ENIAC is the name most people learn as the first electronic computer. A 1973 federal court ruling says otherwise — and it turned on evidence most retellings of this story leave out entirely.
One of the most repeated political misquotes in tech culture. Here's the exact sentence Gore actually said, on the record, and how three days of mockery turned it into something he never claimed.
A computer once filled a room and required a specialized staff to operate. The path to a device that fits in a pocket wasn't one invention — it was a compounding sequence of separate breakthroughs across decades.
Through 1983, US video game console and cartridge sales began an unprecedented decline that would erase roughly 97% of the market's value within two years, taking Atari's fortunes down with it.
Two-digit year fields threatened to make systems worldwide misinterpret 2000 as 1900. Billions were spent fixing it in advance — which is exactly why, to many observers afterward, it looked like the whole thing had been overblown.
Internet companies with no profits, and sometimes no meaningful revenue, reached billion-dollar valuations through the late 1990s. The Nasdaq's collapse starting in 2000 erased trillions in value in under two years.
Tim Berners-Lee's first website had already been running quietly at CERN since December 1990. In August 1991, he posted a public invitation to collaborate — the moment the web actually became something the wider world could join.
A college student's file-sharing tool lasted barely two years before a court order killed it — but it permanently broke the assumption that music had to be sold as a physical or per-track purchase.
Shawn Fanning's peer-to-peer file-sharing tool went live in June 1999, launched out of a small Hull, Massachusetts office. Within two years it would be shut down by court order — but not before changing the music industry permanently.
A graduate student's experiment to measure the internet's size instead knocked out an estimated 10% of it in a single night. The Morris Worm produced the first felony conviction under US computer crime law.