Browsing: Saving Tips

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…

Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos AI is so good at finding software vulnerabilities that the company has restricted its release, and treasury officials, central banks, and the global Financial Stability Board are now holding emergency meetings about what it means for the security of the world’s banking systems

Saving Tips

In April 2026, the leaders of the U.S. financial system held a meeting nobody had quite expected to be holding.…

In 1985, a 14-year-old in Britain could legally drive a Sinclair C5 down a dual carriageway at 15 miles per hour with lorries thundering past at chest height, because the Department of Transport had quietly classified the battery trike as an electrically assisted pedal cycle rather than a motor vehicle.

Saving Tips

Sir Clive Sinclair launched the C5 at Alexandra Palace on 10 January 1985, promising a £399 electric machine that could…

In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and the electromagnetic pulse knocked out streetlights, burglar alarms, and a telephone company microwave link in Honolulu nearly 900 miles away, on an island most engineers had assumed was safely out of range

Saving Tips

On July 9, 1962, a Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead detonated roughly 250 miles above Johnston Atoll in…