recent burials and anniversaries
Live Last read · last published · next check
before broadband made downloading boring, a file that failed at ninety four percent was simply gone and you began again from zero. flashget opened several connections to the same server at once and stitched the slices back together, and more importantly it wrote them to disk as they arrived, so a dead line cost you a minute instead of an evening. it came out of china in 1999 under the name jetcar…
for more than a decade share-online was where the german-speaking internet parked files that were too big to email and too hot to host under a real name. eighteen million of them sat behind 1.3 million registered accounts, and close to three quarters of the traffic came from inside germany. on the afternoon of 16 october 2019 police raided it across three countries at once and the servers went…
in january 2003 siemens announced it would sell mobile phones the way a clothing label sells clothes, in seasonal collections that were supposed to go out of date on schedule. the first four models were designed in house and came out looking like star trek props. the second four went to ideo and reached 399 euros for hardware that could barely manage a text message. all eight together sold 780,000…
a telephone company and a newspaper publisher started a free daily together in may 2007, on the theory that a printed page could hand you off to a website and a phone screen. dutch commuters took 400,000 copies a day at the peak, which sounds like success until you look at what advertisers were willing to pay for a reader who had not chosen to read. kpn walked away from the content side after…
spinlet began in tampere in 2006 as a finnish music player that went nowhere. nigerian investors bought it in 2011 and relaunched it out of lagos as the first streaming service in sub-saharan africa, carrying african catalog nobody else had bothered to license. it reached close to two million app downloads and then hit a wall that had nothing to do with music, because nigerian bank cards could not…
pete townshend wrote lifehouse in 1971 as a story about music generated from a person's own data, and the who could not build it because the machines did not exist yet. in april 2007 he put those machines on a website with the composer lawrence ball and the developer dave snowdon, and about 10,500 people sat for a musical portrait assembled out of what they typed in. it ran fifteen months. the…
joystick started on 9 november 1988 as a thirty two page weekly of cheat codes and reviews, went monthly in january 1990, and spent the next twenty two years being the french pc gaming magazine with a demo disc stuck to the front of it. the print run was 62,000 at the start and under 12,000 at the end. its publisher went into liquidation on 8 november 2012 and issue 260 appeared on the 23rd, the…
jumia food started life as hellofood in 2012, one of rocket internet's african ventures, and took the jumia name in the 2016 rebrand. by late 2023 it was moving about eleven percent of everything jumia sold and had never once made money doing it. on 13 december 2023 the parent announced it was closing food delivery in all seven of its markets before the end of that month, to put the capital into…
bt built a donations platform in 2011 and took no commission on it, which in british fundraising was the entire point, because everybody else was keeping a percentage. by the end of 2015 more than 8,750 charities were registered and the sponsored-run economy ran through it every spring. on 21 january 2019 bt announced it was closing, said the market now had plenty of fee-free options of its own,…
popline was the reproductive health literature database, more than 370,000 records reaching back to 1827, run out of johns hopkins on usaid money from 1978 onward. in february 2008 its search engine was configured to treat abortion as a stop word, so a database built for family planning research could no longer find its own central subject. that lasted until the new york times printed it in april…
a philippine pay-per-view film platform opened on 14 november 2020 by two directors whose cinemas had been shut for eight months. it carried the 2020 metro manila film festival, signed a video on demand agreement with universal pictures in may 2021, and premiered local films that had nowhere else to open. in august 2022 it posted a notice about scheduled system maintenance starting on 1 september.…
a japanese magazine about arcade machines and nothing else, first printed on 5 may 1986 and coming out every two weeks by 1993. it started on shoot 'em ups and scoring tables, then turned with street fighter ii and became the written record of competitive fighting games in the country that invented them. its reader-voted awards are still quoted by people who never held a copy. shinseisha went…
a mobile network promotion that turned into a national weekday habit. you sent the word film to 241 on a wednesday and the code that came back bought two cinema tickets for the price of one. it ran from 2003 to 25 february 2015 and for most of that time it was the best-known thing about orange in britain. it outlived the cinema advertising and the bafta sponsorship that had been built around it,…
capcom's permanently online monster hunter, subscription funded and never once released in the west. it opened on windows in japan on 21 june 2007 and kept expanding onto hardware until six platforms were sharing the same servers, several of them consoles that had already been discontinued. two full rewrites arrived as monster hunter frontier g in 2013 and monster hunter frontier z in 2016. capcom…
a birmingham handset maker that built cheap phones for operators and then bet its future on being first out with microsoft's smartphone platform. microsoft paid for a tenth of the company and took a board seat in february 2001, the software never arrived in a state anyone could ship, and the z100 was canceled weeks before its november 2002 launch. sendo sued, settled in september 2004 on terms…
a distributed version control system written as a pile of shell scripts in 2001, years before the industry agreed that the central server was the problem. changesets instead of file revisions, and branching that happened across machines rather than through one server. all of it correct, all of it wrapped in a command line people could not tolerate. bitkeeper's collapse in april 2005 produced git…
a zürich company that sold films over the internet to televisions, back when a television could barely manage it, by getting its software installed at the factory instead of asking anyone to seek it out. it claimed a reach of 282 million households across 48 countries, a figure that counted sets rather than customers. sky bought it in may 2012 for the technology, folded that into its own on demand…
a california company that handed american schools a free computer lab and a satellite connection, and took the corner of every screen as payment. by late 2000 it had 25,000 machines in 2,300 schools with around two million students sitting in front of the advertising panel. the campaign against selling to a captive audience of minors made the whole thing politically expensive at exactly the moment…
a company founded to cover a yacht race by sending home the instrument readings, which turned into the argument that any sports event is a data stream and that television only ever shows you one channel of it. it built nbc's sydney 2000 site, the first live coverage of an olympic games on the internet, and nearly six million people used it. producing that coverage cost almost exactly what the…
a video store owner's recommendation cards, rebuilt as a website, with a shop bolted on because nobody pays for advice. it worked well enough that hollywood entertainment bought it for $96.9 million in 1998, one month before amazon started selling video and took the whole category in six weeks. by 1999 reel was losing thirteen cents on every dollar it took. the store was shut on 19 june 2000 and…
bajtek arrived in september 1985 as the first polish magazine about computers written for people who were not already engineers, sponsored by the communist youth union and printed in a country where owning a zx spectrum meant somebody had carried it in from abroad. the early issues sold over two hundred thousand copies with no returns. it printed basic listings you typed in by hand and it produced…
brazil spent the eighties under a law that kept foreign computers out, so brazilian companies built their own versions of machines the rest of the world could simply buy. prológica was the largest of them in the home market. the cp-500 was a trs-80 model iii and the cp-200 was a zx81, and for a generation of brazilians those were not clones, they were the computer. the market reserve came apart at…
nec shipped the pc-9801 in october 1982 and then spent a decade owning japanese computing, past sixty percent of the market by 1991. the reason was writing. an ibm clone in the eighties could not put japanese text on a screen at a size you could read, and the pc-98 had the character rom and the display hardware to do it. ibm japan solved the same problem in software with dos/v in 1990, and windows…
heinz nixdorf started a lab in essen in 1952 with borrowed money and built it into the fourth largest computer company in europe on one idea, which was that a small machine belongs in the office doing the work instead of in a rented machine room somewhere else. by 1985 the company turned over four billion marks with twenty three thousand people in forty four countries. nixdorf died at cebit in…
for most of a decade red hat linux was what people meant when they said linux. it came in a cardboard box with printed manuals and a support number, and it gave the world rpm and anaconda, two pieces of plumbing that are still running today. version 9 shipped on 31 march 2003 and turned out to be the last one. red hat killed the free consumer product to concentrate on the paid enterprise line, the…
yahoo opened a webcam broadcasting site on 6 february 2008 and it fell over the same evening, because there was not enough bandwidth standing behind it. the product was a channel per person with a chat box beside the video, built at the exact moment every company on earth wanted one of those. the end was announced on 3 november and the site closed a month later at 7:07 in the evening, leaving the…
a mainframe in a hotel basement and a terminal in a record shop meant you could buy one named seat in a stadium two states away, and the seat could not be sold twice. that was 1968, thirty years before most people had a modem. control data ran it for two decades and by 1990 it had seven hundred and fifty outlets against a competitor with more. carlyle bought the assets and passed them to…
infineon moved its memory business into a separate company in 2006 and listed it in new york three months later, arriving just as dram prices fell eighty five percent in one year and another fifty eight percent in the next. qimonda built good chips on a deep trench cell nobody else used, which counts for nothing when the product sells below what it costs to make. a rescue worth 325 million euros…
danny hillis wanted a computer built from sixty-five thousand tiny processors instead of one large fast one, and thinking machines turned that thesis into a black cube whose front panel blinked red while it worked. for a few years around 1990 it held the top of the supercomputer list, with richard feynman having worked on the router that held it together. then washington was accused of favoring…
two security live cds merged in 2006 and became the thing everyone booted from a disc instead of installing. it carried the whole toolkit already configured, which is why it turned up in university labs and on machines that were not yours. offensive security rebuilt it on debian and released the result as kali linux on 13 march 2013, retiring the old name the same day. every tool inside it is…