Taito Paid Students 180,000 Yen to Show Games and Kept No Code
An unfinished PET experiment and a modern reconstruction show how much gaming history disappears between a demonstration and a store shelf.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
From the vault This day in tech history, November 4
- 1952
A UNIVAC calls the election on CBS
The computer predicted an Eisenhower win. Polls favored Stevenson, so Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood doubted the machine and held its result.
- 2002
Video Game History: Ratchet & Clank comes out in North America
Insomniac, fresh off Spyro the Dragon, sent a lombax and his robot companion across planets like Kerwan and Orxon on the PlayStation 2, with 36 items to collect along the way.
- 2010
Kinect goes on sale
It reached more than 30,000 North American stores the morning after Microsoft filled Times Square with dancers and a Ne-Yo concert.
- 2016
Killed on this Day: Panoramio
Google shut down Panoramio, the location-tagged photo-sharing site that launched in 2005 and that it bought in 2007. Its photos had spent a decade pinned to Google Earth.
Then and now
1981: An IBM PC with 16 KB of memory: $1,565. Today: $305 for a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB. That's about a million times the memory for a fifth of the price.
