Happy Birthday, Digital Stories. Time for Presents!
Exactly a year ago, on March 1, 2021, the Digital Stories site was born: a small island of essays and reportage about the latest technologies and the challenges they put in front of us. Together we set out on a journey where two worlds meet, the humanities and technology, in search of our shared future as a species. Now it is time for a short look back at the year, and then for presents. They are definitely worth it!
142The Dreamer Who Should Have Been Bill Gates
“It was not a happy moment when I realized that computers were being built to make money, not to make minds,” says Gary Kildall. He wrote the first operating system for personal computers. And, according to legend, he let slip the golden contract with IBM that could have put him at the top of the software world—the place Bill Gates and Microsoft won instead. He is, without a doubt, a legend of the computer age. He died at just 52, but left an enormous mark on computer history.
143Save Food!
Restaurants and shops are forced to throw away enormous amounts of food, while at the same time many people go hungry. foodObox, a mobile app created by two young Bulgarians, lets us drastically reduce this problem. It rescues food from the bin and lets each of us buy quality dishes and products at a serious discount. Here is how the app works and why the idea is actually so good and so important…
144The Past in the Future: The Legacy of Todor Slavchev
The whole Bulgarian 20th century is there. Tsar Boris III, Georgi Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov appear; the Bulgarian authorities are welcomed in Macedonia in the early 1940s, and soon after our soldiers storm the German lines; the People's Court and the first rallies of the 1990s are caught on film. The photographic archive of Todor Slavchev is a bottomless treasure trove that reaches us thanks to his granddaughter, Yana Uzunova. Enjoy these extraordinary pictures and read their remarkable story…
145The Bauhaus: When Technology Met Art
These days we have almost grown used to seeing technology and art as rivals, yet this story reminds us that when the two come together, the results can be astonishing. The Bauhaus was a school where both paths converged; it lasted only a handful of years at the start of the last century, but it left behind an entire movement in architecture and art. Its story comes to us from the past to teach us about the roads of the future…
146The Living Museum of Bulgarian Technology
“These are the last years in which something serious can still be done to save the vanishing history of Bulgarian technology. Now is the time for concrete deeds,” says Anton Orush. And his deeds are astonishing. Over 12 years of enormous effort, he has assembled the most complete collection of Bulgarian technology in existence, along with a whole sea of information about its past and present. At just 30, he is a living encyclopedia, and his home is a remarkable library of stories. Let us set off on an unforgettable technological visit.
147And Yet… Life Is Stronger
“Life is stronger!” Stronger than everything that piles up on us every day, than the coronavirus, than the measures against it, than the battles against the measures… than everything. Because while we wander between the extremes of a confused present, while we work ourselves up and turn bitter against one another… life simply goes on. That is exactly what the icon painter Dian Kostov wants to remind us of. Drawing on his rare art, he and like-minded friends created a project by that name, and thanks to it more than 150 children, born in these last years that have been so hard on all of us, smile down at us from tall silos in the middle of the grayness.
148The Programmer Who Sent Humans to the Moon
The woman in the photo is Dr. Margaret Hamilton, head of the team that built the software that carried Apollo 11 to our night luminary, the mission that took the first humans to the Moon in 1969. And that stack of binders? It's the software Margaret and her team wrote. What were the biggest challenges back when the profession of software engineer didn't even exist yet?
1492022, Seen from Sixty Years Ago: What Did the Science Fiction Writers Get Right?
In the 1960s Isaac Asimov wrote a remarkable essay containing some astonishingly perceptive predictions. Around the same time, the first issue of the magazine Kosmos ran a similar piece collecting the ideas of Soviet science fiction writers on the subject. What did the writers get right, and where did their expectations fall flat?
150The Last Gift and the Magi
On the eve of the holidays, we instinctively want to steer clear of uncomfortable subjects. Sometimes, though, the holidays are exactly the right moment to face them. The Last Gift of Man is a stunning multimedia project by two exceptionally talented young journalists: a deep, personal and professionally told story worth hearing, reading and feeling right now…
151The Digital Prophet Who Came to Hate the Internet
“You are not the customer of the internet giants, you are their product.” “Social media is worse than cigarettes. Cigarettes don’t make you degrade. They kill you, but you still remain yourself.” You will hardly believe that these words belong to one of the pioneers of today’s digital world. Jaron Lanier popularized the term “virtual reality” and created the concept of avatars. His path crossed those of Richard Feynman, Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol. For a long time he was at the height of fame, on first-name terms with Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Bill Gates. In a single afternoon he personally showed his pioneering virtual reality goggles to the Dalai Lama, Leonard Bernstein and Terry Gilliam. And today he is a preacher of sorts, speaking out against the flaws of the digital world.
152Vu, the Laptop Called “Grandma,” and the Bet That Made Him a Programmer
The digital story of Vu(nyo) Nguyen barely fits on one planet. Born in Vietnam, he landed in Sofia as a child and later left for the United States, where a short but dizzying career at outlets like The New York Times and MSNBC followed. His older son Adi had never seen his relatives in person when… one day he called the laptop “Grandma.” In that moment Vu and his wife decided they had had enough of America and came back to Bulgaria with no plans at all. So what happened next?
153The Beauty Who “Invented” Wi-Fi
They called Hedy Lamarr “the most beautiful actress in Hollywood.” And also… “the inventor who made Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS possible.” Was her invention really so important that it… could have ended World War II sooner, and how did she find time for it between six marriages and a dazzling Hollywood career? A story like a film from the analog age that turned out to matter for the digital one.
154The Fake News Hunter
It is called Tanbih, it comes from Qatar, and it promises to rescue us elegantly from fake news and disinformation. We meet its creator, Dr. Preslav Nakov, a world-class specialist in natural language processing with artificial intelligence. How can an algorithm tell that a news story is fake… before it has even been written?!
155Linus the Lionheart
“Nobody has ever told me I'm cool. I'm just the thing halfway between a normal person and a tech geek,” says Linus Torvalds. The computer engineer is surely one of the heroes of today's online world: the projects he created, Linux and Git, laid much of the groundwork for life on the internet as we know it. What kind of man is Linus? How does fame sit with him? And what does it feel like to start… an accidental revolution?
156The Meme: The Next Step in Evolution
Technology has exploded and we have access to an unthinkable ocean of information, yet what makes us laugh most often these days is… the same dozen pictures. Is there any logic to this phenomenon at all… or is it the art of our time? What is a meme? A descendant of the joke, anonymous online folklore? Or… a phenomenon that marks a new stage in the evolution of humankind? We'll look into the philosophy behind it and try to explain how it came about, and to have some fun along the way, we'll tell the stories of some of the most recognizable meme heroes.
157Uncle Bob, the Programmers' Much-Hated Moses
Robert Martin, or simply Uncle Bob, is an iconic figure in the history of programming. He formulated the SOLID principles, which every beginner programmer is expected to know by heart at their first job interview. Uncle Bob is also one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, which changed work in the industry forever. So why doesn't he enjoy the fame he deserves today?
158Maria, MasterChef and Life's Recipes from the Stone House
Should we watch not only what we eat but also what we feed… our soul? Maria Zhekova won MasterChef. She is a photographer and an influencer… just not like most of them. Glossy photos leave her cold; what moves her is a return to tradition and the restoration of the stone house where her heart lives. How did this young woman bring the glossy show and the old traditions together?
159Who Are You, Satoshi Nakamoto?
People drawn to the blockchain have been asking this question for a decade now. Why did the creator of bitcoin vanish, and what did he leave behind before he withdrew? We follow the clues Satoshi Nakamoto left in search of his true face, and of one of the most thrilling stories of the digital age.
160Boris Georgiev: The Art of Living and Art as Life
The life of the painter Boris Georgiev reads like a condensed history of the whole contradictory 20th century. He met some of the great figures of his time, among them Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore. He left us his original paintings and something even more precious: an impressive, wise worldview in which life cannot be separated from art.
