The defining moments in computing and video game history — verified, dated, and sourced.
A Stanford research project on ranking web pages by their link structure became a legally registered company on a single day in September 1998 — the formal starting point for what would become the dominant search engine.
US video game revenue collapsed by roughly 97% in under two years. It wasn't one bad game that caused it — it was market oversaturation, and the rebuilding afterward reshaped the industry's structure permanently.
ARPANET was one research network among several incompatible experiments in the 1970s. TCP/IP is the specific technical decision that let it absorb all the others into a single, unified internet.
Priced at $1,565 with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive, the IBM 5150 didn't look like a revolution on paper. Its open architecture is what made it one anyway.
A moth taped into a 1947 logbook is one of computing's most-repeated stories — and one of its most-garbled. Here's what the primary source, the logbook itself, actually shows.
Less than three years after its landmark IPO, Netscape agreed to be acquired by AOL in an all-stock deal — a merger meant to counter Microsoft that critics immediately doubted, given the two companies' very different cultures.
IBM built the 5150 quickly, using off-the-shelf parts and an open architecture, expecting a modest niche product. Instead it became the template every PC-compatible computer still traces back to today.
Facing a losing battle against Internet Explorer, Netscape made an unprecedented move for a major commercial software company: giving away the source code to its flagship product, and creating Mozilla to steward it.
In the mid-1990s, which browser you used determined how much of the web actually worked for you. Here's how a startup's early dominance collapsed against a bundled competitor in under four years.
This blog covers operating systems and infrastructure in technical depth. This category exists for the events, products, and moments that shaped the industry those systems live in — verified, dated, and sourced.