Technology

Hardware, software and the empires that rose and fell with each era.

Entries in this category (106)

• Nokia — From the world's biggest phone maker to the pipes behind 5G
• Steve Jobs — Co-founder of Apple; architect of the iPhone era
• Theranos — The $9B biotech startup that tested almost nothing
• WeWork — The coworking startup that briefly seemed worth more than its landlord
• Sony — Japan's electronics giant that reinvented itself — twice
• Technics — Maker of the SL-1200 turntable — the instrument that built hip-hop
• Eastman Kodak — The company that invented the digital camera — then couldn't survive it
• MySpace — The first social network to rule the world — for about three years
• The Dot-Com Bubble — When any company with '.com' in its name was worth a fortune
• Circuit City — The electronics superstore that Best Buy and the internet switched off
• Toshiba — The Japanese giant that pioneered memory and laptops, then unwound itself
• Intel — The chip giant that defined the PC era and lost the manufacturing crown
• Atari — The company that invented the video game boom - and the crash
• Yahoo — The internet's first giant that fumbled the future
• Compaq — The PC upstart that beat IBM, then got absorbed by HP
• Linksys — The router company that made home Wi-Fi ordinary — and gave the world a hackable $60 router
• Adobe — The company that invented desktop publishing, then pivoted to the subscription cloud
• IBM — The 1911 company that built the mainframe, invented the PC era, and refused to die
• HP (Hewlett-Packard) — From a garage in Palo Alto to the printer-and-PC giant that split itself in two
• Acer — Taiwan's PC upstart that rose to #2 in the world — then rebuilt itself from near-collapse into a diversified, multi-brand group
• Garmin — The GPS company that outlasted the smartphone and became a wearable and navigation giant
• Casio — The Japanese company that gave the world the calculator watch, the G-Shock, and the keytar
• Seiko — The Japanese watch giant that beat Swiss mechanicals with quartz, and survived the fall it caused
• Acorn Computers — The Cambridge firm that won the BBC's schools contract, built a processor nobody asked for, and died — while that processor ended up in most of the world's phones
• AdultFriendFinder — The adult dating site at the centre of a 412 million-account breach reported in 2016 — run by a group that went through Chapter 11, sold Penthouse, and is still trading today
• AirAsia (now Capital A Berhad) — The budget airline that got hit hard by COVID — and reinvented itself as a broader holding company
• Aiwa — The Tokyo audio maker that Sony absorbed in 2002 and dropped six years later — the name now belongs to a former Sony radio contractor in Japan and a patchwork of licensees elsewhere
• Alibaba — The Hangzhou apartment startup that became China's e-commerce empire, set an IPO record — and then ran into the state
• AltaVista — The pioneering 1990s search engine that was once the web's front door — shut down by Yahoo in 2013
• Amiga — The 1985 computer with custom chips that outran everything at its price, sold about 4.9 million units, died with Commodore in 1994 — and whose trademark has since passed through Escom, Gateway, Amiga Inc, Cloanto and Hyperion
• Anker — The Chinese accessories maker that sold straight to Amazon shoppers, then built soundcore into a genuine audio brand — while fighting recalls and congressional scrutiny
• Ashley Madison — The adultery website whose 2015 hack exposed 36 million users — and whose owner then paid $1.66 million for faking profiles and selling a "Full Delete" that did not always delete
• Honda ASIMO — Honda's celebrated humanoid robot that astonished the world — retired after a landmark run
• AT&T — Ma Bell — the century-long telephone monopoly that dismantled itself to save its future
• Baidu — China's search giant, which rode a near-monopoly on Chinese-language search into advertising trouble and then bet the company on artificial intelligence
• BlackBerry — The smartphone giant that ruled the corporate world, then fell to touchscreens and apps
• Boeing — The aviation titan that was once the gold standard of American engineering — and became a cautionary tale of corporate hubris
• Borland — The company behind Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which beat Lotus in court over Quattro Pro, renamed itself Inprise and back, and finished as a product line inside OpenText
• Bose v. JBL — Bose sued JBL and Infinity over a loudspeaker port shaped like an ellipse — and won $5,676,718.32 in a case that turned on one conic section
• Boston Dynamics — The robotics pioneer behind BigDog, Spot and Atlas — from MIT spin-off to a Hyundai-owned leader
• Citizen Watch — The Japanese watchmaker that beat the Swiss on accuracy, then bought its way into the Swiss industry it had helped nearly destroy
• Commodore International — The Toronto typewriter business that became the world's largest home computer maker, launched the Commodore 64, bought the Amiga — and was liquidated in 1994, after which its brand name was sold on for another three decades
• CompUSA — The big-box computer superstore of the 1990s and 2000s — bankrupt by 2007 and gone by 2012
• Craigslist Personals — Craigslist's dating and casual-encounter categories, taken offline on 22 March 2018 — not by a hack or a court order, but by FOSTA/SESTA, the US law that carved sex-trafficking claims out of Section 230
• cURL — Still here — the small Swedish download tool from 1996 that now moves data inside almost everything connected
• Digital Equipment Corporation — The maker of the PDP and VAX minicomputers that helped create the computing industry — bought by Compaq in 1998
• Edifier — The Chinese speaker maker founded in a Beijing business park in 1996 that quietly bought Japan's electrostatic headphone legend STAX — while its founder still holds the company
• Enigma — The cipher machine Germany trusted with its military secrets — reconstructed by Polish mathematicians, then broken at Bletchley Park
• Enron — The Wall Street darling that collapsed in weeks — one of the largest corporate frauds in history
• Ericsson Mobile — Sweden's handset arm, merged into the Sony Ericsson joint venture in 2001 and sold outright to Sony in 2012 — Ericsson kept the networks and gave up phones for good
• Established Men — Ashley Madison's sister site — a 2009 sugar-daddy brand that the 2015 hackers demanded be shut down alongside it, promoted through a "founder" who turned out to be a paid spokeswoman
• FiiO — A Guangzhou company founded by ex-BBK engineers that took the top five portable-player slots in Japan's biggest audio retailer — and is pushing into cassette and CD players while everyone else abandons them
• Fisker — The luxury EV startup that promised a sustainable car — and collapsed into bankruptcy in 2024
• Friendster — One of the first social networks — a pioneer that was outpaced by rivals and shut down, its patents sold
• Fry's Electronics — The Silicon Valley electronics superstore chain with 34 themed stores and a one-day shutdown in February 2021
• FTX — The crypto exchange that was worth $32 billion — and collapsed in days amid one of history's biggest frauds
• GameStop — The video-game retailer at the heart of the 2021 meme-stock squeeze — still trading, still reinvented
• Gateway — The mail-order PC maker from a South Dakota cattle town that shipped its computers in cow-spotted boxes, grew to nearly 25,000 employees, and was bought by Acer — which then revived the brand in Walmart
• Harman Kardon — Two men walked out of a public-address company in 1953 with $5,000 each and built the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver — the company is now a brand inside a Samsung subsidiary
• Harman v. VOXX — A Samsung subsidiary asserted thirteen design patents over the look of an illuminated party speaker against a single Klipsch product — then the case was stayed, dismissed with prejudice, and never tried
• HTC — The Taiwanese maker of the first major Android phone — now focused on virtual reality and XR
• Huawei — The Chinese telecom giant that built much of the world's 5G — then became the centre of a global political storm
• ICQ — The pioneering instant messenger of the 1990s, with its famous "Uh oh!" sound — shut down in 2024
• Iomega — Maker of the mighty Zip disk and the 1990s' favorite portable storage — bought by EMC and folded away
• iPod — Apple's pocket music player that defined a generation — discontinued as the smartphone took over
• Jaguar — The iconic British luxury car maker that has paused production and relaunched as an all-electric brand
• Lotus Development — The company whose 1-2-3 spreadsheet made the IBM PC worth buying, sold to IBM for $3.5 billion in 1995 — with the brand retired in 2012 and Notes, Domino and Sametime now run by HCL
• Lycos — One of the internet's first big search engines, born at Carnegie Mellon — now a minor portal owned in India
• Magellan — The GPS navigation brand that put satellite mapping on the dashboard — still making devices as a MiTAC company
• Microsoft Encarta — The encyclopedia on a disc that taught a generation to look things up — until the open web made it obsolete
• Motorola — The company that made the first commercial handheld cellphone — split in two on 4 January 2011, so that the name now belongs to two unrelated businesses
• Netscape — The browser that brought the web to the masses — acquired by AOL in 1999, its browser discontinued in 2008
• Nortel Networks — Canada's most valuable company at the dot-com peak, broken up in bankruptcy and sold off business by business — the last piece, a patent portfolio, went for $4.5 billion
• Novell — The network software powerhouse behind NetWare — absorbed into Micro Focus and later OpenText
• Palm — The company that made the handheld computer mainstream — bought by HP in 2010, shut down in 2011, with its webOS software ending up in LG televisions and its name licensed onto a very small phone
• Peloton — The connected-fitness brand that boomed in the pandemic — then hit a wall as the world reopened
• Polaroid — The instant-photo pioneer that went bankrupt twice — and was reborn out of a project to keep its film alive
• Qimonda — The German memory-chip maker that rose quickly in the 2000s and collapsed into insolvency in 2009
• The Quartz War — The fifty-year fight over how a watch keeps time — which Japan won on accuracy, Switzerland won on price and prestige, and which is now being fought again from China
• RadioShack — The 1921 Boston ham-radio shop that became an 8,000-store American chain, went bankrupt twice, and now survives as a licensed brand sold through other people's shops
• Rare earth magnets — The strongest permanent magnets ever made — discovered by accident in a US Air Force lab, then invented twice in 1983 by GM and a Japanese rival
• RealPlayer — The 1990s media player that dominated streaming video — still around, but a shadow of its former self
• Rubik's Cube — The Hungarian teaching aid that became a 1980s fad, died, and came back as a sport — built today by companies that could only exist because the patent ran out
• Salesforce — The company that turned software into a utility — and invented the cloud subscription model
• Sea-Gull — The Tianjin watch factory that bought a Swiss movement maker's tooling, kept a dead Swiss design alive as the ST19, and co-built the watch that won a prize in Geneva
• Sega — The arcade and console giant that took on Nintendo, produced the Sega Dreamcast — and then exited the hardware race
• Silicon Graphics — Jim Clark's 3D workstation company that put the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, helped define OpenGL, and was sold in 2009 for $42.5 million to a server maker that took its name
• Sim Wong Hoo — The kampung-born inventor who gave computers their voice — and took Apple to court for US$100 million
• Sinclair Research — The Cambridge company that sold Britain its first computer under £100, then lost the business to Amstrad — while the machines it put in bedrooms ended up as Microsoft, EA and Rockstar
• Sony Walkman — The cassette player that invented personal portable music — retired by Sony after four decades
• SpacemiT MUSE Book — The Chinese start-up that put open-architecture RISC-V silicon inside a laptop you can actually buy
• Sun Microsystems — The workstation and server pioneer behind Java and Solaris — acquired by Oracle in 2010
• Swatch — The cheap plastic watch that was invented to save Swiss watchmaking — and became the umbrella for the group that now owns Omega, Longines, Tissot and Breguet
• Haw Par Corporation — The Tiger Balm maker and the history of a century-old Asian healing brand
• Timex — The American volume watchmaker that helped kill Swiss mechanical watchmaking from below — and whose Scottish factory went on to build Sinclair computers
• Unitree Robotics — The Chinese robotics firm making affordable humanoids and animal-like robots — a fast-rising branch of the robot lineage
• US Robotics — The modem maker that defined dial-up internet — the brand survives, still selling networking gear today
• Verbatim — The blank-media brand behind generations of floppy disks and CDs — still making storage, now under Mitsubishi ownership
• VisiCalc — The first spreadsheet — the "killer app" that made personal computers matter, gone by the mid-1980s
• WABOT-1 — The world's first full-scale humanoid robot — built in Japan in 1973, the grandparent of today's robots
• Western Union — The 1850s telegraph empire that reinvented itself as the world's money-transfer network
• Winamp — The MP3 player that soundtracked the 90s internet — still exists, now as a services-focused brand
• WordStar — The word processor that made business writing on PCs possible — a landmark left behind by the PC era
• Yahoo Personals — The paid dating service inside the Yahoo portal, 1997 to 2010 — closed not by a hack but by free sites, phones, and a company that had stopped wanting to run it
• Zenith (watchmaker) — The Swiss watch house whose best movement was saved from destruction by an engineer who disobeyed a direct order and hid the tooling in an attic
• Zenith — The last American television maker, which invented the wireless remote and helped define digital HDTV — now an LG research and licensing subsidiary in Illinois that sells no televisions at all