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Black and white photos of news paper headlines about computers.

When the Mac 'Ruined' Writing

Quills were once the default writing tool, when pens rose to prominence their impact on writing would be a hot debate in the literary world, and now computers.
by Louis Anslow via Newart on September 19, 2023
Steve Jobs with Apple II computer.

The Birth of the Personal Computer

A new history of the Apple II charts how computers became unavoidable fixtures of our daily lives.
by Kyle Chayka via The New Yorker on May 18, 2023

The Secret Origin Story of the iPhone

An exclusive excerpt from "The One Device" about the engineering fight that created the iPhone as you know it.
by Brian Merchant via The Verge on June 13, 2017
The Hollywood sign replaced with the words "The End."

The Life and Death of Hollywood

Film and television writers face an existential threat.
by Daniel Bessner via Harper’s on March 21, 2024
Image of plastic human figurine hunched over at a desk and computer.

How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body

Decades before 'Zoom fatigue' broke our spirits, the so-called computer revolution brought with it a world of pain previously unknown to humankind.
by Laine Nooney via Vice on March 12, 2021

How Silicon Valley Broke the Economy

The question of how to fix the tech industry is now inseparable from the question of how to fix late 20th century capitalism.
by Adrian Chen via The Nation on October 14, 2019

The Failed Political Promise of Silicon Valley

Tech was meant to help us transcend our most intractable problems. What went wrong?
by Kim Phillips-Fein via The New Republic on September 27, 2019
Douglas Engelbart wearing an earpiece, sitting at a computer, in 1968.

The Future, Revisited: “The Mother of All Demos” at 50

How the ’60s counterculture gave birth to personal computers and the vast tech industry that builds and sells them.
by Andy Horowitz via Los Angeles Review of Books on December 8, 2018

An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption

Three recent books challenge the tech industry's myths of self-reliance and prescience.
by Nitasha Tiku via Wired on October 22, 2018

How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future

Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution.
by Valerie Landau via Smithsonian on January 3, 2018

Designers On Acid: The Tripping Californians Who Paved The Way To Our Touchscreen World

Ever wondered why email, trash cans, Google Docs and desktops look the way they do? The answer lies in 1960s hippie culture.
by Oliver Wainwright via The Guardian on May 11, 2017
An iMac computer displays the starry night screensaver.

Recurring Screens

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.
by Nora Claire Miller via The Paris Review on May 20, 2025
Emoji present on Sharp PA-8500 (1988).

Emoji History: The Missing Years

Tracing the origins of Japanese emoji symbolism and drawing technology.
by Matt Sephton via Gingerbeardman on June 4, 2024
1970s commercial airplane flying over a mountain range

How 1970s California Created the Modern World

What happened in California in the 1970s played an outsized role in creating the world we live in today – both in the United States and globally.
by Francis J. Gavin via Engelsberg Ideas on April 3, 2023
Technology and California graphic.

Blame Palo Alto

From Stanford to Silicon Valley, a small town in California spread tech’s gospel of data and control.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on February 6, 2023
Illustration of screens, electronics, and sound waves.

The Hidden History of Screen Readers

For decades, blind programmers have been creating the tools their community needs.
by Sheon Han via The Verge on July 14, 2022
Neil Young, on left, and UFC announcer and podcaster Joe Rogan.
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What The Neil Young-Joe Rogan Dust-Up Tells Us About The Music Industry

The music industry is thriving — but it’s not always trickling down to artists.
by Sam Backer via Made By History on February 6, 2022
Split image - half a 1980s computer, other half a modern laptop; on the screen for both, an hourglass icon that symbolizes loading.

54 Years Ago, a Computer Programmer Fixed a Massive Bug — and Created an Existential Crisis

A blinking cursor follows us everywhere in the digital world, but who invented it and why?
by Sarah Wells via Inverse on December 3, 2021
A crowd gathered around a railroad track at the ceremony marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

Breaking the Myth About America’s ‘Great’ Railroad Expansion

Historian Richard White on the greed, ineptitude and economic cost behind the transcontinental railroads, and the implications for infrastructure policy today.
by Richard White, Jake Blumgart via Governing on November 18, 2021
Collage of audio-related images, records, cassettes, CDs, wav files, ipods, electronic media icons, and an ear.

What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?

If your entire collection is on a streaming service, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.
by Joe Pinsker via The Atlantic on July 19, 2021
Illustration from the 1919 catalogue of the Library Bureau depicting women working at desks and filing cabinets.

The Filing Cabinet

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems.
by Craig Robertson via Places Journal on May 1, 2021
A shoe stepping on money.

Islands in the Stream

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.
by David Dayen via The American Prospect on March 22, 2021
Jill Lepore and the cover of her Book "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future"

“We Don’t Want the Program”: On How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy

“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
by Jill Lepore, Danah Boyd via Public Books on November 2, 2020

Whose Century?

One has to wonder whether the advocates of a new Cold War have taken the measure of the challenge posed by 21st-century China.
by Adam Tooze via London Review of Books on July 22, 2020
1975 digital camera prototype

How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History

We’re capturing the mundane as well as the memorable.
by Allison Marsh via IEEE Spectrum on June 30, 2020
A walkman and a headphone set

The Walkman, Forty Years On

The gadget that taught the world to socially distance.
by Matt Alt via The New Yorker on June 29, 2020
Sign for the Silicon Valley Financial Center.

The Hidden History of How the Government Kick-Started Silicon Valley

It’s time to move past the tech sector’s creator myths.
by Margaret O'Mara, Hope Reese via OneZero on July 8, 2019
Apple Macintosh computers sit on double decked manufacturing lines, 1984
partner

The Undocumented Workers who Built Silicon Valley

Undocumented workers have been foundational to the rise of our most vaunted hub of innovative capitalism.
by Louis Hyman via Made By History on August 30, 2018

‘Crush Them’: An Oral History of the Lawsuit That Upended Silicon Valley

Twenty years ago, Microsoft tried to eliminate its competition in the race for the internet's future. The government had other ideas.
by Victor Luckerson via The Ringer on May 18, 2018
Rows of typewriters in front of computers

How Literature Became Word Perfect

Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
by Josephine Livingstone via The New Republic on May 2, 2016
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