The defining moments in computing and video game history — verified, dated, and sourced.
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.
Ray Tomlinson is credited as email's inventor, and rightly so for one specific, real breakthrough — but the popular version of the story usually skips over the messaging system that already existed before he touched it.
The Apple I and II are often credited as the birth of personal computing. A different machine, from a company most people have never heard of, beat them to market by more than a year.
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.
A complete walkthrough finding, reading, and actually understanding Request for Comments documents — the original, primary-source specifications behind email, the early internet, and much of the web's foundational technology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.