A Cornell graduate student's self-replicating program, released from MIT's network on a November night in 1988, spread far faster and further than its own author reportedly intended.
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.