History
A field expedition to find Russia's last surviving payphones — from a working GSM-connected booth in a remote village to vandalized remnants — documenting the decline from 150,000 units to just 12,696 and the strange technology keeping them alive.
History
A nostalgic look at the iconic software that defined the 2000s computing era — from Winamp and ICQ to Nero Burning ROM and Total Commander — exploring why each rose to dominance and ultimately faded away.
History
A deep dive into the history of keygen music — from early cracktros on Apple II and Commodore 64 to the tracker and chiptune traditions that defined the sound of 2000s software piracy.
History
A deep dive into why domestically developed Soviet personal computers failed to compete with Western imports, examining planned economy constraints, tiny production volumes, lack of software ecosystems, and the ironic triumph of pirate ZX Spectrum clones.
History
A nostalgic exploration of the early 2000s internet era — from dial-up constraints that fueled creativity, to tight-knit forum communities, digital treasure hunts for rare files, and the pay-per-minute access that made every byte count.
History
The story of self-taught clockmaker John Harrison, who spent 50 years perfecting marine chronometers to solve the longitude problem -- from the devastating Scilly Islands disaster of 1707 to the mass adoption of chronometers by the Royal Navy.
History
An exploration of the earliest programmer jokes on Anekdot.ru, Russia's first major joke website, tracing how IT humor evolved from rare curiosities in 1996 to massively popular cultural artifacts by 1998.
History
A retrospective of ten groundbreaking tech devices from the 1990s and early 2000s that were ahead of their time, from the Apple Newton and Nintendo Virtual Boy to the Electrolux Trilobite robot vacuum.
History
A detailed history of Soviet and Russian automatic caller identification (AON) devices — from 17-chip KR580VM80A designs in the late 1980s to Intel 8031-based units with phonebooks, voice announcement, and even a custom microcontroller with a built-in sound chip.
History
A Soviet programmer from a closed nuclear research city recalls how he built a Wheel of Fortune clone in a week using Turbo Pascal, embedded his home phone number in the code, and accidentally had it spread to half the computers in the former USSR — and beyond.