If you’ve ever seen mojibake—garbled text like ’ and ç—you’ve met the ghosts of competing encodings. The quiet revolution that exorcised them was UTF‑8, a clever way to encode Unicode that made ASCII‑era systems and global scripts coexist (see UTF‑8, Unicode). 🌐 (more…)
On a summer day in 1974, a cashier slid a ten-pack of Wrigley’s gum across a glass window. A machine beeped. Price and product flashed on a screen without anyone touching a key. That beep launched a quiet revolution: the UPC barcode turning packaging into data and retail into a real-time system. 🛒
Picture a map crowded with ports. Now overlay it with straight lines—ships to rails to trucks—snapping at perfect right angles. What coordinates that choreography is a rectangular box with corner castings, agreed dimensions, and standardized locks. That box—the intermodal container—reduced touches, reduced theft, and reduced time, and in doing so reduced the world. 🚢📦
Late on May 1, 2000 (UTC May 2), the U.S. government turned off Selective Availability (SA)—the intentional signal distortion that kept civilian GPS readings fuzzy. Overnight, backyard receivers tightened from ~100 meters to ~10. What changed wasn’t the satellites in orbit but the policy governing their signals. That one decision unlocked consumer navigation, geocaching, app‑based mapping, precision farming, and global logistics at scale. (more…)