Computers

Jane McGonigal, 33, creates "alternative reality games," which take place in virtual environments yet encourage players to take real actions.

Jane McGonigal on How Computer Games Make You Smarter

The "alternate reality game" designer looks to develop ways in which people can combine play with problem-solving

Fox River Promotion Booklet, 2006Designed by Marian Bantjes (Canadian, b. 1963)Booklet designed by Rick Valicenti (American, b. 1951) and Gina Garza (American, b. 1979)

Postmodernism's New Typography

In an act of rebellion against the prevailing Sans serif aesthetic, designers looked to celebrate creativity in their digital fonts

Don French, a buyer for the consumer electronics chain Tandy Radio Shack (TRS), believed that Radio Shack should offer an assembled personal computer and hired engineer Steve Leininger to design it.

August 3, 1977: The TRS-80 Personal Computer Goes on Sale

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Cat Brain Inspires Computer Design

John Gerrard uses a combination of photography, 3-D modeling and gaming software for his landscape images.

Q and A: Irish Artist John Gerrard

Artist John Gerrard uses 360-degree photography and 3-D gaming software to create a virtual reality

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World's 10 Fastest Supercomputers

Over the decades, archaeologists have turned up a great many artifacts from the Indus civilization, including stamp sealings, amulets and small tablets.

Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?

A computer scientist is helping to uncover the secrets of the inscribed symbols of the Indus

Building a robot that humans can love is pretty ambitious. But Javier Movellan (in his San Diego lab with RUBI) says he would like to develop a robot that loves humans.

Robot Babies

Can scientists build a machine that learns as it goes and plays well with others?

Frustrated by human error, mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage designed a machine to perform mathematical functions and automatically print the results.

Booting Up a Computer Pioneer’s 200-Year-Old Design

Charles Babbage, the grandfather of the computer, envisioned a calculating machine that was never built, until now

John Hodgman, the author of "More Information Than You Require," is a preeminent authority on fake trivia.

John Hodgman Gives “More Information Than You Require”

John Hodgman, best recognized as the "PC" in the Apple advertising campaign, discusses how humans distinguish fact from falsehood

“His scientific contributions are joyful, spark curiosity and inspire the young,” computer scientist Jeannette Wing says of her colleague Luis von Ahn (on the Carnegie Mellon campus, seated upon one of the “guest chairs” he keeps in his office).

The Player

Luis von Ahn's secret for making computers smarter? Get thousands of people to take part in his cunning online games

Michael Dell may have assembled this Turbo PC.

Baby Dell

A proto PC harkens back to the birth of an industry

Archaeologists have modeled Rome in three dimensions, and users can "fly" through the ancient city's winding streets, broad plazas, forums—even the Coliseum.

Rome Reborn

Archaeologists unveil a 3-D model of the great city circa A.D. 400

A DEC hard disk drive c. 1980. The invention let users jump directly to data they wanted without scrolling through a tape; when later installed in PCs, the hard disk brought real computing power to the people.

Reboot

A photojournalist enchanted by computers takes another look at the soul of some old machines

Computer History Museum

Digital Attic

Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum, discusses 1950s mainframes, an original Apple One and Steve Wozniak's baby shoes

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What Camera?

Look what photographer Robert Creamer can do with a flatbed scanner

The Old Bailey (in 1809) was the venue for more than 100,000 criminal trials between 1674 and 1834, including all death penalty cases.

Digitizing the Hanging Court

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey is an epic chronicle of crime and vice in early London. Now anyone can search all 52 million words

Bill Gates (in 2003) has "far surpassed anything I accomplished in engineering and business," says Jimmy Carter, now a fellow philanthropist.

35 Who Made a Difference: Bill Gates

The king of software takes on his biggest challenge yet

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Head's Up

From a computer-generated model, sculptors cast a bronze triceratops that Looks like the real thing

Visualization of a portion of the routes on the Internet

Cybercops Take a Byte Out of Computer Crime

A detective working the computer crime beat still needs street smarts, but there's a lot of uncharted legal territory out there

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