Tag: History

2020: it was an inextinguishable dumpster fire. And to celebrate its end/our survival, Antsy Labs is releasing this A.D. 2020: This Is Fine’ commemorative coin. Emblazoned with the year’s lowlights like the coronavirus, Australian wildfires, and murder hornets, it serves as a reminder of all the hardships we’ve overcome.

I’ve played the old Guess Who? board game with my son and daughter, where you have to ask for hints about who the other player has by asking for clues about the character’s appearance. You ask things like “Do you have hair” and so on.

Way back in elementary school, we had to read a certain number of books each week and it seemed that all the good reads were always checked out. That’s when I took some initiative and meandered over to the non-fiction section and happened upon a book on historic natural disasters.

If you can believe it, today marks the 25th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop. This photo retouching and enhancement application has been part of my daily routine for at least 20 of those years, so it’s definitely had its impact on my work and creative life.

For kids, field trips are one of the biggest highlights in school. They offer a temporary escape from the dreary confines of the classroom once every few months (or weeks, if they’re lucky.) Just because you’re all grown up now doesn’t mean you can’t go on field trips anymore.

Are you a serious Apple fanboy or fangirl? Here’s a poster that you’re probably going to want to hang on your wall. Entitled The Insanely Great History of Apple, it chronicles the past 30 years of technology released by Apple.

This is really bizarre to me, but I bet some rich Apple geek will snap this right up. Apparently, the original contract from April 1, 1976 that established Apple Computer Corp. is hitting the auction block at Sotheby’s.

Are you or a loved one a big Nintendo fanatic? Then you’ll probably want to check out this new book that tells the history of the Big N from its earliest roots. In The History of Nintendo, Volume One, author Florent Gorges (along with Isao Yamzaki) carefully documented the beginnings of Nintendo, dating back to as early as 1889, all the way through 1980.

Here’s a fun video clip that does its best to sum up the history of video games from its earliest roots to present day. The 4-minute clip was created by a team of game design students in Munich, Germany, and it walks us through many of the highlights of video gaming throughout the years.

Can you believe that it’s been 15 years since the original Sony PlayStation came out? In celebration of the dawning of the modern console era (ok, the Dreamcast was really the better console, IMHO), Sony has released this short film documenting the brief history of the PlayStation line…

The first YouTube video was uploaded five years ago – April 23, 2005 to be exact. The site has gone a long way since then, being sold to Google for $1.6 billion, then wasting countless hours of our lives.

One of the most beloved and most famous brands in music, the Walkman was the iPod of my childhood. Funny how both names make no direct reference to their products. Anyway the first ever commercially available Walkman was the TPS-L2, which was released in July 1979; it’s blue-and-silver body still looks sexy to me.

We can file this under art, or under why?/why not?: Invented by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus “downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book” and then, for some strange reason, peruses the archives of the United States Patent and Trademark Office for drawings that match the essential words in the book.

This amazing work of paper art envisions the evolution of the mobile phone using the style of those classic Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls. Artist/Designer/Illustrator Kyle Bean recently created Mobile Evolution, an intricate set of nesting models from cardboard.

With just about every device from cell phones to watches embedding portable media players these days, I thought it might be fun (and maybe a little bit educational) to take a walk down memory lane and examine the evolution the portability of music and media over the last 50-odd years.