Steve Jobs designed the original Mac calculator in 10 minutes

VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet, released with Apple II's personal computer in 1979

Before 1979, managers were essentially information processors working off paper ledgers. Scenario modeling was slow, manual, and expensive. Companies were understood as organizations that built things with financial analysis as secondary. VisiCalc made calculation so cheap that you could work iteratively, setting out forecasts and tweaking assumptions until you got the answer you wanted. Oks argues It created a new way of seeing the world.

Apple started out in a garage in 1976

Shifting the focus of personal computing from businesses to everyday consumers, Apple found early success with the Apple II, which sold 6 million units, and the Macintosh, which featured a user-friendly graphical interface.

Before starting Apple, Steve Jobs cold-called HP at 12 years old and got a summer job

As a leader, Jobs was both admired and resented for his unwavering commitment to his vision, which led him to push his colleagues beyond their limits. Jobs once told a rival computer executive that he'd make a product so good, they'd buy one for their kid.

Apple's first backer recruited his own CEO to help manage the company

Wanting Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to focus on developing Apple computers, Mike Markkula brought in his colleague from Fairchild Semiconductor, Michael Scott. As employee number five, Scott helped professionalize the fledgling computer company and getting manufacturing off the ground. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Steve Jobs founded NeXT while on a break from Apple

While Steve Jobs was on a hiatus from working at Apple, he founded a company called NeXT and helped lead the release of its operating system NeXTSTEP. The operating system was used to create the first app store of sorts, as well as the first web browser.

Mac settings have evolved from minimalism to chaotic clutter

The 1984 Mac control panel featured wordless icons, sliders, and desktop pattern editors, highlighting early experimentation in graphical user interface design. This software charm and personality gradually disappeared as Apple enforced visual and functional consistency over time.

Creating the iPhone ended the marriages of several of Apple's engineers

In the early 2000s, Apple recruited multiple engineers onto rival teams tasked with combining phone, internet, and iPod capabilities. Despite significant technical hurdles, Steve Jobs favored a prototype with multitouch technology and a modified Mac operating system over a competing in-house model based on the iPod's click wheel. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

The US Navy used The 'Harvard Calculator' to solve advanced physics problems

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the IBM Mark I was a groundbreaking machine used to solve ballistic trajectories and other mathematical problems whose solutions were needed for the design of the atomic bomb in World War II. The device was one of the first mechanical computers.

Jony Ive helped popularize Apple with iconic product form factors

Appointed SVP of industrial design in 1997 and chief design officer in 2015, Ive was responsible for the translucent plastic shells found on early iMacs and the iBook G3. He also oversaw the construction of Apple Park—the company's headquarters.

Watch Steve Jobs introduce the first iPad

Apple's cofounder debuted the first iPad in 2010, framing it as a third category of personal electronics between the laptop and the smartphone. Steve Jobs showed off how thin the device was (for the time) and explained how it was better than smartphones and laptops for browsing the web.

Microsoft Office debuted on the Macintosh in 1989

Over 15 months before its debut on Windows, the suite included Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mail—the precursor to Outlook. Bill Gates saw the Mac as a testing ground to work out bugs and gather feedback before the Windows release.

Explore a visual history of the Windows operating system

Named after the windows that separate different applications, the operating system’s first version came preinstalled with Calculator, Paint, and Reversi. There was no Windows 9 to avoid compatibility issues with legacy code searching for Windows 95 and 98 files via a “windows9” query.

Office Assistants, including Clippy, were digitally edited with Macintosh computers

The animated characters served as intelligent user interfaces for Microsoft Office and were sketched by hand before being scanned. Clippy was selected as the default assistant after social psychologists at Stanford University identified it as the most trustworthy, likable, and humorous character based on public testing.

The first smartwatch was made by Microsoft in 1994

Coproduced by Timex, the Timex DataLink 150 featured a small LCD screen and could transfer data to and from a Windows PC. Like the Windows XP Tablet that launched in 2002, the smartwatch did not sell well, and both products are considered to have been released before their time.

At the age of seven, Grace Hopper dismantled alarm clocks

Foreshadowing a career in computers, Hopper exhibited a curiosity for gadgets at a young age and took apart seven clocks, determined to understand how they worked. Despite having a dollhouse, Hopper built an elevator for it and showed a greater interest in building toy furniture than playing with dolls.

Eighty-four different pieces were composed for the Windows 95 startup sound

Brian Eno, the ambient music artist, was tasked with creating a 3.25-second jingle that was inspiring, universal, optimistic, and futuristic in tone. As with all of his compositions, Eno created the sound, which was double the requested length, on a Mac.

Jim Simons, mathematician turned government codebreaker turned trader, revolutionized quantitative investing

The late Jim Simons is remembered as one of the most successful (and profitable) hedge fund managers of all time. He went from physically gathering microfilm on commodities pricing decades ago to overseeing a firm that led Wall Street in daily trading volume.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The team responsible for the first interplanetary sundials included Bill Nye

While reviewing designs for instruments to be carried by future Mars rovers, Nye suggested adapting the function of a calibration tool, which would be used by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to help calibrate the brightness and color of their panoramic cameras on the Martian surface.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

A 14-year-old "human calculator" shatters six mathematical world records in one day

A teenage prodigy from Maharashtra, India named Aaryan Shukla set the record for the fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers. He did so in just 25.19 seconds–roughly equivalent to one addition every 0.5 seconds. The math whiz said he practices calculations for around five to six hours a day.

The levels for 'Super Mario Bros.' were designed by hand

Miyamoto and codesigner Takashi Tezuka sketched the world of the game—called Mushroom Kingdom—by hand before handing it off to developers. In the interview below, they show off some of those original illustrations.

How Charles Blair Macdonald changed the design behind golf

Macdonald's contributions to golf course design, including 21 principles still used today, are just as legendary as the game's players. This deep dive into the mostly forgotten figure explores his legacy, including why he never charged for his services.

The origin of shortest-path algorithms and how they became optimized for navigation apps

In 1956, Dutch programmer Edsger Dijkstra spent about 20 minutes developing an algorithm to demonstrate how computers could quickly determine the shortest route between Rotterdam and Groningen. Since then, modified versions of Dijkstra's formulation comprise the processing backbone of systems such as Google Maps and Apple Maps.

The game 'Counter-Strike' was developed in a dorm room

College student Minh Le designed the game through "modding," effectively building on the code of a preexisting game, the game "Half-Life" in his spare time.

It took 70 years for computer scientists to determine how to cut a cake fairly

The cake-cutting problem explores how to divide something fairly, which is not solely about cutting evenly-sized pieces. A protocol that accounted for personal preferences (e.g., a corner piece) between just three people took 16 years to develop.

The concept of 'screen time' was invented in 1991

Mother Jones magazine coined the term in an essay called "Primal Screen" about children's television habits. Writer David Engelhardt wrote that they were watching “screens within screens within screens,” and that even babies were averaging an “hour and a half of screen time a day...the typical older child, about four hours."

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.