly launched a social network named for the engineer who built it in his 20 percent time, Orkut Büyükkökten. Within months his former employer, Affinity Engines, sued, claiming the site shared code with its own alumni network and pointing to nine identical bugs in both. The product itself was startlingly open: any member could view any profile, and friends could pub...

In 1957 a blind seven-year-old with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia found that whistling a certain note into a telephone made the line behave strangely. He had stumbled on the 2600 hertz tone the Bell network used to signal that a long distance trunk was idle. Because control signals traveled on the same channel as voices, anyone who could produce that tone could seize an unbilled line. John Dra...

Before 1984 the Bell System controlled American communications from end to end. AT&T ran long distance, owned the local operating companies, built nearly all the equipment through Western Electric, and funded the research at Bell Labs. In 1974 the Department of Justice sued, mainly to pry loose Western Electric. Convinced it would lose, AT&T offered a different bargain: keep the factories...

In 1942 Harry Coover Jr. led a team trying to make clear plastic for military gun sights. One compound, cyanoacrylate, stuck to every mold and instrument it touched, so they shelved it as a failure. B.F. Goodrich filed the first patent in 1947, but the real turn came in 1951, when Coover, by then at Eastman Kodak, looked again and saw an adhesive instead of a ruined plastic. Kodak brought it to ma...

In 1997 Deidre LaCarte was an art student at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, teaching martial arts on the side, when she bet her sister and her best friend over who could draw the most traffic to a personal web page. Her entry, a GeoCities tribute to her pet hamster Hampton, offered rows of four low resolution dancing rodent GIFs and a sped up nine second loop of Roger M...

Apple's Macintosh commercial aired nationally exactly once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and it is still called the greatest television ad ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott a year and a half after Blade Runner, the 60 second film shows a runner in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through a giant screen where a Big Brother figure lectures rows of gray, shaven...

In 2000, subscribers to Forbes and Wired opened their mailboxes to find a plastic barcode scanner shaped like a cat that they had never ordered. The CueCat, made by Digital Convergence Corporation, promised to spare people the labor of typing web addresses: swipe a printed code in a magazine and your desktop browser would load the page. Investors including Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young and R...

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency's new Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying the four Cluster satellites, each about 1,200 kilograms, bound to study Earth's magnetosphere. For thirty seconds the flight was flawless. At 37 seconds the rocket swiveled its nozzles hard to one side, tore itself apart under aerodynamic stress, and self-destructed. Nothing physical had broken. The cause was...

In 1938 a chemist named Roy J. Plunkett opened the valve on a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas in a New Jersey laboratory and nothing came out. The cylinder still weighed as much as a full one, so he and his assistant sawed it in half. Inside was a waxy, slippery white powder. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a chain of carbon atoms sheathed in fluorine. Almost not...

The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price....

In the spring of 2011 a handful of anonymous hackers knocked the CIA's public website offline, pulled user data out of Sony Pictures, and planted a story on the PBS site claiming Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive in New Zealand. They called themselves LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, and said they did it for laughs. The group formed in May 2011 from an older crew known as Internet Feds. Its lead...

In 1983, in the Castro Valley Village shopping center in California, Joseph Marver ran a failing women's clothing shop called Spirit Women's Discount Apparel. Watching crowds pour into a costume store across the street, he cleared out the dresses, stocked costumes, makeup, and props, and took in 100,000 dollars in a 30 day trial. The following year he opened a temporary seasonal storefront in a ma...

The heavy metal espresso machine on the counter of a specialty cafe very often carries the name La Marzocco. The company began in Florence in 1927, when brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi opened a mechanical workshop. Giuseppe had trained as a brass artisan with the Italian national railway, and he knew steam boilers. Early machines were tall vertical towers that hid the barista from the customer....