Bill Landreth was one of the whiz kids, poking around Pentagon servers with the friends he had never met. But one of them was an FBI informant.

How phone phreakers, many of them blind, opened up Ma Bell to unlimited free international calling using a technical manual and a toy organ.

Steve Jobs, age 29.

On the world’s (then) largest online community.

A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning “hacker tourist” account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth.

Developed by early computer engineers in their spare time, improved in University comp-sci labs, and ultimately sold in coffeeshops for ten cents per game. Inside one of the most influential games ever played.

How the Library of Congress failed to adapt to the 21st century.

Can the Internet be archived?

Why the boom in scientific progress stalled.

The Wikipedia origin story.

From Word to smartphones.

The 50,000-word story of Microsoft’s antitrust case.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project began in 1960 and was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. It didn't go that way.

Update: The software was finally, quietly released in April.

An engineering team races to create a next-generation computer.

The first installment of The Soul of a New Machine.

How the case of a poisoned college student in China, cold for 18 years, has suddenly turned into “what may be the largest amateur online manhunt in history.”

An internet pioneer loses hope in the promise of web culture.

A “crude table-tennis arcade game” called Pong and the birth of the video game industry.

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”

How technological progress slowed from its 20th-century peak, why we’ve shifted from changing reality to simply simulating reality, and whether capitalism is the true culprit.

Shiva Ayyadurai told the world he invented email. Not everyone agreed.

From failure to Pixar, Steve Jobs’ “wilderness years.”

When computer science legend Jim Gray disappeared, his friends and colleagues – including Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – used every technological tool at their disposal to try to find him.

An early take on the dark side of cyberspace:

Like many newcomers to the "net"--which is what people call the global web that connects more than thirty thousand on-line networks--I had assumed, without really articulating the thought, that while talking to other people through my computer I was going to be sheltered by the same customs and laws that shelter me when I'm talking on the telephone or listening to the radio or watching TV. Now, for the first time, I understood the novelty and power of the technology I was dealing with.

Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.

How amateur tinkerers electronically contacted Russia during the Cold War:

The object of Joel's attention at this moment, however, as it is much of the time, is his four-pound, briefcase-size Radio Shack Tandy Model 100 portable computer. "I bought this machine for $399. For $1.82 a minute - $1.82! - I can send a telex message to Moscow. This technology is going to revolutionize human communications! Think what it will mean when you can get thousands of Americans and Soviets on the same computer network. Once scientists in both countries begin talking to each other on these machines they won't be able to stop. And we'll be taking a running leap over the governments on both sides.