Amazon Web Services, hosted in data centers like this one in Virginia, supports thousands of websites, apps and online services – but not during its recent DNS outage. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

What is DNS? A computer engineer explains this foundational piece of the web – and why it’s the internet’s Achilles’ heel

The Domain Name System, like most pieces of the internet, was designed to be distributed across many computers. Concentration on few cloud providers is changing that.
Clifford Berry stands by the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Courtesy of Iowa State University Library Special Collections and University Archives

What was the first computer?

The first computer, named the ABC, was built at Iowa State University. But for a long time, few had heard of it.

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