Imagine if engineers were required to build a working model to demonstrate every new technological concept to the general public. Done right, tech literacy might soar! A compelling visual example can really help people understand the applications and implications of new technologies. That was the idea behind the thunder house, which in the second half […]
Last year for Hands On, I gutted a defunct TRS-80 Model 100. The goal was to upgrade its 24 kilobytes of RAM and 2.4-megahertz, 8-bit CPU but keep the notebook computer’s lovely keyboard and LCD screen. That article was almost entirely about figuring out how to drive its squirrely 1980s-era LCD screen. I left the […]
In mid-2021, the term “Web3” suddenly exploded into the public consciousness. As people scrambled to figure out what it was—cryptocurrencies? blockchain? nonfungible tokens?—venture capital firms were pouring money into new startups, over US $30 billion before the year was out. Meanwhile, Molly White, a software engineer, started reading up on the tech in case that […]
Late in 1979, Steve Jobs and other colleagues from Apple visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). There they were introduced to the experimental Alto computer and the Smalltalk language and computing environment, developed by Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group. Smalltalk was a breakthrough in object-oriented programming, an approach that’s used in many of […]
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the skyrocketing fuel prices that ensued last year got me thinking about how to cut down on my consumption of gasoline. I thought briefly about purchasing a car that got better gas mileage, but it made sense first to see how much fuel economy I could eek out from the […]
On 20 April 1939, David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America, addressed a small crowd outside the RCA pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. “Today we are on the eve of launching a new industry, based on imagination, on scientific research and accomplishment,” he proclaimed. That industry was television. RCA president David […]
There is currently a lot of interest in AI tools designed to help programmers write software. GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer apply deep-learning techniques originally developed for generating natural-language text by adapting it to generate source code. The idea is that programmers can use these tools as a kind of auto-complete on steroids, using prompts […]
In parts of the United States, using the term “systemic racism” to refer to persistent discrimination against Black people has become a political flash point. To some ears, it sounds like an attack on the country and the local community. Several states have enacted laws that ban, or would appear to ban, discussing the concept […]
As I write this month’s article, my house is a noisy, dusty construction zone. I am renovating my kitchen, which was originally built in 1964. Although I’m happy to be rid of some of the disastrous 1960s design missteps—seriously, only one electrical receptacle in the entire kitchen?—I was sad to part with a small piece […]
Accordions come in many shapes. Some have a little piano keyboard while others have a grid of black and white buttons set roughly in the shape of a parallelogram. I’ve been fascinated by this “chromatic-button” layout for a long time. I realized that the buttons are staggered just like the keys on a typewriter, and […]