A personal history-of-technology newsletter exploring how buttons, from cameras and doorbells to radios and digital interfaces, changed daily life. It is being revived after a long hiatus as the groundwork for a book, mixing narrative history with reflections on technology and human language.
Website: https://www.historyofthebutton.com/
A podcast-style transcript and blog-style issue notes that revisit episodes of the PBS series Computer Chronicles, covering companies like Brøderbund and Gavilan and products from the 1980s. Readers get historical context on early personal computing, product failures, and the technology trends that shaped them.
Seth Juarez's blog-style newsletter explains how language models work and how software can be built around them, from next-token prediction to agentic systems. Recent issues mix accessible tutorials on tokens and agency with historical essays linking the Luddite era to today's generative AI debates.
Elliott King, a digital entrepreneur and AI visibility strategist, revisits his own past talks on the dot com boom and early voice and AI search, annotating what he got right and wrong with timestamped transcript links. The newsletter offers a reflective, first-person look at how search and human-machine interaction have evolved since 2016.
One short email a week with hand-picked newsletters from the index. Free, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
