Category: Stories & Inspiration
Stories of science, technology, startup journeys and lessons from history.
Pad 39B, Shuttle STS-51L, and the Unplanned Legacy of Challenger
How NASA’s STS-51L mission reshaped spaceflight safety, STEM education, and public memory following the 1986 Challenger tragedy.
Before the Multi-Touch Era: Jony Ive and the Hardware Legacy of Apple’s 1993 Newton
How Apple’s 1993 Newton and early mobile hardware laid the low-power ARM and design groundwork for the modern smartphone revolution.
Silicon Logic and the Microprocessor Foundation of Early Online Communities
How shrinking computing logic from city-block vacuum tubes to silicon chips sparked desktop personal computing and launched early online networks.
Two Memory Pools and a Teletype: How the First Shared Online World Was Built
How Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle turned a DEC PDP-10 memory trick into MUD, the world’s first persistent multiplayer online space.
Three Terminals and One Million Dollars: The Tactical Decisions Behind ARPANET’s First Nodes
In 1966, Bob Taylor sought to replace three isolated computer terminals with a single network, sparking the engineering choices that created the ARPANET.
A Forgotten USB Drive and a Screencast Demo: Building Dropbox’s Engine
How Drew Houston’s lost flash drive led to Dropbox, custom LAN sync protocols, a Go migration, and custom Magic Pocket infrastructure.
A Hacksaw and Six Acrylic Pieces: How Roger Penrose Earned His Place Among Prodigies
How patient spatial reasoning and a hand-carved acrylic puzzle helped Roger Penrose carve out his place among Cambridge’s mathematical prodigies.
Underwater Training and Custom Tools: Standardizing Orbital Maintenance
Discover how underwater neutral buoyancy training and specialized tool design transformed hazardous early spacewalks into routine orbital maintenance.
Saving the Big Iron: How a DEC Closet Exhibit Survived Relocations to Become the Computer History Museum
How an effort to rescue MIT’s Whirlwind computer grew from a corporate coat closet into Mountain View’s 120,000-square-foot Computer History Museum.
A Vague Contract and a Commodore 64: How Lawrence Holland Built Lucasfilm’s Flight Simulators
How a 1977 licensing loophole barred Lucasfilm Games from Star Wars, driving developer Lawrence Holland to engineer pioneering flight simulators.
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