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People have been leaving public messages since the first artists painted hunting scenes on cave walls. But it was the invention of electricity that forever changed the way we talked to each other. In 1844, the first message was sent via telegraph. Samuel Morse, who created the binary Morse Code decades before electronic computers were even possible, tapped out , “What hath God wrought?” It was a prophetic first post.

World War II accelerated the invention of digital computers, but they were primarily single-use machines, designed to calculate artillery firing tables or solve scientific problems. As computers got more powerful, the idea of time-sharing became attractive. Computers were expensive, and they spent most of their time idle, waiting for a user to enter keystrokes at a terminal. Time-sharing allowed many people to interact with a single computer at the same time.

Part 0: The Precambrian era of digital communication (1969–1979)

Soon after time-sharing was invented, people started sending messages to other users. But since every computer spoke its own unique machine language and had its own way of storing and retrieving data, none of these machines could talk to each other. The solution to this problem came out of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and was thus dubbed the “ARPANET.” When two different computers connected to each other through an “IMP” (Interface Message Processor, the first router) in 1969, it was a massive breakthrough .

Enlarge / More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years. (credit: Samuel Axon)

War never changes , but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.

In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4 -like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.

It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

“Gadgets aren’t fun anymore,” sighed my wife, watching me tap away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the couch with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch.

And it’s true: The smartphone has all but eliminated entire classes of gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 players, GPS maps, and even flashlights. But arguably no style of gadget has been so thoroughly superseded as the personal digital assistant, the handheld computer that dominated the late '90s and early 2000s. The PDA even set the template for how its smartphone successors would render it obsolete, moving from simple personal information management to encompass games, messaging, music, and photos.

But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and how they paved the way for what we use now.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Signs point to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors showing up in actual, real-world, human-purchasable computers in the next couple of months after years of speculation and another year or so of hype.

For those who haven’t been following along, this will allegedly be Qualcomm’s first Arm processor for Windows PCs that does for PCs what Apple’s M-series chips did for Macs, promising both better battery life and better performance than equivalent Intel chips. This would be a departure from past Snapdragon chips for PCs, which have performed worse than (or, at best, similarly to) existing Intel options, barely improved battery life, and come with a bunch of software incompatibility problems to boot.

Early benchmarks that have trickled out look promising for the Snapdragon X. And there are other reasons to be optimistic—the Snapdragon X Elite’s design team is headed up by some of the same people who made Apple Silicon so successful in the first place.

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What comes after OLED?

With OLED-equipped TVs, monitors, and other gadgets slowly becoming more readily available at lower prices, attention is turning to what the next landmark consumer display tech will be.

Micro LED often features in such discussions, but the tech is not expected to start hitting consumer devices until the 2030s . Display makers are also playing with other futuristic ideas, like transparent and foldable screens. But when it comes to technology that could seriously address top user concerns—like image quality , price , and longevity—quantum dots seem the most pertinent at the moment.

Enlarge / For the previous EcoCar 3 competition , student teams turned Camaro sportscars into hybrids. For the EcoCar EV challenge, their job is to improve on the Cadillac Lyriq. (credit: EcoCar)

Across the country, teams of students at 15 different universities are in the middle of a four-year project, dissecting an electric vehicle and figuring out ways to make it even better. The program, called the EcoCar EV Challenge, was founded more than three decades ago by the US Department of Energy and is run by the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

Over the last 35 years, more than 30,000 students from 95 universities have participated in the EcoCar Challenge, part of the DOE's Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition. Each segment spans four years, with the most recent cycle beginning in 2023 with a new Cadillac Lyriq donated by the General Motors automaker.

The students take this competition very seriously, as participation alone brings a lot of benefits, including the potential for a lifelong career path.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt "A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style." (credit: AI Pictures That Go Hard / X )

When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a lot of people off guard . The launch began an innovative and tumultuous period in AI history, marked by a sense of wonder and a polarizing ethical debate that reverberates in the AI space to this day.

Last week, OpenAI turned off the ability for new customers to purchase generation credits for the web version of DALL-E 2, effectively killing it. From a technological point of view, it's not too surprising that OpenAI recently began winding down support for the service. The 2-year-old image generation model was groundbreaking for its time, but it has since been surpassed by DALL-E 3's higher level of detail, and OpenAI has recently begun rolling out DALL-E 3 editing capabilities .

But for a tight-knit group of artists and tech enthusiasts who were there at the start of DALL-E 2, the service's sunset marks the bittersweet end of a period where AI technology briefly felt like a magical portal to boundless creativity. "The arrival of DALL-E 2 was truly mind-blowing," illustrator Douglas Bonneville told Ars in an interview. "There was an exhilarating sense of unlimited freedom in those first days that we all suspected AI was going to unleash. It felt like a liberation from something into something else, but it was never clear exactly what."

I’d wager a guess that we are, as a species, rather fond of our home planet (our wanton carbon emissions notwithstanding). But the ugly truth is that the Earth is doomed. Someday, the Sun will enter a stage that will make life impossible on the Earth’s surface and eventually reduce the planet to nothing more than a sad, lonely chunk of iron and nickel.

The good news is that if we really put our minds to it—and don’t worry, we’ll have hundreds of millions of years to plan—we can keep our home world hospitable, even long after our Sun goes haywire.

A waking nightmare

The Sun is slowly but inexorably getting brighter, hotter, and larger with time. Billions of years ago, when collections of molecules first began to dance together and call themselves alive, the Sun was roughly 20 percent dimmer than it is today. Even the dinosaurs knew a weaker, smaller star. And while the Sun is only halfway through the main hydrogen-burning phase of its life, with 4-billion-and-change years before it begins its death throes, the peculiar combination of temperature and brightness that make life possible on this little world of ours will erode in only a few hundred million years. A blink of an eye, astronomically speaking.

Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 13. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since Framework showed off its first prototypes in February 2021 , we've generally been fans of the company's modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops.

Not that the company's hardware releases to date have been perfect—each Framework Laptop 13 model has had quirks and flaws that range from minor to quite significant , and the Laptop 16's upsides struggle to balance its downsides. But the hardware mostly does a good job of functioning as a regular laptop while being much more tinkerer-friendly than your typical MacBook, XPS, or ThinkPad.

But even as it builds new upgrades for its systems, expands sales of refurbished and B-stock hardware as budget options , and promotes the re-use of its products via external enclosures , Framework has struggled with the other side of computing longevity and sustainability: providing up-to-date software.