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submission
harrymcc writes:
Over at Fast Company, where we’re celebrating 1994 Week, I wrote about the year of Peak CD-ROM, when excitement over the medium’s potential was sky-high and the World Wide Web’s audience still numbered in the extremely low millions. I cover once-famous products such as Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, the curse of shovelware, the rise of a San Francisco neighborhood known as “Multimedia Gulch,” and why the whole dream soon came crashing down.
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harrymcc writes:
On April 25, 1972, Polaroid president Edwin Land unveiled the SX-70 instant camera—a radical advance on its previous models, and one of the most innovative consumer electronics devices ever. It led to the Polaroid’s greatest era, but eventually, the company faltered and finally got out of the camera and film business. But there’s an unexpected happy ending: Today, instant cameras that are the SX-70’s technological descendants are popular again, including with people too young to be nostalgic for Polaroid’s heyday. I wrote about why the SX-70 was—and is—so special for Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
Steve Wilhite, who died on March 14 of complications from COVID-19, is well remembered as the creator of the GIF image file format. But the details behind his invention—which dates to CompuServe in 1987 and still rules the web—are not so widely known. Over at Fast Company, I talked to Wilhite’s colleague Alexander Trevor, who initiated the GIF project, about what the company was trying to accomplish—and why Wilhite should be remembered for much more than one pervasive graphics format.
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harrymcc writes:
Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation banned or demoted many of its editors responsible for the Chinese version of the encyclopedia. The foundation accused these volunteers of biasing it in favor of the Chinese government’s viewpoint. Over at Fast Company, we’ve published Alex Pasternack’s investigation into the story behind this incident, which involves beatings, doxxings, and harassment designed to ensure pro-Beijing content. With Wikipedia versions in other countries also under pressure of a variety of sorts, what’s happening in China is big—but hardly unique.
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harrymcc writes:
In the 1940s, IBM tried to market a typewriter capable of handling all 5,400 Chinese characters. The catch was that using it required memorizing a 4-digit code for each character. But a young woman named Lois Lew tackled the challenge and demoed the typewriter for the company in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. More than 70 years later, Lew, now in her 90s, told her remarkable story to Thomas S. Mullaney for Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there’s a huge library of old Flash games—some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
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harrymcc writes:
Tuesday marks the 20th anniversary of ILOVEYOU, the potent virus, enabled by Microsoft’s Outlook, that shut down email systems worldwide and led to companies spending billions to undo its damage. At the time, Steven Sinofsky headed Microsoft’s Office team. Over at Fast Company, we’ve published an excerpt from the memoir of his Microsoft career he’s working on. It’s an insider account of how ILOVEYOU—and its predecessors Concept and Melissa—changed the company’s approach to its products.
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harrymcc writes:
Drug development in the U.S. has traditionally been cloistered and profit-motivated, which means that it has sometimes failed to tackle pressing needs. But an initiative called the Open Pharma Foundation applies to apply some of the lessons of open-source software to the creation of new drugs—including ones that could help fight COVID-19. Ruth Reader reported on its progress and ambitions for Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
When the Spanish flu struck in 1918, the U.S. reacted in ways that sound eerily familiar, by closing public places and telling people to stay at home. The one technology that promised to make isolation less isolating was the telephone, which was used for commerce, education, and even news distribution. But the phone itself got caught up in the flu’s damaging impact on society, and AT&T ended up running ads asking people not to make calls if at all possible. I wrote about this little-known tale of technology’s promise and pitfalls for Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
From Apple to Microsoft to Google, major tech companies have responded to the coronavirus crisis by either canceling their 2020 conference or making them purely virtual. But one well-established event—Vancouver’s CanSecWest—went ahead earlier this month, with streaming as an option but not mandatory. Only three attendees showed up in the flesh. But so did security reporter Seth Rosenblatt, who wrote about the eerie experience for Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
New legislation in Russia—known as the “law against Apple”—mandates that smartphone makers must preinstall government apps that will give authorities access to an array of information about the phone’s user. Apple, not surprisingly, is trying to wriggle its way out of complying. But whatever happens, it’s another case of an authoritarian government pushing around a U.S. tech company for very un-democratic reasons. Over at Fast Company, Josh Nadeau reports on the issue and why the stakes are so high.
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harrymcc writes:
This week at CES, Delta is previewing a display technology called parallel reality. Created by a startup called Misapplied Sciences, it uses pixels that can aim different colors at different physical locations, allowing for signage that shows different information to multiple people at the same time. Delta plans to install it at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport by midyear to allow travelers to see just their own travel info rather than a sea of flights. I talked with the CEOs of Delta and Misapplied Sciences, along with others, for a story on the tech over at Fast Company.
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harrymcc writes:
Atari’s first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn’t ship until late in the year—so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.
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harrymcc writes:
In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundreds of books about the problem and suggestions on how to respond (quit your job, move to the country, stockpile food) not only capitalized on this fear but helped to spread it. Over at Fast Company, I marked the 20th anniversary of the "crisis" with a retrospective on the survival guides and what we can learn from them.
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harrymcc writes:
From Berkeley, Calif. to Somerville, Mass., a growing number of cities are banning the use of facial recognition, based on concerns such as the technology’s iffy accuracy and the potential for police abuse. Now Portland is working on a law—which could be in place by next spring—that would prevent use of facial recognition by both government agencies and private companies. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain has a report on the impetus behind the proposed legislation.
