40 items
The search engine everyone used before Google — fast, powerful, and the first with a full-text, boolean-searchable index of the web. It also gave the world Babel Fish, the free page-translator named after the fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The dial-up gateway that wired up America. AOL's "You've Got Mail" voice, aggressive free-trial CD carpet-bombing, and shift to unlimited $19.95/month pricing triggered the legendary busy-signal crisis — millions of Americans' first taste of the internet.
The search engine with a cartoon butler you asked full questions in plain English. Type "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" and Jeeves would fetch the answer — a friendlier face on the early web.
The portable stereo that ruled the bedroom and the backyard: a CD player up top, a cassette deck (or two), and speakers loud enough to annoy the neighbors. In the mix-CD era it was command central for playing your burned discs and taping songs off the radio.
The drive that made every PC a record-pressing plant. You fed in a blank CD-R, dragged your downloads into Nero or Easy CD Creator, and held your breath: one buffer underrun mid-burn and the disc was a coaster. When it worked, you walked away with a fresh mix CD and the quiet pride of having pressed it yourself.
Before Google Images, decorating a book report meant clip art: flipping through a phone-book-thick catalog of tiny thumbnails, finding the picture you wanted by number, digging out the right CD-ROM, and printing it one image at a time. Every 90s birthday flyer and school newsletter was built from these libraries.
The online service before AOL was AOL. CompuServe numbered its users with octal digits, ran tight moderated forums instead of chaotic chat rooms, and invented the GIF. By 1995 it claimed 3 million subscribers — then AOL's cheap flat-rate marketing machine ran it over.
The social-news front page of the mid-2000s web, where users submitted links and "dugg" them up or buried them. A single spot on the front page could bury a small website under a flood of traffic — and then a redesign everyone hated handed Digg's entire audience to Reddit.
The camera you bought at the drugstore, used up at the field trip or party, and handed back over the counter — whole. No focus, no zoom, just 24 or 27 chances to get a decent shot. You waited days to see if any of them came out — which was exactly the anxiety that made them so memorable.
The flash-memory bricks that freed your MP3s from the desktop. Diamond's Rio PMP300, arriving in September 1998 at $200, was the first MP3 player that actually caught on — deck-of-cards sized, running forever on one AA battery, holding maybe eight or ten songs. No moving parts meant no skips, a revelation after a decade of portable CD players. The RIAA sued to kill it; the courts sided with you instead.
The CD-ROM encyclopedia that killed the twenty-volume set on the shelf. Encarta turned book reports into a multimedia experience — clickable maps, audio clips of national anthems and animal sounds, video snippets — and hid the MindMaze trivia game inside for when you were supposed to be studying.
The PC that came in a cow-spotted box. Born above an Iowa cattle brokerage, Gateway 2000 mail-ordered family computers straight to your door in black-and-white Holstein-print cardboard — ordered over the phone from a friendly Midwest rep, delivered by truck. For countless kids, that spotted box showing up meant the house was about to get its first computer.
Google's email that launched with a then-unthinkable gigabyte of free storage — so much that people assumed it was an April Fools' joke. During the invite-only beta, a Gmail invite was a genuine status symbol.
The pioneering instant messenger with the green-flower icon, the random UIN number, and the unmistakable "Uh oh!" message alert. Launched in 1996, ICQ basically invented consumer IM before AIM and MSN took over.
The email you absolutely should not have opened. On May 4, 2000, an email landed in inboxes worldwide with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" and an attachment promising a love letter — then it quietly sent itself to everyone in your address book and overwrote your files. Within ten days, tens of millions of computers were infected, and the damage estimates eventually climbed toward $10 billion. It was the moment the internet learned not to trust attachments.
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2001, promising "1,000 songs in your pocket." The original model packed a 5GB hard drive, mechanical scroll wheel, and FireWire connection—Mac-only, $399. The click wheel, iTunes Music Store (2003), and later Windows support made it the gateway device to digital music and one of the most influential electronics ever built.
The wolf-spider-named search engine with the eager black Labrador that would 'Go Get It!' One of the first search giants — briefly bigger than Yahoo — and one of the great cautionary tales of the dot-com bubble.
The Razr V3 launched in late 2004 as the world's thinnest clamshell phone at a shocking $500. Its anodized-aluminum body, laser-etched keypad, and impossible thinness made it a fashion statement. When the price dropped in 2005–2006, everyone had one—and snapping it shut after a call was the whole point.
The chunky yellow walkie-talkies that kept families connected before everyone had a cellphone — two-car road-trip caravans, ski slopes, theme parks, and kids roaming the neighborhood with a two-mile leash. Over.
For a lot of people, the first place you ever played games against strangers over the internet — dial in, drop into a lobby, and play Hearts, Spades, or Age of Empires. Microsoft's online-gaming portal, and a quiet ancestor of Xbox Live.
The browser with the shooting-star "N" and the throbbing loading icon that, for millions, simply was the early web. Netscape dominated the mid-1990s before losing the browser war to Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer.
The brick phone that became a meme—Nokia's 3310 was the phone that survived drops that would kill any modern device. Released in 2000 and sold over 126 million times, it was famous for its indestructibility, the built-in Snake II game, interchangeable colored covers, and the iconic Nokia tune ringtone. It was the anti-smartphone years before the smartphone era, representing the peak of durable simplicity.
A little gray slab that put your calendar, contacts, memos — and, let's be honest, games — in your pocket, years before smartphones. You wrote on it with a stylus in Graffiti, its own alphabet you had to learn stroke by stroke. For a while, it was the future.
Coin-operated public telephones on street corners, in malls, and outside every gas station — the fallback when you needed to call home or were out of pocket change. At their 1990s peak, the US had over 2 million payphones; by the 2010s, they'd nearly vanished.
Scratch off the panel, punch in the PIN, dial the access number, and talk until your minutes ran out — prepaid phone cards were the pre-cell-plan answer to long-distance calls and international dialing. Stacked in convenience stores and gas stations, they were lifelines for travelers and immigrants.
The backseat road-trip luxury before tablets existed. A portable DVD player strapped to the back of a headrest — or a dual-screen set for two kids — meant the family minivan finally had in-flight entertainment, as long as the disc didn't skip over every pothole.
The disc-shaped robot that vacuumed your floor by itself — bumping off the furniture, humming along, and, most memorably, serving as a chariot for the family cat. The first robot vacuum most people ever actually owned.
The free app that made video-calling normal, with its blue logo and unmistakable ringtone bloop. Launched in 2003, Skype connected long-distance friends and family over early broadband — and became a verb before Microsoft bought it.
A chatbot on your buddy list that never slept, always answered, and never quite cursed no matter how hard you tried. SmarterChild answered trivia, cracked jokes back, and proved millions of kids were ready to talk to an AI — they just didn't know that's what it was.
The swivel QWERTY phone that made AIM mobile before smartphones existed. The Sidekick was the texting status symbol — if you had one, you were cool.
The media player that ran the MP3 era. Winamp's dark little window with the glowing green equalizer, endlessly customizable skins, and the MilkDrop visualizer pulsing to your music was where a generation organized its first ripped-and-downloaded music collection — and yes, it really whipped the llama's ass.
The operating system with the rolling green hill wallpaper—Windows XP arrived in October 2001 with Luna's glossy blue taskbar, the green Start button, and the cheerful startup chime that defined a generation's relationship with computers. It was stable, beloved, and so enduring that users clung to it long after Microsoft stopped supporting it, making it the most iconic OS of the 2000s.
CompuServe's last-ditch answer to AOL — a brightly colored, family-friendly online service with a cartoon interface and unlimited hours for $17.95 a month. It crashed and burned in less than a year, but if you had it, you never forgot it.
A purple gorilla who lived on your desktop, told you jokes, and quietly went through your business. BonziBuddy is the friendliest thing ever classified as adware by two antivirus companies. Half the internet remembers installing it on purpose.
The software that turned a blank disc into a mix CD, a backup, or a copy of something you probably shouldn't have had. Nero came bundled with drive after drive, so for a lot of people it wasn't the disc burner they chose — it was simply the one that was there. Its icon is a burning Colosseum, which is both a pun and a historical error.
The prog that turned a friend's computer into a puppet: they ran the file, and suddenly their CD tray wouldn't stay shut. NetBus arrived in March 1998 and became one of the two names everybody in the AOL-era prog scene knew. Its author insisted it was a prank tool — and its Swedish name says exactly that.
The other name every prog kid knew, and the one that got the reputation. SubSeven arrived in February 1999 doing what NetBus did but with more of everything, and it became the era's definitive "double-click this" mayhem. Its author has never been convincingly identified — and that fight is still going.
A little LCD slab that sat beside the phone and did exactly one thing: showed you who was calling before you picked up. For about a decade, knowing that required buying a second device and paying the phone company a monthly fee for the privilege. Then telephones learned to do it themselves and the box quietly vanished.
A translucent pocket computer for teens with a rubber QWERTY keyboard and its own two-way radio — Cybikos within about a hundred meters could text each other and join wireless chatrooms, years before teens had phones. Over 430 games and apps, all free. Half a million sold in 2000 alone, then the moment passed as fast as it arrived.
The thumb-typed email machine that owned the boardroom, then the teen universe — the hottest phone in America right up until the iPhone ate it. Push email, the blinking red light, BBM: BlackBerry was so addictive that Webster's New World made "CrackBerry" its 2006 Word of the Year.