He created the personal computer, then walked away
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he explained to the bank, but for something much more important, something nobody had done before. He planned to build an affordable personal computer. This is the story of the man who created the personal computer, launched the careers of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, and decided—at the height of his success—to walk away, buy a horse farm, and go back to school to become a doctor."
There's a sunken galleon worth $20 billion, but no one can agree on who owns it
From Remy Tumin for the NYT: "When the San José made its final voyage from Seville, Spain, to the Americas in 1706, the Spanish galleon was considered to be one of the most complex machines ever built. Then it was destroyed in an ambush by the British in 1708 in what is known as Wager’s Action, sinking off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, with a haul of gold, jewels and other goods that could be worth upward of $20 billion today. Some experts say that number is inflated. But the myth built around the San José has prompted the Colombian government to keep its exact location a secret as a matter of national security."
I thought my mother was an only child but there was an aunt no one talked about
From Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic: "I have an aunt whom no one speaks about and who herself barely speaks. She is, at the time of this tweet, 70 years old and living in a group home in upstate New York. I have met her just once. When i first discovered that my mother had a younger sister, I reacted as if I’d been told about the existence of a new planet. Now I understood my grandmother’s annual trips to the local department store to buy Christmas presents, although we were Jewish. For almost two years, my mother had a sister. Then, at the age of 6 and a half, she watched as her only sibling was spirited away. It would be 40 years before she saw her again."
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