Curated playlist
American technology writers
- Eberhard ReesOn the 2nd of October, 1945, Eberhard Friedrich Michael Rees arrived at Logan Field. He was one of the first German rocket scientists transported to the United States by the Army Ordnance Corps under Operation Paperclip. He was…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Bill GatesBill Gates was born on the 28th of October, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, and by age 31 he had become the world's youngest-ever billionaire. That milestone came in 1987, one year after Microsoft's first public offering sent the stock price…
- Eric SchmidtEric Schmidt was born on the 27th of April, 1955, in Falls Church, Virginia, into a family shaped by academia and government service. His father, Wilson Emerson Schmidt, was a professor of international economics who worked at the U.S.…
- Nick SzaboNick Szabo looked at the Internet in the early 1990s and saw a fundamental problem: strangers doing business with each other had no reliable way to enforce agreements. Szabo, an American computer scientist and legal scholar, decided that…
- Andrew NgAndrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London on the 18th of April 1976, to a hematologist father and an arts administrator mother who had both immigrated from Hong Kong. Before he was a teenager, his family had already moved twice: first back to…
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil was born on the 12th of February 1948 in Queens, New York City, to parents who had fled Austria just before World War II. By the time he was twelve years old, he had already taught himself to work with computers at a moment…
- David M. EwaltDavid M. Ewalt's first book arrived in 2013. Its subject was Dungeons & Dragons, a pioneering role-playing game. Ewalt, born in 1976, had spent years in American business journalism covering technology companies and the people running…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Virgil GriffithVirgil Griffith was arrested by the FBI on the 28th of November 2019. The agency accused him of giving North Korea information that could 'help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions.' At the time, Griffith held a research role at a…
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…