The portable computer was born 30 years ago this weekend, when Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 in San Francisco. Osborne, a journalist and book author, made the transition to entrepreneur on the strength of his personality, ambition and vision. And for a short few months, his computer company wa

A strange legacy of the Japanese power system’s infancy in the late 1800s is complicating efforts to keep Tokyo supplied with electricity. The problem, as explained by IDG News Service’s Martyn Williams, is that half of the country uses power whose current alternates at 60 Hz, while the other half g

Silicon chips have billions of transistors in every square inch. But sometimes there’s enough room left over for chip engineers to insert a little joke. While using a scanning electron microscope to examine the microcircuitry of a chip found in Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S phone, consulting com

I get to play Rambo in this video, which showcases some of the office warfare weaponry Wired recently tested. My favorite: the Z-Curve Bow. The video’s webpage is here, and talented intern Christina Bonnington wrote a the roundup review of office weapons.

“In an all-white environment, the white version of the iPad 2 will have a better chance of hiding from predators.” via Gallery: Apple’s Jobs Unveils Upgraded, More Colorful iPad 2 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony is blurring the line between portable game consoles and larger consoles currently trapped inside TV cabinets. With a high-resolution screen, a powerful processor and graphics card, and massive amounts of memory, the upcoming Sony NGP will be closer to the capabilities of a PC or

Intel’s new high-speed port technology is called Thunderbolt. But what is it, exactly? Think of Thunderbolt (formerly code named “Light Peak”) as two cables in one. One is a fast PCI Express cable for transferring data, and the other is DisplayPort, for driving an external display. A Thunderbolt cab

Within a few years, your car may become a hub of interconnected devices, media and online services. And you thought it was for getting you around town. I recently spent a little time in a tricked-out 2009 Corvette whose dashboard included some proof-of-concept technology to integrate the car with a

When the tentacled aliens from Gliese 581g arrive on Earth, they’ll probably be riding a YikeBike. At least, that’s how the YikeBike looks. In reality, it’s made for the posteriors of humans, not the glistening thoraxes of our future Gliesean overlords. It’s the most compact electric bicycle ever ma

SAN FRANCISCO — HP’s diminutive Veer might be named that because the company wants to emphasize that it’s swerving in a different direction than most phone makers. And it is: In a gadget season dominated by 4-inch and bigger smartphones, the webOS-based Veer looks positively petite. It feels like a

It may be hard to believe as you read Wired on your iPad, but heating oil and metal plumbing pipes were hot tech topics just 100 years ago. They were businesses, too, on which inventors pinned their hopes and corporations placed their bets in the form of factories, salesmen, and marketing budgets. F

The internet has run out of room. Like a prairie with no more vacant land to homestead or a hip area code with no more cellphone numbers, the pool of available numeric internet addresses has been completely allocated as of Thursday (.pdf). With that, the frontier has closed. The internet — in its cu