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Human history

The long view: the species, not the century.

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9:02

Telegram

Telegram wasn’t an app — it was a paper slip, paid for by the word, and dead since the 1950s.
10:16

Rocket

Rockets did not invent spaceflight—they made it mechanically inevitable by carrying their own sky.
9:50

Plough

The plough wasn’t European — it was forged in Han China, refined in the Near East, and repurposed across empires.

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9:37

Crucial

Crucial was the brand under which Micron Technology sold its consumer memory and storage products, until the brand was discontinued in 2026.
8:44

Personal computer

A personal computer is a computer designed for personal use and operated directly by its user, rather than shared through time-sharing on a mainframe or minicomputer.
9:10

Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt is a hardware interface, developed by Intel with Apple, that carries PCI Express, DisplayPort and power over a single cable to connect external peripherals to a computer.
9:46

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics · 1981

Silicon Graphics built the first practical hardware-accelerated 3D graphics systems. Its Geometry Engine — designed at Stanford under ARPA — delivered ~6 million geometry operations per second. It pioneered scalable cc-NUMA architectures in the mid-1990s. But its reliance on proprietary MIPS and failed transitions to Itanium and Xeon eroded its position as PC graphics commoditised. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009.