HISTORY

Alexander Graham Bell is known for inventing the telephone; but for someone so associated with sound, it's curious that no one living has actually ever heard the tenor of his voice.

However, as of Wednesday, anyone can hear what he sounded like. New technology has brought a 128-year-old recording made by Bell back to life, according to Smithsonian magazine.

The artifact, a wax and cardboard disc, has most likely been unplayable for at least a century. According to Smithsonian, Bell worked on several different ways to record sound, including using foil, wax, glass, paper, plaster, metal, and cardboard. Not … Read more

The next time you mash buttons on a video game controller, keep in mind that there's more than half a century of innovation behind the venerable input device.

To remind you of this fact, Pop Chart Lab's eye-catching poster, titled "The Evolution of Video Game Controllers," sheds light on the incredible technological progression of controller hardware. You'll probably never again see more joysticks, knobs, and buttons in one place -- well, unless you're hanging around CNET producer Stephen Beacham's retro video game console patch bay.… Read more

Last year, nearly as many people visited Apple's retail stores as went to Disneyland parks. That's something to marvel considering Disney has been in the amusement park business since 1955, and Apple's gadget stores are barely 12 years old. Apple's stores are also light on the cotton candy, fireworks, and bathrooms.

While there are plenty more differences between the two, one major similarity is that both companies have relied on these institutions as the ideal experience for interacting with their products.

In that same vein comes Samsung's latest foray into the retail business. Today, the company announced plans … Read more

When setting up a new device, it's nice to go back and make sure you've downloaded all of your purchased apps (or any purchased content for that matter), but Google's Play store app doesn't make it easy for this to happen at the moment. Currently your download history contains both free and paid apps, with no way to separate the two.

My Purchases is a free Android app that allows users to view their entire Google Play purchase history with just a few taps, as first reported by Droid Life.

After you install the free or … Read more

Google updated Chrome for iOS earlier this week. One of the new features in the update is the option to long-press on the back arrow to quickly access your browsing history for that particular tab.

As you can see in the video, the feature is very easy to use, but one that might not be all that obvious if you make a habit of skipping change logs. The displayed history is specific to the current tab you're viewing, and not an overview of your entire Chrome browsing history.

Make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome for iOS … Read more

Field Trip (Android|iPhone) helps you find out more about your current location by sending you notifications when you're near landmarks, restaurants, historical sites, and other noteworthy spots. The app draws information from several sources, including Arcadia, Historvius, Food Network, Zagat, Atlas Obscura, Daily Secret, and others to enrich your experience of locations you wouldn't know were uniquely interesting otherwise. You can use it as a personal tour guide or share interesting locales over Facebook and Twitter.

The app also lets you set the frequency of notifications from none to an Explore mode that gives you all the … Read more

The Computer History Museum has made the source code for Photoshop 1.0.1 into an exhibit that lets the public, or at least programmers, appreciate the inner workings of the historic software.

The museum published the software yesterday, following up on its earlier release of the source code underlying Apple's original MacPaint.

Source code is what humans write -- in Photoshop 1.0's case the brothers Thomas and John Knoll. The initial Photoshop is written in written 128,000 lines of code, a combination of the high-level Pascal programming language and low-level assembly-language instructions. When converted to … Read more

How would you like to download a free and legal version of Photoshop?

Yep, free and legal. Better yet, it's an original -- as in the original version (1.0.1) that was released in 1990.

Via a special arrangement with Adobe Systems, the Computer History Museum announced in a blog post today that it has made available for download the entire 128,000 lines of source code for the first version of Photoshop: … Read more

Imagine a day when it cost an arm and a leg to use the phone, especially for long-distance calls. Then imagine that buried deep within the telephone network infrastructure was a flaw -- a hole that allowed those who were aware of it, and capable of exploiting it, to make all the free calls they want.

These days, phone calls are free -- or nearly so -- and hackers put their energies into computer networks, jailbreaking iPhones, and other more modern pursuits. But back in the 1950s and 1960s, a new group of people emerged, people who were fascinated by … Read more