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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many software teams to work remotely for much longer than they expected. Software development was already more remote-friendly than many professions, but working from home occasionally is very different from building an entire working culture around distance. Read more
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Apple released the first Macs with its M1 system-on-chip in November 2020: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The performance and battery-life results immediately showed why Apple had left Intel. Read more
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AMD announced Zen 3 processors in October 2020 with the Ryzen 5000 desktop family. The most important change was a redesigned core complex that allowed up to eight CPU cores to share one 32 MB L3 cache. Read more
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A traditional antenna has a radiation pattern mainly determined by its physical design. A smart antenna adds signal processing to the system. Instead of treating every direction in the same way, an antenna array can combine signals from multiple elements and shape the effective radiation pattern. This makes beamforming possible. By adjusting phase and amplitude across antenna elements, the system can strengthen transmission or reception in a desired direction and reduce energy in others. Read more
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Starting university in 2020 is different from what many students expected. Education, work, communication, and daily life have all become more dependent on digital systems in a very short time. Read more
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NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 30 series in September 2020, introducing the Ampere architecture to consumer graphics cards. The RTX 3080 and 3090 offered major increases in shader throughput and second-generation ray-tracing hardware compared with Turing. Read more
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The year 2020 has made the importance of digital infrastructure unusually visible. Work, education, communication, shopping, entertainment, and many public services have moved online at a scale few people expected. Read more
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Epic Games deliberately bypassed Apple’s in-app payment system in Fortnite in August 2020, prompting Apple and Google to remove the game from their stores. Epic immediately filed lawsuits challenging platform rules and commission structures. Read more
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OpenAI introduced GPT-3 in 2020 with 175 billion parameters, more than two orders of magnitude larger than GPT-2. The model used the same basic transformer principle—predicting the next token—but scaled data, model size, and computation dramatically. Read more
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Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that Macs would transition from Intel x86 processors to Apple-designed ARM-based silicon. It was the Mac’s third major CPU-architecture transition after Motorola 68k to PowerPC and PowerPC to Intel. Read more
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The Therac-25 is one of the most disturbing cases in software-engineering history because the consequences of failure were not lost files or a crashed program. People were injured and killed. Read more
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Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on Mars on July 4, 1997. Soon after, however, the spacecraft began experiencing unexpected system resets. Read more
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Microsoft released Windows Terminal 1.0 in May 2020 as a modern command-line host for PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL distributions, and other shells. Read more
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Apple and Google announced a joint Exposure Notification system in April 2020 to help public-health applications detect possible COVID-19 contacts without collecting a centralized history of everyone’s location. Read more
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I started to see blogging as more than publishing articles. A personal blog can become a record of what we learn, what we care about, and how our thinking changes over time. Read more
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In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced offices, schools, and universities around the world to move online almost simultaneously. Video conferencing, VPNs, cloud collaboration, and identity systems suddenly became critical infrastructure. Read more
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Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip in February 2020, bringing a vertically folding OLED smartphone into the mainstream market. Unlike the larger Galaxy Fold, the Z Flip folded a normal phone-sized screen into a compact square. Read more
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The story of computing is also a story about human limits. For thousands of years, people have created tools to count, measure, record, and communicate. An abacus, a mechanical calculator, a punched card, and a modern processor may look completely different, but they all come from a similar desire: to move some mental work outside the human mind. Read more
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Microsoft ended normal support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, more than a decade after the operating system’s release. Millions of PCs were still using it, so the event created a large migration and security problem. Read more
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Wi-Fi 6 hardware became widely available in 2019 as routers, laptops, and phones adopted the 802.11ax standard. The new generation focused not only on increasing peak speed but on making crowded wireless networks more efficient. Read more