The Story Behind the Screen
Every device has a history.
Every invention has a story.
isHistory traces the ideas, people, and moments that built the technology you use every day — serialized, in-depth, and built for readers who want more than a Wikipedia summary.
Featured
Read the series →The Ancient Dream of Artificial Life
From Talos and the Golem to Mary Shelley — how humans dreamed of artificial life thousands of years before the computer. The deep roots of AI in myth, philosophy, and the craftsman's obsession with creating minds.
Minds & Machines · A15The Rise of the Thinking Machine: Deep Learning Takes Over
The story of the deep learning revolution from AlexNet through the Transformer, told as a narrative of rapid, cascading discovery. The fastest scientific revolution in the history of AI — and what it means that machines can now do what only humans could do before.
Series
All series →Minds & Machines
A 78-article deep-dive into the full history of Artificial Intelligence — from the ancient myths of mechanical life to the reasoning models reshaping the world today. Three parallel tracks (Articles, Profiles, Events) across five acts, plus a three-article coda. Series complete.
Series · OngoingWired
A 116-episode narrative history of the internet — from ARPANET's first message in 1969 to the AI web of 2025. Five parallel tracks (Chronicle, Pioneers, Episodes, Consequences, Life & Culture) across seven chronological eras tell the story of how a military communications experiment became the nervous system of civilization.
Latest articles
Sam Altman Returns: The Year That Made OpenAI
The sequel to P16 — Sam Altman's return to OpenAI after the November 2023 board crisis and the year that followed. The year of GPT-4o, the for-profit conversion, the $157 billion valuation, the Sutskever departure, the AGI rhetoric escalation, the Apple partnership, and the deeper question of what the year revealed about OpenAI's mission and Altman's position in the AI industry.
Beyond the SeriesNYT v. OpenAI & Microsoft: The Fair-Use Trial
NYT v. OpenAI — the December 2023 lawsuit that will likely define whether training LLMs on copyrighted articles is fair use or infringement.
Beyond the SeriesGetty Images v. Stability AI: The Copyright Test
Getty v. Stability AI — the January 2023 lawsuit over Stable Diffusion's training on 12 million Getty photos and the 2025 UK ruling.
Explore
Beyond the Series
Standalone essays extending isHistory's series — the topics, profiles, and events the main series couldn't fully treat. Each piece is designed to be read on its own.
Primary-Source ReferenceDocs Catalog
Verified documents, papers, reports, and legislation with canonical source URLs — the primary sources behind the series, each explained in plain English.
Standalone WritingBlog
Essays and field notes on the history of technology — the people, the moments, and the machines. Written when there's something to say, not on a schedule.
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