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Nintendo copied Apple, while Apple copied Braun. Why are there so many electronics made of white polycarbonate, no matter the decade?

Over the past 35 years, our views on privacy and Caller ID technology have totally flipped. The concern used to be about the caller. Now, it's the recipient.

For the last couple of months, Facebook has leaned on The Muppets to help salvage its damaged reputation on privacy issues. Hey Facebook, could you please not?

Newspapers saw fax machines as a way to get breaking news to the masses, then as a way to reach the niches. Neither worked out.

Learn why dryers produce lint and how the lint roller came into existence.

Deep into Queens, there's a business operating 24 hours a day that most wouldn't expect. But in the city that never sleeps, should you expect anything else?

The ongoing fight against tape hiss has proven a useful creative tension for the music industry — even if you're not into lo-fi music recorded on a four-track.

Corporate motivation isn't enough when it comes to digital preservation. Here's a case for creating a National Register of Historic Places for websites.

How the quirks of a conservative British censor led one of the most popular cartoons in history to appear in censored form during the height of its success.

Before the smartphone fit in your pocket, it sat on your desk — and sometimes, it was even called an iPhone. Let's check out a few landline smartphones.

How the music industry let the perfect solution to file-sharing fall through its fingers in the '80s — or how record rentals bolstered Japan's music industry.

For nearly 30 years, many schools aired a daily news show in exchange for free AV equipment. Channel One was a hit — but the ads drove seemingly everyone crazy.

Mechanical keyboards have become hip again, despite near-complete disinterest in the form by mainstream computer-makers.

Why USB ports changed the world for the better, or what I learned from a futile month of trying to get a 25-year-old webcam working on a modern PC.

HTML and email weren't destined to be together, but the browser wars might have ensured they wouldn't spend much time apart.

Before Windows became a fact of life for most computer users, a scrappy upstart named GeoWorks tried taking Microsoft on. It failed, but it gave us AOL.

Hold music works pretty much the opposite way that every other kind of music does, for reasons both technical and psychological.

Vintage technology has powered the innards of the NYC subway system for decades — and sometimes, it surfaces in interesting ways.

There was a time when the iPAQ was ubiquitous part of the handheld market. But before that, the forgotten Compaq-borne brand surfaced in many bizarre contexts.