Wired

1983: Lotus Development Corporation begins selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3. 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet application — it was preceded by VisiCalc. But 1-2-3 quickly became the most popular, helping to boost sales of IBM PCs and PC clones, all of which ran

An economic crisis changes the way you think about gadgets. Is a $400 game console bundle really what you want to be spending your hard-earned money on, considering that you could be out of a job in six months? Maybe not — though we’re sympathetic to the idea that the recently unemployed might need

1968: Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart kicks off the personal computer revolution with a product demonstration that is so amazing it inspires a generation of technologists. It will become known as “the mother of all demos.” The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelba

Link: Gallery: 40 Years of Mighty Mice Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

Forty years ago Tuesday, a Silicon Valley engineer named Douglas Engelbart made a presentation so influential that computer scientists now call it "the mother of all demos." More than a mere product demo, it was a down payment on an ambitious idea: that networked computers could help groups of peopl

1894: Norbert Wiener is born in Columbia, Missouri. A child prodigy, he goes on to become one of the 20th century’s most famous mathematicians and the founder of the discipline of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems. Norbert’s father, Leo Wiener, was a lecturer (and later professor) of

For the first time, professional-grade single-lens reflex cameras are gaining the ability to record high-definition video. That capability, photographers say, has the potential to transform both still photography and moviemaking — and it’s largely thanks to advances in the semiconductor technology u

Today’s debut of the T-Mobile G1 is the first public appearance of an almost fully-baked consumer "Googlephone" — a phone based on Google’s Android operating system. There’s just one problem: There is no Googlephone*. And that’s something Google must fix, and fast, if it wants its mobile operating s

PALO ALTO, California — Georgia residents Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer say they’ve found Bigfoot — and not only that, they say they have his body. They just didn’t happen to have the creature’s corpse with them for their press conference Friday. At the well-attended gathering, Dyer and Whitton, tog

It’s not the groundbreaking, industry-changing event that the original iPhone was. But the iPhone 3G is a worthy upgrade to Apple’s smartphone, and fixes a few flaws that kept many people from buying the first version. The addition of fast 3G wireless data, GPS and a more flexible, extensible operat

Carbon nanotubes grown on silicon wafers go in all directions (right), whilenanotubes grown on crystalline quartz are much more orderly, mostly growingin straight rows (left).Image: Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering Carbon nanotubes have been around for more than a decade, but

He’s a merciless competitor, a shameless “fan” of other people’s ideas and an unapologetic monopolist. And because of all that, Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else. As Gates prepares to retire from full-time work at Microsoft July 1, after 33 years of