Midway advertises its new game in 1982.Thirty-five years after its release, Ms. Pac-Man is one of the most successful and enduring video games of all time. After debuting publicly on February 3, 1982, in its original form as an arcade game from Bally...
Retrology
Atari’s Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Alan Alcorn pose with Pong.In the annals of Silicon Valley history, Nolan Bushnell’s name conjures up both brilliant success and spectacular failure. His two landmark achievements we...
The innards of a Pizza Time “Cyberamics” robot, as seen in a 1982 manual [Photo: courtesy of Showbizpizza.com]In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” mig...
On Friday, June 29, 2007, I got up extra-early and headed to the Stonestown Galleria shopping center in San Francisco. By 7:20 a.m., there was already a sizable line of people waiting to buy the first iPhone, which wouldn’t go on sale until 6...
Simon Flash puts Simon and other games into handheld blocks. [Photo: courtesy of Hasbro]Tech giants Google, Microsoft, and eBay all use blue, yellow, red, and green as their logo colors. But those hues made an indelible mark on consumer tech 40 years...
1977’s Apple II, whose industrial design the Apple IIe preserved with minimal changes. [Photo: RamaMusée Bolo/Wikimedia Commons]On the evening of January 26, 1983, as a technology-smitten Boston University freshman, I attended the monthly...
Everyone knows how the story ends.In July 2016, 22 years after it began as a hobby for Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo agreed to sell its core operating business to Verizon in what Forbes writer Brian Solomon called ȁ...
