54847931
submission
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.
54163899
submission
harrymcc writes:
In 1953, Dr. Grace Hopper — at the time, the creator of the Univac 1's compiler, and now remembered as one of computer science's most legendary figures — provided a job recommendation for Second Lieutenant Herb Finnie. She wrote Finnie about it, and decades later, his daughter, my friend Ann Finnie, discovered that charming piece of correspondence in her father's foot locker. Google's Google Doodle yesterday celebrating the 107th anniversary of Hopper's birth inspired Ann to share the letter, which I've published and written about at TIME.com.
53441123
submission
harrymcc writes:
The latest round in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign against Google is a simulated episode of PAWN STARS in which the pawn shop rejects a Chromebook. Over at Time.com, I assess it — and conclude that by making fun of Chromebooks, even though their market share is tiny, Microsoft is acknowledging that they do present a threat to Windows.
52878349
submission
harrymcc writes:
In the mid-1970s, Silicon Valley's legendary Homebrew Computer Club did as much as any one organization to jumpstart the PC revolution, playing an instrumental role in the creation of Apple and numerous other important companies. On Monday night, dozens of its former members — including Woz himself — attended an amazing reunion that was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. I attended and covered it for TIME.
51350879
submission
harrymcc writes:
On Saturday, I picked up a copy of a book called How to HOW TO USE THE INTERNET at a flea market. It was published in May, 1994, and is a fascinating snapshot of the state of the Net at that time — when you had to explain to people that it wasn't a good idea to say "thank you" when issuing commands to a machine, and the World Wide Web was an alternative to Gopher that warranted only four pages of coverage towards the end of the book. I selected some choice excerpts and wrote about them over at TIME.com.
48540871
submission
harrymcc writes:
After slightly more than 30 years, PCWorld — one of the most successful computer magazines of all time — is discontinuing print publication. It was the last general-interest magazine for PC users, so it really is the end of an era. Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category, in part as a former editor at PCWorld, but mostly as a guy who really, really loved to read computer magazines.
47845551
submission
harrymcc writes:
If you were watching TV in the 1980s, you saw the TV commercials in which my employer, TIME magazine, sold subscriptions — "Hi, I'm Judy, an operator here at TIME magazine." — and gave new customers gadgets such as phones, clocks and even 35mm cameras. By 2013 standards they're all quaint, cheesy and/or silly. And they're preserved via YouTube versions of the commercials. I rounded them up over at TIME.com.
46442181
submission
harrymcc writes:
Back in late March, Facebook finally introduced a feature which lets you reply to a specific comment on an update. But at the same time, it started reshuffling the order of comments in an attempt to put the best ones at the top. The change only applies to Pages and to the Profiles of people with more than 10,000 followers, but it's driving me crazy. Over at TIME.com, I explain why.
46028315
submission
harrymcc writes:
IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microcope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie.
46024141
submission
harrymcc writes:
Harry Huskey was a member of the team that developed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, during WWII. He went on to design what was the world's fastest computer for a time, and one that was arguably the first personal computer. He also guested on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, back when the idea of an "electric brain " sounded comical. And he's still around to talk about it. Over at TIME, I wrote about his induction last weekend into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows.
45463459
submission
harrymcc writes:
When analyzing the competition between iOS and Android, folks like to fixate on one statistic — be it phone shipments or web usage or profit margin — and declare one operating system or the other as the winner. But it's rare to see a lot of data in one place. So I gathered and graphed the results of many recent studies, covering an array of factors, over at TIME.com.
44849009
submission
harrymcc writes:
Over at TIME.com, we've published David Greelish's interview with Alan Kay, the famously quotable visionary whose Dynabook proposal has provided much of the inspiration for advances in mobile computing for over 40 years now. Kay talks about his work, laments that the computer has failed to live up to its potential as an educational tool, and says that the iPad betrays the vision that he and others created at Xerox PARC and elsewhere in the 1970s.
