The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn’t supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology […]
In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app – not as popular, but growing fast, and already hugely influential among the tech set – looked […]
The hottest toy of 1998 was sort of adorable, and sort of annoying. It couldn’t do much – couldn’t do anything, really – but it could look at you, it could say some nonsense phrases, and it seemed uncannily aware of the world around it. That’s all Furby needed to pretty much take over the […]
For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You could pause live TV. And […]
Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here’s a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing into the green Mario-ish pipes coming from both the […]
The Nintendo Power Glove was not good. It’s important that you know that. The Power Glove was ambitious, impressive, even important – one of the very first mainstream devices that let you control a game using your body instead of just your thumbs – but it was not good. In some ways, its not-good-ness is […]
If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there’s a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat with your friends or your crush. Maybe […]