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Its blocky 8-bit graphics looked nothing like the lavish, rousing illustrations on its game jackets,
but the black-and-faux-wood Atari 2600 game console was the first gaming box to stir the imaginations of millions.
It brought the arcade experience home for $199 (about $800 adjusted for inflation), including a pair of iconic
digital joysticks and games with computer-controlled opponents–a home console first.
It sold poorly in the months after its launch in September 1977, but when games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man
arrived a few years later, sales shot into the millions, positioning Atari at the vanguard of the incipient video gaming revolution.
Beep boop bop beep. Eeeeeeerrrrrrroooooooahhhh ba dong ba dong ba dong psssssssssssh.
In the days before broadband, that was the sound the Internet made. Dial-up modems, like
the US Robotics Sportster, were many families’ first gateway to the Web.
Their use peaked around 2001, as faster alternatives that carried data over cable lines arrived.
But millions of households still have an active dial-up connection. Why?
They’re cheaper and accessible to the millions of Americans who still lack broadband access.
Nintendo’s debut front-loading, rain-gray console showed up just in time to save the games industry
from its excesses, arriving a few years after a crash that capsized many of the field’s biggest players.
The NES was to video gaming what The Beatles were to rock and roll, singlehandedly resuscitating the market
after it launched in 1983. The NES heralded Japan’s dominance of the industry, establishing indelible interface
and game design ideas so archetypal you can find their DNA in every home console hence.
It’s a wonder we didn’t destroy our eyes gaming on the Game Boy’s tiny 2.6-inch olive green screen,
considering how many Nintendo sold (over 200 million when you include the souped-up subsequent
Game Boy Advance.) A chunky, somewhat dismal looking off-white object with garish cerise-colored buttons,
Nintendo’s 1989 handheld invented the modern mobile game. Its modest power and anemic screen forced developers
to distill the essence of genres carried over from consoles.
The result: A paradigm shift in mobile game design that’s influenced everything from competing devoted handhelds to Apple’s iPhone.
Long before cellphones became commonplace, beepers were the way to stay in touch on the go.
Early pagers allowed users to send codes to one another, like 411 for “what’s going on” or 911
to indicate an emergency (for obvious reasons). Message recipients would respond by calling the sender via telephone.
The Bravo Flex, introduced in 1986, became the best-selling pager in the world,according to Motorola, giving many people
their first taste of mobile communication. It could store up to five messages that were 24 characters in length.
By the early 1990s, having a pager became a status symbol, paving the way for more advanced communication devices
like the two-way pager, the cellphone, and eventually the smartphone.
From Rodney King and citizen journalism to America’s Funniest Home Videos and unscripted television,
the camcorder did as much to change the world from 1983 to 2006 as it did to record it.
And though the 1984 JVC VideoMovie wasn’t the first model on the market, it became iconic when Marty McFly
lugged it around in 1985’s Back to the Future. The ruby red model was the first to integrate the tapedeck into the camera.
(Previously, home videographers had to wear a purse-like peripheral that housed the cassette.)
Eventually, camcorders were displaced by flash memory-packing Flip Video cameras and, later, smartphones.
But their impact will live forever, like the movies they captured.
Other Android-powered smartphones existed before the Droid launched in 2009,
but this was the first one popular enough to push Android into the spotlight. It cemented Google’s Android platform as the iPhone’s biggest competition.
(And sowed a rift between Apple and Google, which had previously been close allies.)
Verizon is said to have poured $100 million into marketing the device. It seemingly paid off—
although neither companies disclosed sales figures, analysts estimated that between 700,000 and
800,000 Droids were sold in roughly one month following its launch.
Few products are so iconic that their design remains largely unchanged after more than 20 years.
Such is the case with the ThinkPad line of laptops, which challenged the dominance of Apple and
Compaq in the personal computing industry during the early 1990s by introducing features that
were considered to beinnovative at the time. (It’s also part of the permanent collection at New York City’s MoMA.)
One of the earliest in the line, the ThinkPad 700C, came with a 10.4-inch color touch screen, larger than displays
offered by other competing products. Its TrackPoint navigation device and powerful microprocessors were also considered
to be groundbreaking in the early 1990s.
Like the early Internet, GPS started life as a government-funded innovation.
It wasn’t until President Bill Clinton decided in 2000 to fully open the network that
it became a massive commerical success. (He was filling a promise made by Ronald Reagan.)
Shortly afterwards, companies from TomTom to Garmin introduced personal GPS devices for
automotive navigation (like the Start 45) and other uses. Later, combining GPS technology with
smartphones’ mobile broadband connections gave rise to multibillion dollar location-based services like Uber.
Escape from your creditors and OC?
23. Phonemate 400 Answering Machine
The idea of an answering machine weighing more than a few ounces may sound ludicrous by today’s standards.
But in 1971,PhoneMate’s 10-pound Model 400 was viewed as a glimpse of the future. The Model 400 was considered
the firstanswering machine designed for the home during a time when the technology was only commonly found in
workplaces. It held roughly 20 messages and enabled owners to listen to voicemails privately through an earphone.
BlackBerry made pocket-sized gadgets for accessing email on-the-go before the 6210,
but this was the first to combine the Web-browsing and email experience with the functionality
of a phone. The 6210 let users check email, make phone calls, send text messages, manage their calendar,
and more all from a single device.
(Its predecessor, the 5810, required users to attach a headset in order to make calls.)
All told, the 6210 was a pivotal step forward for mobile devices.
The iPad’s 2010 launch spurred a slew of headlines questioning whether or not
the tablet would replace the laptop as the most important personal computer.
Apple’s iPad wasn’t the first tablet, but it was radically different from what came before.
Earlier devices, like the GriDPad and Palm Pilot, had smaller touchscreens users had to
operate with a stylus. Microsoft unveiled a tablet that ran Windows XP in 2002.
The problem, however, was that these devices didn’t have interfaces that were well-suited
for touch, and they were often clunkier and larger than the iPad. Apple sold 300,000 iPads
on its first day in stores, roughly matching the iPhone’s day-one numbers, and has gone on to dominate the market.
Millennials get plenty of flak over their penchant for instant gratification.
But that’s a desire that crosses generations. Need proof?
When the first affordable, easy-to-use instant shooter, the Polaroid OneStep Land camera,
hit the market in 1977, it quickly became the country’s best-selling camera, 40 years before “Millennials” were a thing.
That Polaroid photographs so dominated 80s-era family albums and pop culture gives the square-framed, often off-color snaps
a retro appeal that today is celebrated by enthusiasts and aped by billion-dollar apps like Instagram.
Amazon began as an online bookstore, so it’s no surprise that its most influential piece of hardware
changed the way we read. The Kindle quickly took over the e-reader market, becoming the best-selling
product in the history of Amazon.com in 2010. Follow-up hardware ventures, such as the Kindle Fire Tablet
and Echo home assistant, have also found success.
The Kindle also marks the beginning of Amazon’s evolution as a digital media company.
Today the company has digital stores for music, movies and video games in addition to books.
Electronics manufacturers were already fiddling with standalone optical storage in the early 1990s,
but the first to market was Toshiba’s SD-3000 DVD player in November 1996.
Obsoleting noisy, tangle-prone magnetic tape (as well as the binary of “original” versus “copy”)
the DVD player made it possible to watch crisp digital movies off a tiny platter just 12 centimeters in diameter
—still the de facto size for mainstream optical media (like Blu-ray) today.
You’d be hard pressed to name a single PlayStation feature that by itself transformed the games industry.
It’s been Sony’s obsession with compacting high-end tech into sleek, affordable boxes, then making all that
power readily accessible to developers, that’s made the PlayStation family an enduring icon of the living room.
Part of Sony’s triumph was simply reading the demographic tea leaves:
The company marketed the PlayStation as a game system for grownups to the kids who’d literally grown up playing
Atari and Nintendo games. And that helped drive the original system, released in 1994, to meteoric sales, including the
PlayStation 2’s Guinness record for bestselling console of all time—a record even Nintendo’s Wii hasn’t come close to breaking.
“Thanks to Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata, we’re all gamers now,” went the headline ofWired’s obituary
for Nintendo’s beloved president, who died last July. Nothing speaks to Iwata’s legacy more than
the company’s game-changing Wii (pun intended).
Nintendo’s tiny pearl-white box, released in 2006, and which users engaged with motion control wands,
had moms and dads and grandpas and grandmas out of their seats and swinging virtual golf clubs or dancing.
No game system has done more to illustrate the omni-generational appeal of interactive entertainment.
For many, Nokia’s colorful candy bar-shaped 3210 defined the cell phone
after it was released in 1999. With more than 160 million sold, it became a
bestseller for the Finnish company.
The 3210 did more than just introduce the cellphone to new audiences.
It also established a few important precedents. The 3210 is regarded to b
be the first phone with an internal antenna and the first to come with games
like Snake preloaded. Gadget reviewers even praised the phone more than 10 years
after its launch for its long battery life and clear reception.
Most had this in their office and home 35. HP DeskJet
Obsoleting noisy, lousy dot matrix technology, devices like 1988’s HP DeskJet gave computer owners
the ability to quietly output graphics and text at a rate of two pages per minute. The DeskJet wasn’t the first
inkjet on the market, but with a $995 price tag, it was the first one many home PC users bought.
Over the 20 years following the product’s launch, HP sold more than 240 million printers in the DeskJet product line,
outputting Christmas letters, household budgets, and book reports by the millions. Even in an increasingly paper-less world,
the inkjet’s technology lives on in 3-D printers, which are fundamentally the same devices, only extruding molten plastic instead of dye.
