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How does a fibre-optic strand thinner than a spaghetti noodle carry a signal across 13,000 kilometres of ocean without a single electrical amplifier along the way?
4+ day, 18+ hour ago (1178+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Gaming · Lifestyle Published Aug 21, 2026 · How we edit The glass itself is extraordinarily small. A standard single-mode fibre has glass cladding 125 micrometres across, while the light occupies a mode field…...
How did a rubber gasket the size of a dinner plate, stiffened overnight in a Florida cold snap, rewrite the way NASA engineers are allowed to disagree with management?
1+ week, 13+ hour ago (983+ words) By How It Works Covers Tech Explained · Gaming · Lifestyle Published Aug 18, 2026 · How we edit The mechanical story is well known and has been covered in detail elsewhere. The less-told story is what the accident did to the internal rules of…...
The 'root' of the internet is 13 named server clusters??? labelled A through M??? that between them answer roughly 1.6 million DNS queries every second, and one of them, K-root, is run by a Dutch non-profit from more than 140 sites that all share a single IP address
1+ week, 6+ day ago (777+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Gaming · Lifestyle Published Aug 12, 2026 · How we edit The number 13 is not architectural. It is a leftover from a 1980s decision about how much data would fit in a single UDP…...
How did a Sunday driving ban imposed by Dutch prime minister Joop den Uyl during the 1973 oil shock quietly turn empty motorways into the seed of 35,000 kilometres of cycle path?
1+ week, 6+ day ago (271+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Gaming · Lifestyle Published Aug 12, 2026 · How we edit The ban itself lasted only until January 1974. Its consequences did not. None of this was planned as infrastructure policy. It was a side…...
The JPEG format was finalised in 1992 by a committee that met for six years to agree on how much visual information a human eye would tolerate losing??? the answer, roughly 90 per cent, is why every photo on the web looks the way it does
2+ week, 20+ hour ago (302+ words) By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Internet · Lifestyle Published Aug 11, 2026 · How we edit That trade-off — invisible loss for enormous savings — is why the web looks the way it does. Existing lossless techniques — run-length…...
How did a publicly humiliated Japanese electronics firm turn a failed CD partnership with Nintendo into a console that outsold every rival of the 1990s?
2+ week, 1+ day ago (900+ words) By How It Works Covers Tech Explained · Gaming · Lifestyle Published Aug 10, 2026 · How we edit All of it started with a public humiliation. In June 1991, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony announced a Nintendo-branded CD-ROM add-on for the Super…...
How does a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a garden hose carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet traffic across 13,000 kilometres of ocean floor?
2+ week, 2+ day ago (879+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Lifestyle Published Aug 9, 2026 · How we edit Inside that hose, most of the volume is not communicating at all. It is armour. A deep-sea cable is a nested cylinder, and…...
How did a Cornell graduate student's 99-line bootstrap program in November 1988 infect roughly 6,000 machines??? about 10 per cent of the early internet??? and force universities to invent the first computer emergency response team?
2+ week, 5+ day ago (850+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Lifestyle Published Aug 6, 2026 · How we edit The second was a debugging back door in sendmail, the mail transport agent that then ran on almost every Unix system on the…...
How did a stray calico cat, handed a stationmaster's cap at the unstaffed end of a dying Japanese branch line, lift its ridership by 17 per cent and generate an estimated 1.1 billion yen for the local economy?
2+ week, 6+ day ago (1107+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Covers Tech Explained · Lifestyle Published Aug 5, 2026 · How we edit The Kishigawa Line had been run for decades by Nankai Electric Railway, and the decline was long and documented. According to a Wakayama…...
How did one incorrect command input during a routine debugging task in February 2017 knock a large slice of the internet offline for about four hours?
3+ week, 17+ hour ago (984+ words) By How It Works · Edited by Justin Brown Published Aug 4, 2026 · How we edit Amazon described the initiating error plainly: “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended....