Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they’re known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is...

We covered computer and internet copyright law in a previous episode. That type of law began with interpretations that tried to take the technology out of cases so they could be interpreted as though what was being protected was a printed work, or at least it did for a time. But when it came to the internet, laws, case law, and their knock-on effects, the body of jurisprudence work began to diverge.  Safe Harbor mostly refers to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, or...

Bluetooth The King Ragnar Lodbrok was a legendary Norse king, conquering parts of Denmark and Sweden. And if we’re to believe the songs, he led some of the best raids against the Franks and the the loose patchwork of nations Charlemagne put together called the Holy Roman Empire.  We use the term legendary as the stories of Ragnar were passed down orally and don’t necessarily reconcile with other written events. In other words, it’s likely that the man in the songs sung by the bards of old...

One of the hardest parts of telling any history, is which innovations are significant enough to warrant mention. Too much, and the history is so vast that it can't be told. Too few, and it's incomplete. Arguably, no history is ever complete. Yet there's a critical path of innovation to get where we are today, and hundreds of smaller innovations that get missed along the way, or are out of scope for this exact story. Children have probably been placing sand into buckets to make sandcastles...

The Mogollon culture was an indigenous culture in the Western United States and Mexico that ranged from New Mexico and Arizona to Sonora, Mexico and out to Texas. They flourished from around 200 CE until the Spanish showed up and claimed their lands. The cultures that pre-existed them date back thousands more years, although archaeology has yet to pinpoint exactly how those evolved. Like many early cultures, they farmed and foraged. As they farmed more, their homes become more permanent and...

Gutenburg shipped the first working printing press around 1450 and typeface was born. Before then most books were hand written, often in blackletter calligraphy. And they were expensive.    The next few decades saw Nicolas Jensen develop the Roman typeface, Aldus Manutius and Francesco Griffo create the first italic typeface. This represented a period where people were experimenting with making type that would save space. The 1700s saw the start of a focus on readability. William Caslon...

In our previous episode, we looked at the history of flight - from dinosaurs to the modern aircraft that carry people and things all over the world. Those helped to make the world smaller, but UAVs and drones have had a very different impact in how we lead our lives - and will have an even more substantial impact in the future. That might not have seemed so likely in the 1700s, though - when unmann Unmanned Aircraft Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797 and then ceded control to the Austrians...

Humans have probably considered flight since they found birds. As far as 228 million years ago, the Pterosaurs used flight to reign down onto other animals from above and eat them. The first known bird-like dinosaur was the Archaeopteryx, which lived around 150 million years ago. It’s not considered an ancestor of modern birds - but other dinosaurs from the same era, the theropods, are. 25 million years later, in modern China, the Confuciusornis sanctus had feathers and could have flown. The...

Computing has totally changed how people buy and experience travel. That process seemed to start with sites that made it easy to book travel, but as with most things we experience in our modern lives, it actually began far sooner and moved down-market as generations of computing led to more consumer options for desktops, the internet, and the convergence of these technologies. Systems like SABRE did the original work to re-think travel - to take logic and rules out of the heads of booking and...

We’ve talked about the history of microchips, transistors, and other chip makers. Today we’re going to talk about Intel in a little more detail.  Intel is short for Integrated Electronics. They were founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Noyce was an Iowa kid who went off to MIT to get a PhD in physics in 1953. He went off to join the Shockley Semiconductor Lab to join up with William Shockley who’d developed the transistor as a means of bringing a solid-state alternative to...

Carlota Perez is a researcher who has studied hype cycles for much of her career. She’s affiliated with the University College London, the University of Sussex, The Tallinn University of Technology in Astonia and has worked with some influential organizations around technology and innovation. As a neo-Schumpeterian, she sees technology as a cornerstone of innovation. Her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a must-read for anyone who works in an industry that includes any...

Research into the history of computers sometimes leads down some interesting alleys - or wormholes even. My family would always go out to eat Chinese food, or pick it up, on New Year’s day. None of the one Chinese restaurants in the area actually closed, so it just made sense. The Christmas leftovers were gone by then and no one really wanted to cook. My dad mentioned there were no Chinese restaurants in our area in the 1970s - so it was a relatively new entrant to the cuisine of my North...

The Silk Road, or roads more appropriately, has been in use for thousands of years. Horses, jade, gold, and of course silk flowed across the trade routes. As did spices - and knowledge. The term Silk Road was coined by a German geographer named Ferdinand van Richthofen in 1870 to describe a network of routes that was somewhat formalized in the second century that some theorize date back 3000 years, given that silk has been found on Egyptian mummies from that time - or further. The use of silk...

Dassler shoes was started by Adolf Dassler in 1924 in Germany, after he came home from World War I. His brother Rudolph joined him. They made athletic shoes and developed spikes to go on the bottom of the shoes. By 1936, they convinced Jesse Owens to wear their shoes on the way to his gold medals. Some of the American troops who liked the shoes during World War II helped spread the word. The brothers had a falling out soon after the war was over. Adolph founded Adidas while Rudolph created a...

Taiwan is a country about half the size of Maine with about 17 times the population of that state. Taiwan sits just over a hundred miles off the coast of mainland China. It’s home to some 23 and a half million humans, roughly half way between Texas and Florida or a few more than live in Romania for the Europeans. Taiwan was connected to mainland China by a land bridge in the Late Pleistocene and human remains have been found dating back to 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. About half a million...

Mark Pincus was at the forefront of mobile technology when it was just being born. He is a recovering venture capitalist who co-founded his first company with Sunil Paul in 1995. FreeLoader was at the forefront of giving people the news through push technology, just as the IETF was in the process of ratifying HTTP2. He sold that for $38 million only to watch it get destroyed. But he did invest in a startup that one of the interns founded when he gave Sean Parker $100,000 to help found...

In the beginning was the command line. Actually, before that were punch cards and paper tape. But at Multics and RSTS and DTSS came out, programmers and users needed a way to interface with the computer through the teletypes and other terminals that appeared in the early age of interactive computing. Those were often just a program that sat on a filesystem eventually as a daemon, listening for input on keyboards. This was one of the first things the team that built Unix needed, once they had...

Lee Felsenstein went to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. He worked at the tape manufacturer Ampex, where Oracle was born out of before going back to Berkeley to finish his degree. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, and as with so many inspired by the Altair S-100 bus, designed the Sol-20, arguably the first microcomputer that came with a built-in keyboard that could be hooked up to a television in 1976. The Apple II was introduced the...

Lars Magnus Ericsson was working for the Swedish government that made telegraph equipment in the 1870s when he started a little telegraph repair shop in 1976. That was the same year the telephone was invented. After fixing other people’s telegraphs and then telephones he started a company making his own telephone equipment. He started making his own equipment and by the 1890s was shipping gear to the UK. As the roaring 20s came, they sold stock to buy other companies and expanded quickly. ...

Imagine a game that begins with a printout that reads: You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. In the distance there is a tall gleaming white tower. Now imagine typing some information into a teletype and then reading the next printout. And then another. A trail of paper lists your every move. This is interactive gaming in the 1970s. Later versions had a monitor so a screen could...

Before Facebook, there was MySpace. People logged into a web page every day to write to friends, show off photos, and play music. Some of the things we still do on social networks. The world had been shifting to personal use of computers since the early days when time sharing systems were used in universities. Then came the Bulletin Board Systems of the 80s. But those were somewhat difficult to use and prone to be taken over by people like the ones who went on to found DefCon and hacking...

Theophile Bruguier was a fur trader who moved south out of Monreal after a stint as an attorney in Quebec before his fiancé died. He became friends with Chief War Eagle of the Yankton Sioux. We call him Chief, but he left the Santee rather than have a bloody fight over who would be the next chief. The Santee were being pushed down from the Great Lakes area of Minnesota and Wisconsin by the growing Ojibwe and were pushing further and further south. There are two main divisions of the Sioux...

Microsoft had confusion in the Windows 2000 marketing and disappointment with Millennium Edition, which was built on a kernel that had run its course. It was time to phase out the older 95, 98, and Millennium code. So in 2001, Microsoft introduced Windows NT 5.1, known as Windows XP (eXperience). XP came in a Home or Professional edition.  Microsoft built a new interface they called Whistler for XP. It was sleeker and took more use of the graphics processors of the day. Jim Allchin was the...