Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Keep reading below, or choose a related topic to explore something different.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

WonderTechnology

YouTube's first video, 'Me at the zoo', was uploaded on 23 April 2005. In 19 seconds, co-founder Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo and remarks on how long their trunks are.

YouTube had been founded that February by three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Karim has said the idea came from being unable to find video clips online of two big news events of 2004: the Super Bowl half-time show controversy and the Indian Ocean tsunami. The zoo clip was filmed by his school friend Yakov Lapitsky and uploaded at 8.31 in the evening, California time. Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion US dollars in November 2006. By 2019 more than 500 hours of video were being uploaded every minute, and 'Me at the zoo' itself has passed 400 million views.

Technology historyRead card

WonderTechnology

Creeper, written in 1971, is generally seen as the first computer worm: a program that copies itself from one computer to another across a network. It did no harm, and simply printed 'I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN' on each machine it reached.

Bob Thomas wrote Creeper at the Massachusetts firm BBN as an experiment on ARPANET, the US research network that grew into the internet. His first version moved from one computer to the next; Ray Tomlinson, the engineer who created network email that same year, changed it so that it copied itself instead. It could reach at most 28 machines, the number on ARPANET then running the TENEX operating system. In 1972 Tomlinson wrote Reaper, which travelled the network deleting Creeper and is often called the first antivirus program. A worm differs from a virus: a worm spreads on its own, while a virus hides inside other programs or files and spreads when they are run. Harmful worms came later; the Morris worm of 1988 disabled thousands of computers on the early internet.

Technology historyRead card

DriveTechnology

'123456' keeps topping lists of the most common passwords. In a 2019 analysis of accounts exposed in data breaches, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre found that 23.2 million of them used exactly that password.

Such lists come from breaches, when criminals steal and publish databases of logins. The NCSC used the Have I Been Pwned collection run by the security researcher Troy Hunt; the next most common choices were '123456789', 'qwerty', 'password' and '1111111'. Simple passwords fall quickly to attackers, who try the most popular ones first. Reused passwords are risky because criminals test leaked email and password pairs on other websites, a technique called credential stuffing. The NCSC recommends joining three random but memorable words, and the US standards body NIST advises length rather than complicated character rules. A password manager, an app that creates and stores a different strong password for every account, means you do not have to remember them.

TechnologyRead card

WonderTechnology

The QWERTY layout, named after the first six letters on its top row, was worked out for Christopher Latham Sholes's typewriter in the 1870s. It stayed because typists learned it and machines kept it, not because tests proved it the fastest way to type.

Sholes, a printer and newspaperman from Milwaukee, patented an early typewriter with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule in 1868, then kept moving its keys around for years. The popular story says common letter pairs were spread apart to stop the metal type bars jamming; some historians argue instead that telegraph operators, who used the machines to take down Morse code, shaped the layout. Remington began selling the Sholes and Glidden typewriter in 1874, and its Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first with a shift key for capital letters, made QWERTY the norm. The Dvorak layout of 1936 promised faster typing, but later research found no clear advantage. Turkey's standard Q keyboard is QWERTY with Turkish letters added; Turkey also has its own F keyboard, designed in 1955 around Turkish letter frequencies, and typists using it have won many world typing championships since the 1960s.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderTechnology

Spacewar!, written in 1962 by Steve Russell and his friends on MIT's PDP-1 computer, let two players steer spaceships around a star and shoot at each other. It is one of the earliest and most influential video games.

The idea came in 1961 from three friends, Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen, who loved science fiction such as E. E. Smith's Lensman novels. Russell wrote most of the code and had a playable game by February 1962. Others added to it: Peter Samson wrote a scrolling map of the real night sky, Dan Edwards gave the star gravity that pulled the ships in, and Bob Saunders built hand-held control boxes. The PDP-1 cost about 120,000 dollars and only 53 were sold, but the game was copied from lab to lab, and the maker, DEC, reportedly used it to test new machines. Nolan Bushnell, who later co-founded Atari, turned the idea into Computer Space (1971), one of the first coin-operated video games. In 2007 Spacewar! was named on a list of the ten most important video games ever made.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderTechnology

The barcode was patented in 1952 by two American inventors, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, but it only spread in the 1970s, once laser scanners and computers made it practical at supermarket tills.

In 1948 Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the head of a local food chain asking for a way to read product details automatically at the checkout. He and his friend Woodland took up the challenge. Woodland found the idea on a beach in Florida: he drew Morse code's dots and dashes in the sand and stretched them downwards into thin and thick lines. Their patent also showed a round 'bullseye' version, but reading it needed a 500-watt bulb, and the technology was not ready. In 1973 the American grocery industry chose a design by George Laurer of IBM, the Universal Product Code (UPC). On 26 June 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum became the first UPC item scanned at a till. It rang up 67 cents.

Ikigai DailyRead card

StillnessTechnology

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian-American engineer whose inventions helped make alternating-current (AC) electricity, the kind that reaches homes today, practical. In April 1927 the Belgrade newspaper Politika published an interview in which he was asked about patent disputes, including who invented radio. As reported, he answered that the future should judge each person by their work: the present belonged to his rivals, the future to him. His name now marks the tesla, the unit used to measure magnetic fields, and a crater on the Moon.

Nikola Tesla, interview by Dragislav L. Petković, Politika (April 1927)Read card

WonderTechnology

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

The line is from Note A, one of the notes Ada Lovelace added in 1843 to her English translation of an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea; her notes ran to about three times the length of the article. The Jacquard loom used chains of punched cards to weave complex patterns automatically. Lovelace saw that cards could direct numbers and symbols in the same way, so the engine could do far more than arithmetic. Her Note G sets out, step by step, how the machine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, a sequence important in mathematics; it is often called the first published computer program.

Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine (1843)Read card

StillnessTechnology

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

These are the last words of 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', the paper Alan Turing (1912–1954) published in the journal Mind in 1950. It opens with the question 'Can machines think?' and replaces it with the imitation game, later called the Turing test: a judge exchanges typed messages with a person and a machine and tries to tell which is which. Turing then answers nine objections, one of which he named after Ada Lovelace, who had written that a machine can only do what we know how to order it to do. During the Second World War he had led the Bletchley Park team that broke German naval Enigma messages.

Alan TuringRead card

WonderTechnology

'Algorithm' comes from the Latinised name of al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century mathematician in Baghdad; 'algebra' comes from al-jabr, a word in the title of his best-known book.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–c. 850) worked around 820 at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a library and centre of learning of the Abbasid caliphs. A Latin translation of his book on calculating with Indian numerals began 'Dixit Algorizmi' ('So said al-Khwarizmi'). From that form came 'algorism', the old word for reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals, and later 'algorithm', a fixed set of steps for solving a problem. His book on equations has al-jabr, 'restoration', in its title: it meant moving a subtracted term to the other side of an equation so that the equation stays balanced.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderHistory

Within about fifty years of Gutenberg's press, Europe's printers produced an estimated twenty million books from roughly thirty thousand different editions.

Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called incunabula, from a Latin word for swaddling clothes or a cradle, because printing was still in its infancy. Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type in Mainz around 1450 and completed his famous Bible around 1455. Before that, books were mostly copied by hand, and a single copy could take months. Presses soon spread to more than two hundred towns and cities. Historians estimate total output at around twenty million copies, and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, kept at the British Library, records about 30,000 editions.

Incunabula scholarshipRead card

WonderHistory

The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris with a permit to stand for only 20 years. It survived beyond 1909 largely because it had become a valuable radio mast.

Gustave Eiffel's contract let him run the tower for 20 years after the 1889 fair. In 1909 it was due to pass to the City of Paris, which could then have taken it down. Its height gave it a new purpose. Wireless experiments began there in 1898, and from 1903 the army engineer Gustave Ferrié set up a military radio transmitter on it, whose range grew from about 400 km to 6,000 km by 1908. In 1909 a permanent underground radio station was built near the south pillar, and it still exists. The tower was allowed to stay, and from 1910 it sent daily time signals that ships at sea used to set their clocks.

HistoryRead card

WonderTechnology

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards, more than 80 years before it made its first video games.

Fusajiro Yamauchi opened the business in Kyoto in 1889. Hanafuda, or 'flower cards', are small, stiff cards in twelve suits, one for each month of the year, each decorated with a flower or plant of its season; they are used in several traditional Japanese games. Nintendo stayed a card company for decades: in 1959 it began printing playing cards with Disney characters, which sold very well. In the 1960s it moved into toys, and in the mid-1970s into arcade and home video games. Its Family Computer of 1983, sold abroad as the NES, made it a household name around the world. Nintendo still makes and sells hanafuda decks in Japan today.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderHistory

Jikji, a Korean collection of Buddhist teachings printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book made with movable metal type, 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible.

Its full title means roughly 'Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings', compiled by the monk Baegun, and it was printed in July 1377 at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju. Movable type means each character is cast as a separate piece that can be arranged, inked, printed and then reused. Records show Korean printers were using metal type as early as the 13th century, but no earlier book printed that way survives. Only the second of Jikji's two volumes remains. The French diplomat Victor Collin de Plancy acquired it in Seoul in the late 1800s; the collector Henri Vever bought it at auction in 1911, and it passed to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1950. UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register in 2001.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderTechnology

Grace Hopper, a US Navy mathematician, helped move programming from raw machine code to languages written in English words, work that led to COBOL.

Hopper joined the US Navy in 1943 and was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer. In 1952, at the company that built the UNIVAC, she completed A-0, an early compiler: a program that turns instructions written by people into the machine code a computer runs. Many colleagues believed computers could only do arithmetic, but she argued that programs could be written in English words, and her team's FLOW-MATIC language did exactly that. It became a main model for COBOL, a business language created in 1959 and still used by banks and governments. She retired from the Navy in 1986 as a rear admiral, aged 79, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom after her death, in 2016.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderScience

The first image of a black hole, released in 2019, was made by linking radio telescopes around the world so that they worked as one telescope the size of Earth.

The black hole lies at the centre of the galaxy M87, about 55 million light years away, and has about 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. A black hole gives off no light of its own; the picture shows a ring of glowing hot gas around its dark shadow. In April 2017 eight radio telescopes at six sites, from Hawaii and Chile to Spain and the South Pole, observed it at the same moments, each timed by an atomic clock. The recordings were too large to send over the internet, so hard drives were flown to computing centres in the United States and Germany to be combined. The Event Horizon Telescope team of more than 200 scientists released the result on 10 April 2019, and in 2022 an image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderTechnology

The astrolabe is a handheld brass instrument that models the turning sky on a flat disc. With it, a user could tell the time, find stars and work out the hours of prayer.

An astrolabe relies on stereographic projection, a way of drawing the dome of the sky on a flat surface worked out by Greek astronomers; Hipparchus may have used it, and Theon of Alexandria wrote a treatise on the instrument in the 4th century AD. A pierced, rotating plate called the rete carries pointers for bright stars. Turning it over a plate engraved for the user's latitude shows the sky as it is at any hour, day or night. Scholars in the Islamic world took up the instrument from the 8th century, when al-Fazari is said to have built the first one there, and added scales for prayer times and, on some models, the direction of Mecca. The design reached Europe through Muslim Spain, and in about 1391 the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his son.

Ikigai DailyRead card

DriveTechnology

In Toyota's car factories, any worker who spots a fault can pull a cord to call for help and, if it cannot be fixed quickly, stop the whole production line.

The idea comes from Toyota's roots in weaving. In 1924 Sakichi Toyoda built an automatic loom that stopped itself the moment a thread broke, so no faulty cloth was made and one person could look after many machines. His son Kiichiro turned the family loom company towards cars in the 1930s, and engineers led by Taiichi Ohno later made the principle a pillar of the Toyota Production System. It is called jidoka, usually translated as automation with a human touch. The cord is known as an andon, after the Japanese word for a paper lantern, because pulling it lights up a signal board. The reasoning is simple: fixing a fault at once costs less than finding it later in finished cars.

ToyotaRead card

DriveTechnology

Post-it Notes grew from a weak, reusable glue that 3M chemist Spencer Silver made by accident in 1968 while trying to create a very strong one.

For years Silver's glue was a solution looking for a problem. In 1974 his colleague Art Fry, who sang in a church choir, wanted a bookmark that would stay in his hymn book without damaging the pages, and realised the glue could make notes that stick and peel off again. A 1977 test launch in four cities under the name Press 'n Peel sold poorly. In 1978 3M handed out free samples to offices in Boise, Idaho, and more than 90% of people who tried them said they would buy them. Post-it Notes went on sale across the United States in 1980, and in Canada and Europe in 1981. The famous canary yellow was chosen by chance: the lab next door had yellow scrap paper.

3M / USPTORead card

DriveTechnology

The standard shipping container lets goods travel from ship to train to lorry without being unpacked. Put to work at scale by Malcolm McLean in 1956, it made world trade far cheaper.

Before containers, cargo was loaded piece by piece: sacks, crates and barrels carried aboard by teams of dockworkers, while ships often waited in port for days. Malcolm McLean, an American trucking businessman, had a converted tanker, the Ideal X, carry 58 containers from Newark to Houston in April 1956. He estimated that loading loose cargo cost $5.86 a ton, against about 16 cents a ton by container. In the late 1960s international standards fixed the box sizes and the corner fittings that lock boxes to cranes, trucks and each other, so any port could handle any container. Ports needed far fewer dockworkers, and many cities built new container terminals away from their old harbours.

Smithsonian / National Inventors Hall of FameRead card

WonderArt

Many of the footsteps, rustling clothes and small everyday sounds in a film are recreated after shooting by Foley artists, who perform them in a studio while watching the picture.

The craft is named after Jack Foley, who worked at Universal Pictures. When sound arrived in cinema, Universal's Show Boat (1929), begun as a silent film, needed sound added after filming, and Foley and his team performed effects live in time with the projected picture. He went on doing this work for about 30 years. Today Foley artists walk on trays of gravel, wood or concrete in different shoes, rub fabric close to the microphone and use props: cornstarch squeezed in a leather pouch, for example, sounds like footsteps in snow. The microphone on set mostly records dialogue, so these sounds are added separately, and a separate effects track is also needed when a film is dubbed into another language.

Academy Museum of Motion PicturesRead card

DriveTechnology

M-Pesa, launched in Kenya in 2007, lets people send, store and withdraw money with an ordinary mobile phone, using local shops as cash points.

Pesa means money in Swahili. The mobile operator Safaricom and its part-owner Vodafone launched the service in March 2007, after a pilot partly funded by the UK government. A customer hands cash to an agent, often a shopkeeper who sells phone credit, and the money appears as a balance on their phone. They can send it by text message to someone hundreds of kilometres away, who collects it as cash from another agent. By the end of 2011 M-Pesa had about 17 million users in Kenya. A 2016 study in Science by Tavneet Suri and William Jack estimated that access to it had lifted about 194,000 households, 2% of Kenya's total, out of poverty, especially households headed by women.

World Bank / Harvard Kennedy SchoolRead card

DriveTechnology

Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

Smithsonian / Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRead card

DriveHealth

OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, launched in 1990, were designed with thick, soft handles for people whose hands hurt or grip weakly, and proved easier for everyone to use.

Sam Farber, a housewares entrepreneur who had retired, noticed that his wife Betsey, who had arthritis in her hands, struggled to hold an ordinary metal vegetable peeler. He worked with the New York design firm Smart Design, and the first 15 OXO Good Grips tools, including a swivel peeler, were introduced at the Gourmet Products Show in San Francisco in 1990. Their handles were made of soft, non-slip synthetic rubber, wide and oval so they would not twist in a wet or weak hand. The line sold far beyond people with arthritis and became a textbook example of universal design: making everyday things usable by as many people as possible without special adaptation.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumRead card