Software technical writer for many years, with a background in social sciences, Anne-Laure Freant is passionate about anything related to knowledge production, history of techniques and sciences.
visual-archive
In 1996, computer engineer Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive with the mission to provide "universal access to all knowledge." Today, that vision drives the methodical work happening in scanning centers where operators carefully digitize books one page at a time, preserving both the content and the physical
cryptoanalysis
Known to posterity as "The Mother of Cryptology," Elizebeth Friedman's extraordinary career spanned three decades and fundamentally shaped the foundations of modern intelligence work. From breaking enemy codes in two world wars to dismantling criminal networks during Prohibition, Friedman's intellectual brilliance and dedication helped
biography
It all started with a very ambitious and painfully slow project: the United States National Census. The rise of the Tabulation Project In the late 1880s, the United States confronted a pressing administrative challenge: the decennial census of 1880 had taken between six and eight years to process, rendering its
visual-archive
Imagine rooms and corridors filled up not with books, but with reels of magnetic-tapes. Thousands and thousands of magnetic tapes stocked in their cases, stacked on shelves, over kilometers of corridors, meticulously numbered and ordered. In the middle of the room, a cartwheel or two, needed by the librarian to
WomenInTech
This is surprisingly not a very well-known dimension of the computing history. Before becoming the name of a machine, "computer" was actually a profession, that existed somewhere between the 1860s and the 1960s. Decades before actual computers came to be, "human computers" were mathematicians employed in
computing-history
Douglas Engelbart was an American engineer and computer science pioneer known for leading - with his team from the Standford Research Institute - "the Mother of all Demos" in 1968. His contributions to computer sciences, and especially to the field of human-computer interactions, go way beyond the iconic
computing-history
I turned 40 in 2024. If somebody had told me, when I was in high-school in the early 2000s, that my future was to work on a laptop at home, I wouldn't have believed it. I guess nobody would have believed that a global pandemic and national "
computing-history
This story marks one of the most important moments in the history of computing. Tim Berners-Lee's invention was so revolutionary that it spread across the globe within a few years, transforming how human civilization communicates and manages information through the use of hypertext. The creation of the World
infrastructure
Inventing the Telegraph I didn’t suspect—until recently—that submarine cables existed long before the Internet and fiber optics were invented. I had always assumed we waited until the invention of the telephone to start laying thousands of kilometers of copper cables across the ocean floor to transmit information
dataviz
In the 1960s, punched cards and tabulation machines had already been in use for several decades. They were first employed at scale for the United States census in 1890, using Hollerith tabulating machines—a technology that laid the foundations for what would become IBM. Over time, these systems became standard
video-game
Lucas... Like in George Lucas? For a good part of my childhood, I played Monkey Island (I & II) using floppy disks. The game also came with a paper code-wheel, which was required to start the game. It was clever, fun and playful just like the game itself, involving pirate