You’ve almost certainly played a game on your phone today. Some beautiful, high-res game with a rainbow of colors and fluid animation. You’ve got a lot of power in your pocket these days, but portable gaming owes a lot to the chunky old Game Boy, which is 25 years old today.
Gmail’s officially entering its tender tween years today
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Take heed, because there’s a lot of bad stuff out there on the internet today. But there’s one thing that’s very good and useful: it’s Gmail, and today your favorite email service is celebrating its tenth birthday.
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I have a confession: My brother and I destroyed my Easy-Bake Oven. I had the 1981 Mini-Wave model, the boxy, yellow microwave style, which was, in my 7-year-old mind, the only kind of Easy-Bake there was. One day, my 4-year-old brother had a brilliant idea—to "cook" a green plastic steak from our 1972 Mattel Tuff Stuff Play Food set. After all, we should be able to cook a steak, right? It fit into the slot perfectly, and for some reason, I didn’t try to stop him. The plastic steak, of course, gave off a noxious odor as it melted inside the machine. Goodbye, Easy-Bake Oven. Goodbye, little round chocolate cakes we loved to bake and eat.
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Ten years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg gave birth to The Facebook and launched an online social revolution in his Harvard dorm room. We all know what happened next—thanks in no small part to an eight-time Academy Award-nominated film. With such humble beginnings, no one could have predicted the wild success (and cries of outrage) the site’s many iterations would bring over the years.
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Fifty years ago today, in 1964, the US Surgeon General released one of the most progressive documents on smoking of its time, stating definitively that, yes, smoking tobacco can indeed be fatal. And with it, the Untied States’ cigarette culture began its (often frustratingly, grudgingly slow) overhaul from one of hipness and health to shame and decrepitude.
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On December 9th, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart—along with 17 researchers from Stanford—gave a 90-minute live public demonstration of the technology they’d been working on for the previous 6 years. It changed the face of technology—and you can watch it in full here.
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Polaroid is a non-entity these days, but instant photography lives on in the digital photos we produce at dazzling speeds. We’re addicted, and that’s what made Polaroid the hottest tech company in the world when its first blockbuster consumer product, the Model 95 Land Camera, went on sale. That was 65 years ago on Black Friday, November 26th, 1948.
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We were promised supersonic flights. Today, we stay well below the speed of sound. We were promised transatlantic flights from New York to London in 3 and a half hours. Today, that flight takes us 7 hours. We were promised the future of flying. That future hasn’t existed for 10 years. The last flight of the Concorde was on October 24, 2003, we’ve been flying on slow-haul planes since.
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Incredible as it may seem, today 4chan turns a full 10 years old—hello tween years! But 4chan is, let’s say, advanced for its age. And the precursor to pretty much the entire internet as you know it has given us a whole lot to think about over the years.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
