Roundabout
The roundabout isn’t clever design—it’s enforced yielding, standardised in 1966, and it works only because drivers obey a single, unambiguous rule.
Urban planning
Deciding how strangers will share a place.
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Traffic light
The first traffic light wasn’t a step forward — it was a gas-powered dead end.
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Crucial
Crucial was the brand under which Micron Technology sold its consumer memory and storage products, until the brand was discontinued in 2026.
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.
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.
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.