Tidbits

1 day ago | tidbits.com | Adam Engst

Wouldn't it be nice if you could link to specific bits of text on a Web page rather than forcing people following your links to scan the page for whatever piece of information you're trying to convey? With full support from major browser manufacturers appearing late last year, the Web has finally caught up with hypertext theory from the previous century.

6 days ago | tidbits.com | Adam Engst

As TidBITS marks its 35th anniversary, I find myself reflecting on our core mission of explaining technology in an increasingly fractured and fractious world. We live in an era of remarkable technological capability, with artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles promising to reshape how we live and work.

1 week ago | tidbits.com | Adam Engst

The search engine has been a key Internet tool since the early days. Before the Web was a thing, I fondly remember Archie (from "archive" without the "v"), which indexed filenames on FTP servers, followed by Jughead and Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives), which extended the index-and-search concept to Gopher menu titles.

1 week ago | tidbits.com | Adam Engst

Apple has released targeted updates to five of its current operating systems, primarily to address a pair of security vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild.

1 week ago | tidbits.com | Adam Engst

At his Gates Notes blog, Bill Gates commemorates the 50th anniversary of Microsoft with a story about the company's first code:The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists.