Another Boring Topic

Microsoft Windows has attained near ubiquity in the computing world today, running on an estimated 3 out of every 4 computers. It decisively won the operating systems battle that raged across the 1980s and early 1990s, and has no significant competitors today, with its greatest rival on the desktop, Apple, having only a 16% market share. Yet Windows did not win the operating system battle overnight, and its victory was far from assured. It struggled just to get its first release, and spent years facing formidable competition. Few people would have bet on Windows to eventually win, but that is just what eventually happened. This series will (eventually) explore Windows rise to dominance, starting from its origins all the way to its last big gamble, Windows 8.

The post World War 2 era saw a large geopolitical realignment as the Iron Curtain descended and the first phase of the Cold War began. The United States and the Soviet Union raced to replace the increasingly obsolete planes that had fought in WW2 with new fighters and bombers that leveraged the best technologies of the day. In the skies over Korea, these new fighters and bombers would be pitted against each other in the first major military action since the end of WW2. In this video we take a quick look at the major fighters and bombers deployed in Korea on both sides.

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union and a number of allied countries embarked on a bold attempt to significantly increase their computer technology and catch up to the west, via an ambitious effort to produce a clone of the popular IBM S/360 line of mainframes. The result of this program was the RYAD line of Soviet mainframes, a whole family of computers that were a significant leap forward for Soviet computing, and a program whose story is a fascinating one both for the ways in which it succeeded as well as the ways in which it fell short.