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You think you know tech history. You know Steve Jobs, you know Mark Zuckerberg, you know the garage startups and the billion-dollar IPOs. But the real stories — the ones that make you stop mid-sentence and say "wait, what?" — those are buried in footnotes, forgotten press releases, and decisions made in conference rooms that nobody wrote about because nobody realized they'd matter.
This is Vol. 2. No repeats. All new rabbit holes.
Accidental Innovations
The actress whose torpedo patent became Bluetooth
In 1940, Hedy Lamarr was the most famous actress in Hollywood. She was also, in her spare time, an inventor who co-developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during World War II.
The problem she was solving: radio-guided torpedoes could be jammed by the enemy on a single frequency. Her solution — co-developed with composer George Antheil — was frequency hopping: rapidly switching transmission frequencies in a synchronized pattern so the signal couldn't be jammed. The US Navy received the patent in 1942 and then promptly ignored it.
The patent expired in 1959 before the Navy adopted the technology in the 1960s — meaning Lamarr received no royalties for what became the foundational principle behind spread-spectrum communication. That frequency-hopping concept is the direct ancestor of Bluetooth, and contributes to the broader wireless communication theory that WiFi also draws from.
She received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997. She was 82 years old. The citation read "for keeping her sense of humor and some of her patents."
The 802.11 WiFi algorithm came from chasing black holes
In the 1990s, Australian astronomer John O'Sullivan was working on a CSIRO project to detect the faint radio signals from evaporating black holes — a theoretical phenomenon predicted by Stephen Hawking. The radio signals from such an event would arrive smeared and distorted by bouncing off objects in space.
O'Sullivan's team developed a mathematical technique to clean up those smeared signals. The black holes were never found. But the signal-cleaning algorithm turned out to be exactly what you need to decode radio signals bouncing off walls and ceilings in indoor environments.
That algorithm — called OFDM — is the core of 802.11 WiFi, solving the specific problem of signals bouncing off walls and furniture in indoor spaces. Australia's CSIRO subsequently earned over $430 million in patent royalties from companies including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP, and Nintendo. It remains one of the most profitable government research investments in history.
Naming Stories
Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century Danish king
Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson was a Viking king who, in the 10th century, united the warring Danish tribes and, according to one account, had a conspicuously dead-looking tooth that appeared dark blue.
In 1996, Intel engineer Jim Kardach was working on a short-range wireless standard to unify competing communication protocols — essentially uniting them the way Harald had united the Danes. He was reading a historical novel about Harald at the time. The name "Bluetooth" was suggested as a codename.
The Bluetooth logo is a combination of Harald's runic initials: ᚼ (Hagall) and ᛒ (Bjarkan) — H and B — merged into a single symbol. The codename was never supposed to ship. The marketing team couldn't agree on a permanent name in time, so Bluetooth stuck. Every wireless headphone, keyboard, and speaker on earth carries the initials of a Viking king.
Nintendo has been around since 1889
Nintendo was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi in Kyoto, Japan, in 1889 — 96 years before the NES launched in North America. For most of its existence it was a playing card company, manufacturing handmade hanafuda cards.
Nintendo means "leave luck to heaven" in Japanese — a philosophical statement about the gambling nature of card games. The company dabbled in taxis, love hotels, instant rice, and a TV network before Hiroshi Yamauchi redirected the entire company into electronic toys in the late 1960s.
The Game & Watch handheld, the NES, Super Mario, Zelda — all of it came from a 90-year-old playing card company that decided to try something new. Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, was hired as Nintendo's first artist in 1977 because his father knew the company president.
The Million-Dollar Mistakes
Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix for $50 million
In 2000, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings flew to Dallas to meet with Blockbuster CEO John Antioco. Netflix was losing money and Hastings offered to sell the company for $50 million. Antioco and his team reportedly laughed him out of the room.
The logic at the time was defensible: Netflix had 300,000 subscribers and was burning cash. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and $6 billion in revenue. Late fees alone generated $800 million a year.
By 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Netflix had 20 million subscribers. Today Netflix's market cap exceeds $300 billion. The last remaining Blockbuster store is in Bend, Oregon, and operates as a tourist attraction and occasional Airbnb rental.
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and buried it
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first digital camera — a device the size of a toaster that captured a 0.01 megapixel black-and-white image onto a cassette tape in 23 seconds. It weighed 8 pounds.
He presented it to Kodak management. Their response, as Sasson later described it: "That's cute — but don't tell anyone about it."
Kodak's business was film. Digital photography would destroy film. So they sat on the technology for years, watching it develop elsewhere. They eventually entered the digital camera market in the 1990s — too late, too reluctantly, and too focused on protecting margins that were already doomed.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The digital camera Sasson built in 1975 is now in the Smithsonian. Kodak held the patent on the digital camera and received almost nothing for it.
Notable Figures
The man who built the internet died two weeks after Steve Jobs — and nobody noticed
Dennis Ritchie died on October 12, 2011, at age 70. Steve Jobs had died six days earlier, on October 5.
Ritchie created the C programming language and co-created Unix with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. C became the foundation of virtually all modern operating systems — Unix, Linux, macOS, Windows are all written in C or languages descended from it. iOS, Android, every kernel, every embedded system. Ritchie's work is in every device you own.
The news coverage of his death was minimal. Jobs received global front-page coverage for a week. Ritchie received a few obituaries in technology publications.
Rob Pike, who worked with Ritchie at Bell Labs, wrote: "I was warmly encouraged by Dennis to keep going when I was uncertain. He was always generous with his time and knowledge. The C programming language and Unix will outlive us all."
Format Wars
Flash vs. HTML5: Steve Jobs killed an era with a memo
For most of the 2000s, Adobe Flash ran the interactive web. Games, video players, animations, entire websites — all Flash. It was ubiquitous.
In April 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" explaining why the iPhone would never support it. He called it proprietary, unreliable, a security risk, and a battery drain. "The world is moving to HTML5," he declared.
At the time, HTML5 video was barely functional and CSS animations were primitive. Jobs was describing a future that didn't fully exist yet. But Apple's refusal meant that Flash content was invisible to hundreds of millions of iPhone users, and as the iPhone grew, Flash's footprint shrunk. Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft all followed Apple's lead in deprecating Flash support.
Adobe officially killed Flash on December 31, 2020. Thousands of games, artworks, and interactive experiences became permanently inaccessible overnight. The Internet Archive has a Flash emulator project working to preserve them. Entire digital art movements essentially vanished at midnight.
The First Times
The first spam email was sent in 1978
On May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an unsolicited promotional email to 393 users on ARPANET advertising DEC's new DECSYSTEM-20 computers. It was sent in violation of ARPANET's acceptable use policy, which prohibited commercial messages.
The response was a mix of outrage and mild interest. Several people actually attended the advertised presentation. DEC credited the email with generating $13 million in sales.
Thuerk was reprimanded. He is now known as the "Father of Spam." The word "spam" for unsolicited email comes from a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant where every menu item contains spam — a reference to how spam overwhelms everything around it.
In 2004, Thuerk told Wired magazine he thought the email had been "a reasonable business decision." He has never apologized.
Things That Keep Developers Up at Night
The 2038 problem is Y2K's slower, quieter sibling
Y2K was the panic about 2-digit year storage overflowing at the year 2000. The world spent $300 billion fixing it and nothing exploded.
The Year 2038 problem is different. Unix timestamps — the way most computers track time internally — store the current time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. They store this number as a 32-bit signed integer. That integer maxes out at 2,147,483,647 seconds past the epoch.
That limit hits on January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC.
At that moment, any system still using 32-bit timestamps will roll over to a large negative number and believe it's December 13, 1901. Legacy embedded systems — industrial controllers, medical devices, older servers — are the concern. The fix (switching to 64-bit timestamps) is simple in theory and has been applied to most modern systems. The risk is in the old hardware nobody knows is still running.
The good news: we have until 2038. The bad news: Y2K took 15 years of focused effort to fix and we still almost missed it.
Bonus Round: Things You Can Win Bar Bets With
- The name "Skype" came from "Sky peer-to-peer," shortened to Skyper, then shortened again to Skype because skyper.com was taken.
- HP's name order was decided by a coin flip. Bill Hewlett won. The company could easily have been called Packard-Hewlett.
- Amazon's first product was a book called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter, ordered by a computer science professor in 1995.
- The first hard drive (IBM 350, 1956) stored 5 megabytes of data. It was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and leased for $3,200 per month. Per megabyte, that's $7,000/MB. A modern SSD costs about $0.000006/MB.
The Takeaways
The pattern across all of these stories is the same: the people making the decisions almost never understood what they were deciding. The Bluetooth logo is a Viking king's initials. WiFi came from black hole detection. Nintendo made playing cards. Spam was invented by a marketing manager who thought he was being reasonable.
Technology history isn't a story of visionaries with perfect insight. It's a story of accidents, bad decisions, ignored patents, and the occasional person who was right about something fifteen years too early.
The next time someone acts like the current tech landscape was inevitable — that of course the iPhone won mobile, of course streaming killed video rental — remember that Blockbuster's board laughed Reed Hastings out of a room.
Nobody knows what they're looking at when they're looking at it.