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Curated playlist

Cross-platform software

  • Python (programming language)The Python programming language is named after a British comedy group, not a snake.
  • JavaScriptJavaScript was first built in just ten days in 1995. Brendan Eich wrote it at Netscape for the web.
  • GmailOn the 1st of April 2004, Google announced Gmail as a limited beta and offered every user one gigabyte of storage. Rival mail services offered far less at the time. Today Gmail is the largest email service in the world, with 1.8 billion…
  • Solana (blockchain platform)In November 2022, the FTX bankruptcy sent the price of Solana's SOL token down roughly 40% within one day.
  • WhatsAppWhatsApp reported more than 3 billion monthly active users in May 2025, which makes it the most used messenger app in the world. Its name is a pun, built to sound like the greeting "what's up". Yet the service began as little more than a…
  • EthereumEthereum's name came from a list of science fiction elements. Vitalik Buterin liked how the word sounded.
  • FLACFLAC gives back a bit-for-bit copy of the original audio. Josh Coalson released the lossless format in 2001.
  • LinuxLinux is an operating system family whose kernel Linus Torvalds first released on the 17th of September 1991. It now runs all 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That is a strange destination for a project that began with one…
  • Adobe FlashAdobe turned down the chance to buy the tool that became Flash in 1995, then bought its owner in 2005.
  • Telegram (software)In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram, the messaging service he built with his brother Nikolai, had passed one billion monthly active users. The app began as two quiet phone releases. The iOS version arrived on the 14th of…
  • Google PhotosGoogle Photos began in May 2015 as a spinoff from the failed social network Google+.
  • Tor (network)Tor is a network built to hide who is talking to whom, and in 2012 the United States National Security Agency wrote a classified slide deck about it titled "Tor Stinks." One line from those slides reads: "We will never be able to…
  • Cardano (blockchain platform)Cardano's founder Charles Hoskinson left Ethereum in 2014 after a dispute with Vitalik Buterin.
  • MoneroIn 2020, the IRS offered a $625,000 bounty for tools to trace Monero.

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