Archive

From the Archive: Tech News 2008 to 2013, Revisited

The original site published hundreds of news items, opinion pieces and listicles. The ones that were linked from around the web are revisited here: what was reported, what happened afterward, and what the story looks like now.

Between 2008 and 2013 this site was a general consumer-technology blog, and a handful of its posts travelled far beyond its usual readership: a note about LG reorganising its Mexican plants that ended up in trade newsletters and reading lists; a gallery of twenty optical illusions shared by universities; the Please Rob Me privacy stunt; a sketch imagining people speaking the way they comment; launches of an 18 inch gaming laptop, a computer in a Commodore 64 case and the first quantum machine sold to a customer. Those posts still receive visitors from the links that made them popular.

Rather than reprint decade-old news, each retrospective follows one frame: what the original post reported, what happened next, and why it still matters. Where the historical record is thin, the page says so. Where the original headline overstated things, as with the first quantum PC available to purchase, the retrospective says that too. The optical illusions page is a special case: the original images were lost, so the illusions have been redrawn as vector graphics with an explanation of each.

Posts that carried few links and have no useful present-day angle are not recreated; the old addresses for those redirect here so that nothing lands on an error page. If you arrived at this hub from an old link and expected a specific post, the list on this page and the site sections above cover everything that has been rebuilt.

The archive is not a nostalgia exercise. Read together, these pages are a record of the years when netbooks rose and fell, 3D screens came and went, tablets arrived, location sharing became a privacy issue and the smartphone platform contest settled into the shape it still has.