Last month, an extremely rare prototype of the never-released Nintendo Play Station went up for auction. (It’s so rare, in fact, that it may be the only one left in existence.) Among the bidders for this unique piece of video game history — physical proof of how close bitter rivals Sony and Nintendo once came to partnering on gaming hardware — was Palmer Luckey, founder of the Facebook-owned virtual reality platform Oculus (and more recently of Anduril, a defense firm responsible for military surveillance technology).

There are major hurdles to playing old or rare video games today: The physical materials…

So here’s a thing that I don’t usually say in public: I love cables. To be more specific, I love the connectors. The actual wire I can take or leave, really, but the metal end that fits into the port is where the power is. Cables suggest possibilities; the possibility of linking together pieces of hardware. When I see a connector, I feel a little frisson of excitement. I start thinking of peripheral devices I can make speak to each other. Often there’s a satisfying click when you plug the cable into the corresponding port. Some are better than others…

Since my interaction design firm, Cooper, has had new owners now for more than two years, it’s not surprising to find that some of my more personal Web postings have been quietly removed from Cooper dot com. One casualty was an essay I originally wrote and posted in 1995 that tells the origin story of Visual Basic. I am reposting it here with slight updates from the original piece I wrote 25 years ago.

Mitchell Waite called me the “father of Visual Basic” in the foreword to what I believe was the first book ever published for Visual Basic (VB)…

Author’s note: This story was initially reported in 2014 but was not published. It’s released here today in memory of George Laurer, who died on December 10, 2019 at the age of 94.

Forty-five years ago Clyde Dawson handed over a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum to checkout clerk Sharon Buchanan in the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was 8 a.m. and Dawson wasn’t any ordinary shopper — he was Marsh’s director of research and development — and this wasn’t any ordinary transaction.

History was made, and it cost 67 cents.

This was the first time the…

In 1972, a Swedish woman named Lena Söderberg accepted a modeling job from the photographer Dwight Hooker. Söderberg was 21, new to the United States, and broke. The name of Hooker’s employer, Playboy, didn’t mean much to her; the contract definitely did. “It was money, and I didn’t have a lot of money,” she explained to Wired earlier this year.

In the photo shoot’s most famous image, a hat-wearing Söderberg stands nude before a full-length mirror, clutching a feather boa and looking over one shoulder. The photograph ran as the centerfold in the November 1972 issue. …

In Annalee Newitz’s new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a time-traveling band of feminist academics battle against a group of men’s rights activists to see who will determine the course of history. As each group takes steps to alter the past, they leave their imprint on the future, determining whether abortion will be legal and whether women will have the right to vote or be reduced to little more than the property of men.

OneZero sat down with Newitz to chat about real-life attempts to edit the timeline, the forgotten history of feminist activism, and why understanding the past…

What do you think of when you imagine the eighth wonder of the world?

A beautiful historical site like the Roman Colosseum or Machu Picchu that attracts many tourists to compliment natural beauties? Wrong. According to Thomas Edison, the eighth wonder of the world was the Linotype machine.

A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know what the Linotype machine was. But when I visited the Baltimore Museum of Industry, I learned that the Linotype changed the world, and especially changed the printing industry. Ottmar Mergenthaler, the inventor of the Linotype machine, revolutionized printing. …

As dawn cracks over the Cornish coastline, with only a few seagulls and a lone dog for company, Tracey Williams goes looking for plastic. “It began over 20 years ago,” she tells me. “My parents lived in an old house perched on the clifftop in South Devon, and we used to comb the beaches to see what had washed up.”

Ever since 1997, Williams’ family would notice Lego pieces amid the sand and seaweed of England’s southwestern shore; plastic octopuses, spear guns, flippers, scuba tanks, life preservers, daisies, ship rigging. “I still remember the moment when a neighbor found one…