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harrymcc writes:
I attended my COMDEX in Las Vegas in 1991. Every year since, I've attended at least one enormous Vegas tech show--in this century, mostly CES. But I'm skipping CES next week,. Over at Fast Company, I explain why--and why I think that the notion that enormous shows such as CES were once more valuable than they are now is revisionist history.
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harrymcc writes:
When Apple launched the Mac App Store in 2011, expectations were high. But it hasn't had anywhere near the success of its iOS counterpart, and recently, some major developers have pulled apps altogether. Over at Fast Company, my colleague Jared Newman talked to developers about their frustrations, which range from technical matters (highly restrictive sandboxing) to financial ones (no ability to sell paid upgrades).
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harrymcc writes:
In September of 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, spent 12 days touring the U.S. One of his stops was IBM's facilities in San Jose, which helped to create the area later known as Silicon Valley. The premier got to see the first computer which came with a hard disk, which IBM programmed to answer history questions. But what he was most impressed by was IBM's modern cafeteria. Over at Fast Company, I've chronicled this fascinating and little-known moment in tech history, which will be covered in an upcoming PBS program on Khrushchev's U.S. trip.
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harrymcc writes:
In the era of clickbait, journalists like to make absurd promises in headlines in hopes of helping them go viral--and one of the most powerful, widely-made, silliest claims is that a listicle, photo, or video will "restore your faith in humanity." Over at Technologizer, I've written a history of the meme (which has been booming for the past two years, although I found a precursor in a razor ad from 1930).
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harrymcc writes:
In June 1967, a weekly newspaper called Computerworld launched. Almost exactly 47 years later, it's calling it quits in print form to focus on its website and other digital editions. The move isn't the least bit surprising, but it's also the end of an era--and I can' t think of any computing publication which had a longer run. Over at Technologizer, I shared some thoughts on what Computerworld meant to the world, to its publisher, IDG, and to me.
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harrymcc writes:
If you used an PC in the 1980s and 1990s, the chances were very good that you used utility software which came in a box with a picture of Peter Norton on it. The Norton brand still exists, but those packaging photos of Norton himself are long gone--along with the whole classic era of utility software they represented. Over at Technologizer, I paid tribute to this one-time icon of the PC industry.
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harrymcc writes:
On May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m. in a computer room at Dartmouth University, the first programs written in BASIC ran on the university's brand-new time-sharing system. With these two innovations, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz didn't just make it easier to learn how to program a computer: They offered Dartmouth students a form of interactive, personal computing years before the invention of the PC. Over at TIME.com, I chronicle BASIC's first 50 years with a feature with thoughts from Kurtz, Microsoft's Paul Allen and many others.
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harrymcc writes:
If you remember the golden age of BYTE magazine, you remember Robert Tinney's wonderful cover paintings. BYTE's April 1981 cover featured an amazing Tinney image of a smartwatch with a tiny text-oriented interface, QWERTY keyboard, and floppy drive. It's hilarious--but 33 years later, it's also a smart visual explanation of why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions. I wrote about this over at TIME.com.
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harrymcc writes:
Google officially--and mischievously--unveiled Gmail on April Fools' Day 2004. That makes this its tenth birthday, which I celebrated by talking to a bunch of the people who created the service for TIME.com. It's an amazing story: The service was in the works for almost three years before the announcement, and faced so much opposition from within Google that it wasn't clear it would ever reach consumers.
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harrymcc writes:
It's well known that the World Wide Web originated in Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal for an information-management system for his employer, CERN. That document turns 25 today, and there's no better way to celebrate the web's birthday than to celebrate it. What Berners-Lee proposed was simple, expandable, social, compatible and distributed — so smart an approach to sharing information that it's easy to envision it going strong generations from now. Over at TIME.com, I posted an appreciation.
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harrymcc writes:
Google is releasing more details on Project Ara, its effort — originally spearheaded by Motorola — to reinvent the smartphone in a form made up of hot-swappable modules that consumers can configure as they choose, then upgrade later as new technologies emerge. Over at TIME, I have an in-depth report on the product, which Google is aiming to release about a year from now.
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harrymcc writes:
Back in October, LinkedIn unveiled Intro, which inserted contact info into the iPhone's Mail — even though that app has no mechanism for plugins. Intro worked by serving as a middleman between your e-mail account and your phone, and injecting HTML, a technique which got it lots of extremely negative feedback from the blogosphere.
And now LinkedIn is discontinuing Intro, though it's being vague about why it's giving up after slightly over three months. People who are using it will need to go through several steps to get rid of it, or their mail won't work as of March 7.
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harrymcc writes:
Google's Ngram Viewer is a fascinating way to chart the ups and downs of different phrases over time. I plugged a bunch of tech-related terms in, and cranked out graphs which succinctly show the story of browsers, operating systems, electronics retailers and other rivals over the past few decades. The results are over at TIME.com.
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harrymcc writes:
In 2012, TIME wrote about Daniel Omar, a 14-year-old in South Sudan who lost both arms to a bomb dropped by his own government. Mick Ebeling of Not Impossible Labs read the story, was moved — and went to Sudan, where he set up a 3D printing lab which can produce an artificial arm for $100. Omar and others have received them, and Ebeling hopes that other organizations around the world will adopt his open-source design to help amputees, many of whom will never receive more conventional prosthetics.
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harrymcc writes:
Over at TIME.com, I rounded up the year's dumbest moments in technology. Yes, the launch of Healthcare.gov is included, as are Edward Snowden's revelations. But so are a bunch of people embarrassing themselves on Twitter, both BlackBerry and Lenovo hiring celebrities to (supposedly) design products, the release of glitchy products ranging from OS X 10.9 Mavericks to the new Yahoo Mail, and much more.
