Ernie Smith

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. These days, computer users take collaboration software for granted. Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and so on, are such a big part of many people’s daily lives that they hardly notice them. But they are the outgrowth of years of hard work done before the Internet became a thing, when there was a

3 min read Anthony Brown/Alamy A version of this post originally appeared onTedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. Last month, Google announced some big changes to its search engine that are, in a word, infuriating, to users like myself. Google has started adding AI overviews to many of its search results, which essentially generate pre-processed answers to search queries. If you’re using Google to actually find websites rather

11 min read During Intel’s Pentium era, the motherboard featured a large PCI chipset in the middle of the board. A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can’t fry a computer by

10 min read 3M’s floppies were not unique, but they were emblematic of an early computing era. IEEE Spectrum A version of this post originally appeared onTedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. Now, this