Telos by Shrikant Kumar
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  1. The Library in the Air
  2. A Factory for Other People’s Ideas
  3. The Blue Dot
  4. Paying a Stranger
  5. A Computer of One’s Own

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#Open Standards

Shared rules that let things built by strangers work together.

5 products · latest update first

Scattered pale points on the left and right of a dark field, linked by dozens of thin amber curves that all pass through a single glowing switch at the centre, marked with two arrows pointing in opposite directions and ringed in violet.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

c. 3000 BCE → 2026

Digital Payments

Paying a Stranger

44 min read Communication Systems Design
Concentric dashed ellipses labelled kernel, drivers, services and programs surround a glowing core, with many small windows labelled with process numbers orbiting around it.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1956 → 2013

Operating Systems

A Computer of One’s Own

25 min read Systems Design History of Computing
A single amber line of commits runs across a dark field from left to right. Violet branches split off it, run alongside, sometimes merge back, and multiply towards the right until the field is crossed by many parallel lines.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1950s–1960s → 2025

Open Source Software

The Gift That Runs the World

36 min read Programming Open Standards
A pendulum hangs from the top centre, swinging between a server rack on the left and a browser window on the right, with faint earlier positions marked 1995, 2005, 2013 and 2021.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1993 → 2024

Web Frameworks

Where Should the Program Run?

25 min read Programming The Web
A large golden @ sign glows at the centre of a dark field. Around it, dozens of small circles, each a separate mail server, are joined by thin lines, and tiny envelopes travel along the lines between them.
Updated 22 Oct 2026

1965 → 2026

Email

An Address Anyone Can Write To

52 min read Communication Open Standards

Often found together

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