A clearer view of a changing world.
Loading the edition…
Desk
Archival photographs, timelines, maps, primary documents, then-and-now comparisons and the people history overlooked. Illustrative placeholders stand in until archival material is licensed.
Feature
Before Silicon Valley there was Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, a glider factory in St. Paul and a laboratory in Norwalk, Connecticut. The first American computers were built in places that made typewriters and aircraft parts, by companies that no longer exist, in towns that do.
4 min read
The first commercial computer weighed about thirteen tons, used more than five thousand vacuum tubes and was sold by a typewriter company. Forty-six were built. The age they began has not ended.
3 min read
A single employer could build a town's housing, fund its schools and set its rhythm for a century. When the industry moved or died, the town remained. Local history is largely the history of that relationship.
2 min read
A national archive in this illustrative scenario completed the digitization of its newsreel collection and reopened its screening rooms to the public.
1 min read
A typewriter maker bought the two most important computer start-ups in America, led the industry for a few years and then lost it. The corporate history explains a great deal about how technology businesses rise and fall.
2 min read
Most of the record of the past is on paper and film in boxes that few people will ever open. Digitization changes who can ask questions of it, and which questions get asked.
2 min read
From 2,300 transistors on the first microprocessor to more than a hundred billion on a modern system. The curve that defined computing, and the reasons it is bending.
2 min read
In 1956 a trucking executive loaded fifty-eight metal boxes onto a tanker in Newark. The shipping container that resulted did more to create global trade than any treaty.
2 min read
The note an orchestra tunes to was fought over for two centuries, settled by an international conference in 1939 and written into a standard in 1955. Some orchestras still ignore it.
2 min read