Some things have become so ubiquitous that we never stop to wonder what came before them. Take the neat row of icons stacked at the bottom of your Mac screen. Before 1984, these little icons simply ...

When you click on that red and white envelope icon to access your email, you don’t think “this is an envelope, which means mail.” Instead, your brain jumps immediately to “Gmail.” Good icons like ...

Susan Kare, “Sketches for Graphic User Interface Icon” (detail) (1982), ink on graph paper, on view in ‘This Is for Everyone’ at MoMA (gift of the designer, 2015, photo by the author for Hyperallergic ...

Fifty years ago, the word “computer” had a very different meaning. Prior to World War II, the word referred not to machines, but to people (mostly women in order to save costs) hired as human ...

When you install Windows 7 and Windows 8 you will find that your desktop has only the Recycle Bin icon and any other icons enabled by your computer manufacturer. If you wish to add other icons such as ...

If you find that your desktop icons are missing, type gpedit.msc in the Start menu and hit Enter to open the Group Policy Editor. Now select the Desktop folder, present in the right pane. On the right ...