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21 articles
Before there were amiibo and limited-edition controllers, there was a box on the cereal aisle that doubled as a Nintendo Power source. We trace the gloriously shameless golden age of cartoon-and-console cross-promotion — and why the leftover artifacts now fetch serious money.
The retro revival didn't build itself, and it definitely wasn't a boys-only project. Meet the restorers, repair techs, and chip musicians whose unsung work — from the Atari era to today's modding benches — keeps old machines breathing.
Somewhere in a garage two towns over, a sealed Dreamcast bundle sits in a box marked 'FREE.' The hunters know. They always know. Meet the thrift regulars who turn Saturday mornings into treasure expeditions — and learn how to spot a grail before somebody else does.
Before laptops roamed free and Wi-Fi blanketed everything, the family computer lived in one specific room, guarded by one specific parent. A cultural history of the beige PC corner — America's first digital hearth — and the open floor plan that killed it.
Modern devices are frictionless, invisible, and utterly forgettable. But the pencil-in-the-cassette and the channel you had to 'feel' for? Those little annoyances were the whole relationship. A eulogy for the interfaces that talked back.
A mint-in-box NES isn't preserved — it's silenced. This is a case for fingerprints, worn buttons, and playing the dang thing before the shrink wrap outlives you.
The American shopping mall wasn't just retail — it was a technology apprenticeship for an entire generation. From Sam Goody listening booths to the demo kiosk at Software Etc., here's what vanished when the food court went quiet, and why gadget nerds felt it worst.
Somewhere between 'casual hobbyist' and 'full-blown archivist,' a growing tribe of retro tech enthusiasts has decided that owning vintage hardware isn't enough — it must be documented, cataloged, and displayed with museum-grade precision. We went deep inside the obsessive, oddly therapeutic world of collectors who treat their Super Nintendos like priceless artifacts. Spoiler: some of them have better databases than your local library.
In forgotten university basements, shuttered corporate campuses, and abandoned office parks across America, decades-old computers are quietly gathering dust — their hard drives still spinning, their floppy disks still loaded, their monitors frozen mid-task like digital Pompeiis. A scrappy underground community of urban explorers and tech historians is racing to document these time capsules before the bulldozers arrive. What they're finding is equal parts treasure hunt and cautionary tale.
Forget shelling out $70 for a game you technically don't own. A growing army of millennials is pulling out the soldering irons, haunting eBay listings, and building custom retro gaming rigs that they actually, legally, philosophically own. It's part nostalgia trip, part political statement, and entirely too much fun.
Someone out there is selling a candle that smells like a warm CRT monitor, and people are buying it faster than a fresh cartridge at a garage sale. Welcome to the strange, surprisingly lucrative world of olfactory nostalgia — where the scent of a melting NES brings in real money and the memories of dial-up have apparently found their forever home inside a soy wax vessel.
Somewhere between the nostalgia industrial complex and the cold logic of supply and demand, the CRT monitor your parents threw out in 2003 quietly turned into a four-figure collector's item. We traced the strange economic journey of vintage computer displays — from landfill fodder to living room centerpiece — and the numbers are genuinely wild.
It holds 1.44 megabytes. Your phone takes more data to load a single webpage. And yet the floppy disk — clinically dead since the early 2000s — has somehow become the totemic object of a generation pushing back against cloud dependency, subscription culture, and the quiet erosion of digital ownership. We looked into it, and honestly? The logic holds up.
The tech industry declared LaserDisc dead in 2001. Nobody told the collectors. We spent time with the passionate, slightly obsessive community keeping 'obsolete' media formats alive — and found out that in the world of physical media, death is a lot more negotiable than the industry would like you to believe.
Somewhere in a basement, a 1998 Pentium II is powering up in the time it takes your brand-new laptop to finish loading its third mandatory update prompt. We dug into the maddening paradox of 'progress' to figure out how we got here — and what the ghosts of 90s computing are still trying to tell us.
There is exactly one Blockbuster left on Earth, and it's in Bend, Oregon, and people make pilgrimages to it like it's a shrine. That probably tells you everything you need to know about how we feel about what we lost when video rental culture died—and what the streaming era, for all its convenience, has never managed to replace.
Some people are deliberately throttling their internet connections, firing up GeoCities clones, and listening to modem screech on repeat—and they're doing it on purpose. In a world of algorithmic feeds and instant-load everything, the agonizing patience of the 56K era has somehow become an act of digital self-care. We investigated, and we have feelings about it.
Streaming was supposed to kill physical media forever. Nobody told the millennials. Across the country, young professionals are spending serious cash to fill their shelves with games, movies, and vinyl records they could technically access with a few taps on their phone—and they're absolutely not sorry about it.
Before RGB lighting and macro keys took over every desk in America, keyboard engineers were building input devices so overbuilt they'd survive a nuclear winter. We dig into the vintage mechanical keyboard obsession sweeping collector communities—and why a decades-old IBM is still winning the typing wars.
Somewhere between TikTok trends and thrift store digs, a generation that never once saved a book report to a 3.5-inch disk has decided floppy disks are extremely, unironically cool. We dug into the why, the how, and the gloriously impractical world of the floppy disk revival — and honestly? We kind of get it.
There was a time when every strip mall in America had a Radio Shack, and every curious kid with a screwdriver and a dream had a reason to walk through its door. This is the story of how a Fort Worth electronics chain became the spiritual home of a generation of hobbyists — and how it threw it all away.