Topic
Tech History
Nintendo released the Game Boy in Japan in April 1989, and its green-tinted screen and AA batteries made it the handheld that outlasted flashier color rivals. Tech History follows devices like that, the ones that changed what people did with their hands and ears. The Sony Walkman TPS-L2 made music private and portable in 1979. Sony's PlayStation, launched in Japan in December 1994, pulled video games toward an older audience. Apple's iPod arrived in October 2001 and reshaped the music business within a few years. Cameras run through the whole topic, from the Polaroid SX-70 of 1972 to the Leica M6, introduced in 1984 and reissued in 2022, and the Fujifilm X100, which went on sale in 2011 and made a fixed-lens compact desirable again. Each article explains how the technology worked and what made it different at the time, and how it holds up for anyone thinking of buying one now. The Technics SL-1200, first sold in 1972, is still found in DJ booths half a century later.
Stories
Tech4 min read
Ricoh GR: The Pocket Camera Street Shooters Won't Give Up
Ricoh's 28mm compact began as a magnesium film camera in 1996. Thirty years later, street photographers still leave the house with one in a jacket pocket.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Game Boy: How Gunpei Yokoi Won With Old Tech
Nintendo's 1989 handheld had a four-shade screen and no backlight. It buried every color rival anyway, thanks to a designer who trusted old parts.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Sony Walkman and the Birth of Personal Audio
How a blue and silver cassette player from Tokyo turned music into something you carry, and why the TPS-L2 still shapes the way we listen.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
The iPod: How Apple Put a Wheel in Every Pocket
A $399 Mac accessory with a monochrome screen turned into 450 million units and the white earbuds that marked a decade. The wheel did most of the work.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Nothing Phone (1): Carl Pei's See-Through Comeback
After leaving OnePlus, Carl Pei set up shop in London and sold a phone you could see into. The lights on the back did most of the marketing.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Analogue Pocket: The Game Boy, Rebuilt in Silicon
Analogue's handheld doesn't emulate the Game Boy. It rebuilds one in programmable silicon, then gives it a screen with ten times the resolution.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Watches4 min read
Omega Speedmaster Professional: The Moonwatch Story
A 1957 racing chronograph survived eleven brutal NASA tests, rode Gemini into orbit and became the first watch worn on the Moon.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech5 min read
Leica M6 and the Film Camera Revival
A metered rangefinder from 1984 became the camera of the analog comeback. Why the Leica M6 matters, and what changed when Leica brought it back.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Fujifilm X100: The Camera TikTok Made Impossible to Buy
Fujifilm built a fixed-lens digital camera that looked like a 1960s rangefinder. Six generations later it is the hardest camera in the shop to find.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Tech4 min read
Polaroid SX-70: Edwin Land's Folding Miracle
In 1972 Polaroid sold a single-lens reflex camera that folded flat and spat out pictures that developed in daylight. Nothing else has matched it since.
By Quiet Menace Editors /
Related Hubs
All TopicsIndustrial DesignCamerasJapanGamingMusicAudioNintendoSonyTeenage EngineeringOmega