Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on 9 January 2007 as three devices in one: a phone, a widescreen iPod and an internet communicator. It went on sale in the United States on 29 June 2007 and in time replaced many more gadgets.

Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. Its big idea was a multi-touch screen, one that responds to several fingers at once, in place of a keyboard or a stylus. The first model had a 2-megapixel camera, no GPS and no way to install other companies' apps, and it cost 499 or 599 US dollars with a two-year contract. The real change came on 10 July 2008, when the App Store opened with 500 apps. From then on the phone could stand in for maps, cameras, music players, alarm clocks, newspapers and, for many people, the bank branch. The first Android phones, sold from 2008, followed the same path. By July 2025 more than 3 billion iPhones had been sold.

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In December 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, in William Shockley's group at Bell Labs in New Jersey, built the first working transistor: a small device that could amplify an electrical signal, a job that until then needed bulky glass vacuum tubes.

A transistor uses a small electric current to control a larger one, so it can boost a signal or act as an on-off switch. The first was a block of germanium, a semiconductor (a material whose ability to carry electricity can be controlled), touched by two gold contacts held very close together. The key experiment took place on 16 December, and the device was shown to Bell Labs managers on 23 December. Vacuum tubes ran hot, broke easily and used a lot of power. The engineer John R. Pierce came up with the name ‘transistor’. Shockley soon designed a sturdier type that was easier to make, and the three men shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics; Bardeen won a second physics Nobel in 1972. Transistors made pocket radios and modern computers possible, and a single chip today can hold tens of billions of them.

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On 29 October 1969 a student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) sent the first message over the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet, to a computer at Stanford Research Institute. He meant to type ‘login’, the command for signing in, but the system crashed after ‘l’ and ‘o’.

The student was Charley Kline, working in Leonard Kleinrock's lab; at the other end, more than 500 kilometres away, was the programmer Bill Duvall. About an hour later the login worked. ARPANET was funded by ARPA, the research agency of the US Department of Defense, so that universities could share scarce and expensive computers. It used packet switching: a message is cut into small blocks that travel separately and are put back together at the end, an idea developed independently by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain. By 5 December 1969 the network linked four sites: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. On 1 January 1983 ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, the shared rules computers still use to talk across the internet, a date often called the internet's birthday.

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In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the American firm BBN, sent the first email between two computers on a network. To separate a person's name from the name of their computer, he put an @ between them, the pattern still used in every email address.

Until then, people could leave messages only for others using the same computer. Tomlinson combined a program for such messages, SNDMSG, with a file-transfer program he had written, CPYNET, so that mail could travel over the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. His first test went between two machines standing side by side. He later said the test messages were forgettable, probably a random string of keys such as QWERTYUIOP, the top row of letters. He chose @ because it was already on the keyboard, hardly ever appeared in names and meant ‘at’; in trade it had long meant ‘at the rate of’. Many languages have their own name for it: Italians call it chiocciola (snail), the Dutch apenstaart (monkey's tail), and in Turkish it is kuyruklu a (a with a tail), usually read aloud as ‘et’.

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IBM's 350 disk storage unit, announced with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer on 14 September 1956, was the first commercial hard disk drive. It held 5 million characters (letters or digits), about 3.75 megabytes by today's measure, and weighed about a ton.

RAMAC stood for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. Random access, the ability to go straight to any record, was the whole point. Business records were usually kept on punched cards or magnetic tape, which had to be worked through in order, while the disk drive could reach any record in under a second, about 600 milliseconds on average. Inside, a stack of 52 disks, each 61 centimetres across, spun at 1,200 revolutions a minute, and an arm moved between them to read and write. The whole RAMAC system could be leased for 3,200 US dollars a month. The drive was developed at IBM's laboratory in San Jose, California, and the first production units shipped in 1957. A phone today stores tens of thousands of times as much.

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The integrated circuit, or microchip, puts transistors and other electronic parts together on one small piece of material such as silicon. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments showed the first on 12 September 1958; Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor independently made a more practical version about six months later.

Before the chip, every transistor, resistor and capacitor was a separate part that had to be wired to the others by hand, so complex circuits grew huge and unreliable. Kilby's first chip was a sliver of germanium joined up with fine gold wires; when he switched it on, an oscilloscope, an instrument that draws electrical signals on a screen, showed a steady wave, proof that it worked. Noyce's chip was made of silicon and used the planar process devised by his colleague Jean Hoerni, in which the parts and the connections between them are built up in thin, flat layers. That made chips easy to mass-produce, and almost all chips are still made on the same principle. Noyce co-founded Intel in 1968 and died in 1990; Nobel Prizes are not awarded after death, and in 2000 Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention.

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Linux, the free operating system that Linus Torvalds started in 1991 as a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, can be used and changed by anyone. Since November 2017 it has run every machine on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

On 25 August 1991 Torvalds announced his project in an online discussion group, describing a free operating system that was ‘just a hobby’. Strictly, Linux is a kernel: the core of an operating system, which manages the processor, memory and devices so that other programs can run. Torvalds wanted to call it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, who helped run the Finnish university network's server where the files were first shared, named the folder Linux, and the name stuck. In 1992 Torvalds released it under the GNU General Public License, which lets anyone use, study, change and share the code as long as their changed versions stay free too. Thousands of volunteers and companies now work on it. The Linux kernel runs inside every Android phone and on much of the internet's servers.

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Fibre-optic cables carry data as pulses of light through strands of very pure glass about as thin as a human hair. Bundled into cables, these fibres run under streets and across ocean floors, carrying calls, videos and payments between continents.

Light stays inside the fibre because of total internal reflection: when it meets the boundary with the surrounding layer of glass at a shallow angle, it bounces back in instead of escaping. In 1966 Charles Kao and George Hockham, working in England, argued that glass made pure enough could carry light over long distances; Kao later won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1970 the Corning glass company made the first fibre clear enough to be practical. The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, TAT-8, began working in 1988. A single fibre carries far more data than a copper wire and loses less signal over distance. Today most of the data that crosses oceans travels through undersea cables rather than satellites, and repair ships stand ready for when fishing gear, anchors or earthquakes break them.

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On 22 May 1973 Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox's research centre in Palo Alto, California (Xerox PARC), wrote a memo describing a way to link the lab's computers by cable. With David Boggs he turned it into Ethernet, which first ran that November; most wired networks still use it.

Metcalfe named it after the ‘luminiferous aether’, the invisible medium that 19th-century physicists wrongly believed carried light; the cable would be a shared medium for data. The idea grew from ALOHAnet, a radio network at the University of Hawaii in which computers shared one channel and, if two messages collided, each sender waited a random moment and tried again. Ethernet added a rule to listen before sending. The first Ethernet, working on 11 November 1973, linked Xerox Alto computers at about 3 million bits a second; today's versions reach hundreds of billions. In 1979 Metcalfe founded the company 3Com. In 1980 Xerox, Intel and Digital Equipment published Ethernet as an open standard that any manufacturer could use, and in 1983 the engineering body IEEE adopted it as an official standard. Metcalfe received the Turing Award, computing's highest honour, in 2023.

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Bluetooth takes its name from Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century king who united the Danish tribes into one kingdom. In the 1990s the Intel engineer Jim Kardach suggested the name for a new short-range radio standard that would bring phones, computers and other devices together in the same way.

Harald ruled Denmark from about 958 to 986 and brought Christianity to the country. A great runestone he raised at Jelling says he won all of Denmark and Norway, though his hold on Norway lasted only a few years. His nickname is traditionally explained as a bad tooth that looked dark, since the Old Norse word for blue also meant blue-black. Kardach first heard of Harald from the Ericsson engineer Sven Mattisson, who told him stories from The Long Ships, a novel about the Vikings. According to the Bluetooth industry group, he proposed the name in 1996 as a stand-in until marketing found something better. The favourite, PAN, was already far too common a term, and checks on the other candidate, RadioWire, could not be finished in time, so Bluetooth stuck. The logo joins Harald's initials, H and B, written in Viking-age runes, into a single sign.

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On 20 December 1990 the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee put the world's first website online at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva. It explained what the World Wide Web was, how to use a browser and how to set up a web server.

Berners-Lee had proposed the idea in March 1989 as a way for CERN's scientists to reach documents stored on different computers by clicking links. By the end of 1990 he had written the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, and the first web server, both running on a NeXT computer that carried a hand-written note warning people not to switch it off. The site lived at info.cern.ch. In August 1991 he invited people outside CERN to join the project through an online discussion group, and in April 1993 CERN made the Web software free for anyone to use, which let the Web spread around the world. The Web is not the same as the internet: the internet is the network of connected computers, and the Web is the system of linked pages that runs on it.

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The IBM Simon, on sale in the United States from August 1994, was a mobile phone with a touchscreen, email, fax, a calendar, an address book and other built-in apps. It is often called the first smartphone, and it came out 13 years before the iPhone.

The IBM engineer Frank Canova realised that chips and wireless technology had become small enough for a handheld device. IBM showed a prototype, code-named Sweetspot, at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas in November 1992; it even demonstrated maps, share prices and news long before such services were common. Mitsubishi Electric built the finished phone, and the American operator BellSouth named it the Simon Personal Communicator and sold it for 899 dollars with a two-year contract. Users wrote on it by tapping an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. The high price and a battery that lasted only about an hour held sales back: about 50,000 were sold in six months, and it was withdrawn in February 1995.

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Open-source software is published with its source code, the human-readable instructions programmers write, under a licence that lets anyone study, change and share it. Linux, the Firefox browser and MediaWiki, which runs Wikipedia, are all made this way.

Sharing code was normal in the early days of computing. In the 1980s, as most software became closed, Richard Stallman started the free software movement. In 1991 Linus Torvalds released Linux, which now runs most of the world's busiest web servers and all of the 500 fastest supercomputers; Android is built on it too. The term 'open source' was suggested by Christine Peterson in 1998 to make the idea appealing to business, and the Open Source Initiative was founded the same year. Licences differ. Permissive ones, such as MIT or Apache, let others reuse the code almost freely, while 'copyleft' ones, such as the GNU GPL, require anyone who passes on a changed version to share it under the same terms. Projects are run by volunteers, companies or both.

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Machine learning lets a computer learn a task from examples instead of following rules written by hand. A spam filter, for instance, is shown thousands of emails already marked as spam or not spam, and works out for itself which patterns give spam away.

The term was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM researcher whose draughts-playing program got better the more it played. A learning system has many internal settings. During training they are adjusted again and again until its answers on the examples are as accurate as possible, and the system then uses them on cases it has never seen. A turning point came in 2012, when AlexNet, a system from the University of Toronto, recognised objects in photos far better than earlier methods, using layered 'neural networks' loosely modelled on the brain. Machine learning now powers translation apps, voice assistants, film and music recommendations and the analysis of medical scans. Because it learns from data, gaps or biases in that data carry through into its answers.

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By one widely cited estimate, about 13 sextillion transistors (13 followed by 21 zeros) had been made by 2018, more than any other object in history. A transistor is a tiny electronic switch, and computer chips are built from billions of them.

The first transistor was built at Bell Labs in the United States in 1947 by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working in William Shockley's group; the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Transistors replaced the fragile glass valves of early electronics. A transistor switches an electric current on or off, and those on and off states are the 1s and 0s computers work with. Almost all transistors made today are of a type called the MOSFET, invented at Bell Labs in 1959 by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng. The 13 sextillion figure is an estimate by the industry analyst Jim Handy, published by the Computer History Museum in 2018. A single advanced chip can now hold more than 100 billion transistors, and billions more are made every day.

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An MRI scanner uses a powerful magnet and pulses of radio waves to make hydrogen atoms in the body give off faint signals, which a computer turns into detailed pictures of the brain, muscles and organs. Unlike X-rays and CT scans, it uses no ionising radiation, the kind that can damage cells.

Most of the body is water and fat, both rich in hydrogen, and the nucleus of each hydrogen atom behaves like a tiny magnet. The scanner's magnet is usually tens of thousands of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field, and inside it these nuclei line up. A radio pulse knocks them out of line; as they settle back they send out weak radio signals. Different tissues settle at different speeds, which gives the images their contrast. The method grew out of nuclear magnetic resonance, a laboratory technique, and 'nuclear' was later dropped from the name because it worried patients, though no radioactivity is involved. Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, who worked out in the 1970s how to turn the signals into pictures, shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The loud knocking during a scan comes from rapidly switched magnetic coils.

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A nuclear power station makes electricity from fission, the splitting of heavy atoms such as uranium. The heat released boils water, and the steam spins turbines, just as in a coal or gas plant. Nuclear power supplied about 9 per cent of the world's electricity in 2023.

When an atom of uranium-235, the form of uranium that powers most reactors, absorbs a neutron, one of the particles found in an atom's nucleus, it splits in two, releasing heat and two or three more neutrons. These can split further atoms, a process called a chain reaction. Control rods made of materials that soak up neutrons are moved in or out to keep the reaction steady. The fuel is extremely concentrated: a kilogram of typical reactor fuel holds about 120,000 times as much energy as a kilogram of coal, and the plant gives off almost no carbon dioxide while running. The first plant to feed a power grid opened at Obninsk, near Moscow, in 1954, and Britain's Calder Hall followed in 1956. The difficulties are long-lived radioactive waste, high building costs and the need for strict safety, as the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 showed.

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In 1877 Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first machine that could both record sound and play it back. A needle pressed the vibrations of a voice into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round a turning cylinder, and running a needle along that groove again brought the sound back.

Edison hit on the idea while looking for ways to record telegraph and telephone messages at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He announced the invention on 21 November 1877 and was granted a patent in February 1878. Years later he recalled that the first words he recorded were the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. In December 1877 the machine was shown at the offices of Scientific American, where it greeted the editors and asked how they liked the phonograph. Twenty years earlier the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had built a device that traced sound as wavy lines on soot-blackened paper, but it could not play them back; one of his 1860 tracings was only turned into sound in 2008. Tinfoil wore out quickly, so later machines used wax cylinders and then flat discs.

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Light bulbs that glow when electricity heats a thin thread, or filament, inside them existed before Thomas Edison. In 1879 his team at Menlo Park, New Jersey, made one with a carbon filament that lasted, then built the generators, wiring, meters and power stations that made electric light practical for homes and offices.

In 1802 the chemist Humphry Davy made a strip of platinum glow with electricity, and over the next 75 years many inventors tried to turn that glow into lasting light. In England, the inventor Joseph Swan showed a working carbon-filament lamp to an audience of more than 700 in Newcastle in February 1879, and his house in Gateshead became the first in the world lit by light bulbs. Edison's team made its first successful test on 22 October 1879, when a bulb glowed for about 13 and a half hours; filaments of carbonised bamboo later lasted more than 1,200 hours. Edison's bigger achievement was the system around the bulb. In September 1882 his Pearl Street Station in New York began supplying electricity to 82 customers. In Britain, Edison's and Swan's companies later merged as Ediswan.

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On 2 December 1942, under the stands of a disused American football stadium at the University of Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi started the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was a carefully built stack of graphite blocks and uranium.

In a chain reaction, each uranium atom that splits releases particles called neutrons, which go on to split more atoms. Fermi, an Italian physicist who had moved to the United States, worked with a team of about 30, including Leo Szilard and Leona Woods. They stacked some 45,000 graphite blocks, with uranium set among them, in a squash court beneath the stands of Stagg Field. The pile had no radiation shielding or cooling, because it ran at only about half a watt. After about four and a half minutes the team stopped it by putting control rods back in. The work was secret, part of the Manhattan Project, the wartime American programme to build an atomic bomb. Arthur Compton, the physicist in charge of the work in Chicago, reported the success by telephone in code: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.'

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On 25 June 1967, Our World became the first live television programme broadcast around the globe by satellite. Broadcasters in 14 countries each sent a live segment, and an estimated 400 to 700 million people watched, the largest television audience up to that time.

The idea came from the BBC producer Aubrey Singer, and the European Broadcasting Union coordinated the project. Four communications satellites, two over the Atlantic and two over the Pacific, linked the countries, and the master control room was at the BBC in London. The rules were strict: everything had to be live, and no politicians or heads of state could appear. Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, pulled out four days before the broadcast in protest at the West's response to the Six-Day War. The two-hour show featured the conductor Leonard Bernstein and the painter Joan Miró, among others, but it is best remembered for Britain's segment, in which the Beatles performed 'All You Need Is Love' for the first time.

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ENIAC, finished in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first programmable, general-purpose electronic computer. It filled a large room and weighed about 27 tonnes, and each new problem had to be set up by rewiring cables and turning switches, a job that could take weeks.

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed ENIAC for the US Army, to calculate the firing tables gunners used to aim artillery. Until then such tables were worked out by hand by 'human computers', many of them women. ENIAC's 18,000 or so vacuum tubes, glass valves that switch electric current on and off, let it make about 5,000 additions a second, roughly a thousand times faster than earlier electromechanical machines. It was unveiled in February 1946, and the press called it a 'giant brain'. Six women worked out how to program it: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Their role was overlooked for decades; in 1997 they were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. ENIAC stayed in use until 1955.

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Encryption turns readable data into scrambled code that only someone with the right key can turn back. It protects online banking, card payments and private messages; the padlock many browsers show beside a web address means the page reached you encrypted.

People have hidden messages for thousands of years. Julius Caesar is said to have shifted each letter a fixed number of places along the alphabet, and in the 9th century the Arab scholar al-Kindi showed how to crack such codes by counting how often each letter appears. Modern encryption rests on mathematical problems that even very fast computers cannot solve without the key. For centuries the hard part was sharing a key safely. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a way for two strangers to agree on a secret key over an open line, the basis of what is called public-key cryptography; British government mathematicians had found similar ideas in secret a few years earlier. Your browser and your bank use this method, in a fraction of a second, every time you log in.

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Ordinary computers store information in bits that are either 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can be in a combination of 0 and 1 at once, called a superposition, until they are measured. For certain problems, such as simulating molecules, they could be far faster than any ordinary computer.

In 1982 the physicist Richard Feynman suggested that computers built on quantum physics could simulate nature far more efficiently than ordinary ones. In 1994 the mathematician Peter Shor showed that a large quantum computer could break some of the encryption that protects the internet today, which drew wide attention to the field. The hard part is building one. Qubits are extremely fragile: heat or vibration can easily upset their state, a problem called decoherence, so some machines are cooled to about 0.02 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible. Today's quantum computers are still small and make many errors, and they are not faster at everyday tasks such as browsing the web or sending email. Researchers hope they will help design new medicines, materials and batteries.

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