Five stories from the wider world of technology that caught our eye, with a note on why each one matters to a business like yours. Last updated 28 October 2026.
On this day28 October 1955Computing history
Bill Gates is born
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle on 28 October 1955. Twenty years later he co-founded Microsoft with his school friend Paul Allen, and by 1987 he was the world’s youngest billionaire, at 31.
The photograph is his 1977 police mugshot, taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after a speeding stop at which he had forgotten his driving licence. Microsoft was a tiny company in Albuquerque at the time, writing BASIC for the Altair hobbyist computer.
Eleven months after Gates was born, computing looked very different. In September 1956 IBM shipped the world’s first hard disk drive, the IBM 350, as part of its RAMAC 305 system. It stored five million characters, about 5 MB, on fifty 24-inch platters, the complete system weighed over a ton, and it leased for $3,200 a month, roughly $36,000 in today’s money. Units went to customers by forklift, and IBM’s own archive photo of one being hoisted into a Pan Am aircraft is still doing the rounds online seventy years later. A modern phone holds more than twenty thousand of them.
Also born on this day: Ted Hoff, in 1937, one of the inventors of the microprocessor and lead architect of the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, in 1971.
Bill Gates, 1977. Photo: Albuquerque Police Department, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.The disk stack from an IBM RAMAC 305, 1956. Fifty platters, five million characters. Photo: Mikaël Restoux, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.A complete IBM 305 RAMAC system. The disk unit is the cabinet on the left. Photo: Norsk Teknisk Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On this day29 October 1969Computing history
The internet says “lo”
At 10:30pm on 29 October 1969, UCLA student programmer Charley Kline tried to log in to a computer at Stanford Research Institute, 350 miles away, over the brand-new ARPANET. He typed L, then O, and the far end crashed.
About an hour later, after SRI’s Bill Duvall adjusted the machine, Kline tried again and logged in successfully. So the first two characters ever carried over the network that grew into the internet were “lo”, which is either an accident or the most apt opening line in the history of technology.
The log book entry from that night, in Kline’s handwriting, simply reads “talked to SRI host to host”. The machine that made it possible was the Interface Message Processor, a ruggedised Honeywell minicomputer built by BBN, and the first router. Every remote support session we run today traces its ancestry back to that one line in a log book.
The IMP log for 29 October 1969: “talked to SRI host to host”. Photo: Charles S. Kline, UCLA Kleinrock Center for Internet Studies, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.The 1969 Interface Message Processor, the first router. Photo: DARPA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This month's feature stories
AI at workOctober 2026
01
Google’s new AI “coworker” gets its own email address
At its Gemini at Work event on 8 October, Google Cloud unveiled the Gemini Agent, a single AI agent for work. A manager describes a role, such as events coordinator, and Gemini creates a coworker agent with its own Workspace email address, calendar, Drive storage and a listing in the company directory. You give it a goal and it carries on working in the cloud, sometimes for hours or days, after you close your laptop.
It works across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and Calendar, and can reach into Microsoft 365 and Slack. Every action it takes lands in an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than to a person, and real-time spend caps pause it when a project hits its limit. Google has not announced pricing or a general release date; financial services and legal versions are in preview.
Microsoft’s reworked Copilot introduces Code, which lets anyone describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in plain language and have Copilot build it. The examples Microsoft gives range from small desktop widgets to interactive dashboards and cloud-hosted internal apps that can be shared with a team. It runs in a sandbox, can be hosted inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, and uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot.
Alongside it comes Autopilot, a persistent agent you give a name, role and goal, which keeps working in the cloud while you are away, and Today, a command centre across mail, calendar, Teams, meetings and tasks that went into private preview in October. The new features are reaching Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme first, and Code, Cowork and Autopilot are billed on usage rather than per user.
AI is finding software bugs faster than the world can patch them
In late October, outages hit government websites in Europe and elsewhere after AI-driven research uncovered weaknesses in PHP, a programming language that powers a large part of the internet. Some operators could not patch in time and took their sites offline until they were secure. Research from threat-intelligence firm VulnCheck found that AI helped double the number of flaws discovered year on year.
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told Reuters he expects several years of near-constant alarms, with serious new vulnerabilities appearing regularly. Not everyone sees a free-for-all: curl’s lead developer Daniel Stenberg points out that AI-found bugs are often hard to exploit, and Prince himself argues the wave will be a net positive once the flaws it exposes are fixed.
MIT built a computer out of bacteria. It takes eight hours to add two numbers
Engineers at MIT have turned a common bacterium, Pantoea agglomerans, into living transistors and printed them onto a growth medium as “living circuit boards”. Each colony is switched on or off by one molecule, detects another and emits a third, which the next colony picks up. Colonies sit about five millimetres apart so signals flow in one direction, just like a wire.
The largest circuit so far wires 24 bacterial colonies together to add two inputs, and a calculation takes around eight hours. The point is not speed. The team imagines coating plant roots or leaves with circuits that sense drought or pests and trigger a response, such as producing a fungicide. The work was published in Nature Chemical Biology.
Researchers at Ohio State University grew shiitake mushrooms in petri dishes, dried the mycelium in the sun and wired it into a purpose-built circuit. The result behaves as a memristor, a component that remembers how much current has passed through it, and it switched between states about 5,850 times a second with 90 per cent accuracy. The slowest commercial memristors run at a little under twice that speed.
Higher voltages degraded the mushrooms’ performance, which the team fixed in the most agricultural way possible: by adding more mushrooms to the circuit. Published in PLOS One, the paper suggests low-cost, biodegradable components that need very little standby power, and ends with the line “the future of computing could be fungal.” It will not be powering your laptop any time soon.
