Author: administración

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

Saving Tips

The great majority of data that crosses between continents travels through fibre-optic cables on the seabed, not through satellites. Estimates put the share at somewhere between 95 and 99 per cent of international traffic. Satellites, for all their visibility, carry the remainder. The word to watch is “all.” The figure is about traffic that crosses oceans, not every byte the internet moves. International traffic, not all traffic Most of what you do online never goes near the ocean floor. The video you stream, the page you load, the file you open are very often stored on a server in your…

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In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and the team launched it with no advertising budget, no headphone jack standard, and an internal forecast of 5,000 units a month that the device beat in its first fortnight.

Saving Tips

In February 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka walked into the office of audio engineer Nobutoshi Kihara carrying a bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder and a complaint. He was about to fly to the United States, the trip was long, and he wanted to listen to opera on the plane without lugging a machine the size of a hardback book. Kihara, the engineer Ibuka liked to call godlike for his habit of turning a hallway conversation into a working prototype almost overnight, pulled apart a Pressman, Sony’s portable recorder for reporters, stripped out the speaker and the recording head, wired in a…

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NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

Saving Tips

The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written in a 1970s-era programming language that barely anyone understands anymore, kept alive by a few elderly engineers who remember how it all works. Like many great space stories, the truth is a little messier — and in some ways even more impressive. The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, built for a mission that was originally meant to study Jupiter and Saturn. Nearly five decades later, they are still operating. NASA describes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as the only…

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