Is it possible for a phone to have “pretty privilege”? Mediocre features and functionality be damned, the original Motorola Razr V3 and its successors dominated the US cellphone market for four years following its 2004 release — up to and including the iPhone’s introduction in 2007 — seemingly on vibes and aesthetics alone. Not to glamorize consumerism or anything, but I miss it terribly. I was 11 years old when the Razr launched and probably among the first generation of kiddies that begged their parents to buy them a cellphone. We weren’t really the target demographic before that — cellphones had mostly been bulky, boring things primarily for working adults. SMS texting had just become something that everyone did day-to-day, and mobile...

For a couple of years, there was nothing on the internet so simultaneously thrilling and terrifying as having your website hit the front page of Digg. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, would immediately come to your site — and there’s a good chance they’d crash it in the process. Hundreds of commenters would debate the merits of whatever you’d created or published, pick fights with you and each other about it, and make you feel like the internet’s main character. At least for a few minutes, until something bigger and newer and more controversial hit Digg.com and everyone moved on. In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote...

Flipping through your high school scrapbook is a humbling experience. There’s a lot to reckon with — including braces and bootcut jeans, in my case — and you get a sense of what kinds of moments you thought were worth preserving. Apparently, a great deal of funny things happened to my friends and me as we loafed around a suburban coffee shop avoiding homework. Looking through those pages, I can find plenty of documentation of life as we waited for our teammates to finish their tennis matches and turned the communal couch at Caribou Coffee into our own private rec room. But only a few pages later, the photos abruptly stop. This was all in 2003, my senior year of high school. (Please don’t do that math.) I carried around disposable cameras...

The Mojave Desert is not typically a place for a car race, but these were not your typical cars, and this was not your typical race. The course was 150 miles of rocks, loose dirt, and narrow switchbacks — harrowing terrain even for the most rugged vehicles. The obvious goal: be the first to cross the finish line without crashing, flipping over, or catching fire. The prize was $1 million. The participants looked straight out of Mad Max: military-grade Humvees, dune buggies, motorcycles, and a particularly gnarly-looking Acura SUV. No drivers with mohawks and shoulder pads, unfortunately. No drivers at all. This was the DARPA Grand Challenge — the world’s first robot car race. It was March 13th, 2004, a watershed moment in autonomous...

In fashion, it’s said that trends return every 20 years. But it seems technology has started to repeat itself at the same cadence, too. Can you identify what things happened in 2004, 2024, or in some cases, both? Two decades ago, the EU handed down a fine of over $600 million for not offering versions of Windows that did not come with Windows Media Player preinstalled. Microsoft still has antitrust problems in Europe at the moment, and last year, the EU attempted to block the company’s acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard. But Microsoft has paid no fines this year… so far. The very first Razr, called the Motorola Razr V3,...

Before a podcast was a “podcast,” it was… well, it wasn’t really much of anything. A few of the early believers called them “audio blogs,” and the journalist often credited with coining the term “podcast” also offered “GuerillaMedia” as an alternative in the very same article. (And actually, there’s plenty of debate over exactly who coined the term and when. The history of the podcast is more contentious than you’d think.) It was in 2004, though, that many of the earliest names in on-demand audio began to smush “iPod” and “broadcast” into the word we’ve come to know as the way we all download and listen to shows now. In the 20 years since podcasts became a thing, they’ve changed dramatically — the earliest pods were mostly just dudes...