Version History | The Verge

How AT&T created the most iconic phone ever

2026-04-13T05:44:01-04:00

For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same phone. Nobody really thought about it, it didn't even matter what it was called - it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and when landline phones ruled the world, the Western Electric 500 ruled the landlines. It was so ubiquitous for so long that even if you've never touched a landline, you've encountered the 500. The Phone app on your iPhone? Looks like a 500.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Western Electric 500, and the deeply strange world it came to represent. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and prof …

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How the Amazon Echo learned to talk — and listen

2026-04-05T08:24:45-04:00

A photo of a black speaker, the Amazon Echo, on a gray background. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Jeff Bezos badly wanted a voice computer. He had been saying so publicly since the very early days of Amazon, telling anyone who would listen about why voice might make it easier and more natural to interact with technology. (And to buy stuff from Jeff Bezos.) But when a team at Amazon set out to actually make the voice computer a reality, they encountered a seemingly endless series of hard problems. Eventually, though, they created two products, the Echo speaker and the Alexa voice assistant, that would help bring a new kind of computer to millions of people.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Echo's development i …

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The Macintosh changed computers forever

2026-04-05T06:15:54-04:00

This is part of our package about Apple's 50th anniversary, read more here.

Apple's most legendary computer has two legacies: there's the computer itself, and there's the commercial. That commercial. Only a couple of days before Steve Jobs debuted the computer that would both help cement his legacy and contribute to his unceremonious exile from Apple, the company dropped a Super Bowl ad that is still one of the most iconic commercials of all time. It raised both the hype and the stakes for the Macintosh in a big way.

The Macintosh wasn't a great computer, at least at first. It didn't have enough memory; there wasn't enough software that su …

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The secret story of the vocoder, the military tech that changed music forever

2026-03-23T13:37:51-04:00

The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn't supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology that could both capture and synthesize the human voice.

As so much great tech does, the vocoder immediately took on a life of its own. It played a key role in World War II, enabling secret communications across the ocean. And then, only a few years later, it started to become a musical phenomenon. At first, a few artists wer …

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The fast rise and epic fall of Clubhouse

2026-03-16T06:06:38-04:00

In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app - not as popular, but growing fast, and already hugely influential among the tech set - looked like it might have an entirely new social idea on its hands. It was called Clubhouse, and it was a huge bet that audio might be the future. It was the next big thing, until it wasn't.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the early days of Clubhouse, and how a simple audio group chat app turned into a booming entertainment a …

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The cute and cursed story of Furby

2026-03-08T08:17:40-04:00

The hottest toy of 1998 was sort of adorable, and sort of annoying. It couldn't do much - couldn't do anything, really - but it could look at you, it could say some nonsense phrases, and it seemed uncannily aware of the world around it. That's all Furby needed to pretty much take over the world.

The story of Furby is filled with technical achievement. The fact that the furry little guy worked at all, ever, was a bit of a surprise to a lot of people involved. But Furby also represents a different way of thinking about our relationships with technology, a different idea about human-computer interaction, and maybe even a path worth following f …

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How TiVo killed live TV

2026-01-12T07:23:27-05:00

For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You could pause live TV. And rewind it. And even set shows to record for later, knowing they'd be there whenever you needed them.

There's a reason you almost certainly don't have a TiVo now, though. The company quickly became a victim of its own success and never managed to turn its game-changing concept into a big business or a truly lasting hit product. Meanwhile, the changes it help …

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The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird

2026-01-04T08:24:14-05:00

Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here's a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing into the green Mario-ish pipes coming from both the top and bottom of the screen. Tap the screen to go up, stop tapping to go down. That's it. That's the game.

Nobody, not even Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, thought those were the ingredients for a smash hit. And yet for a few weeks in 2014, the game was at the top of app stores everywhere - and became something of a cultural phenomenon. Almos …

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The terrible Nintendo controller that helped make VR happen

2025-12-29T15:08:51-05:00

The Nintendo Power Glove was not good. It's important that you know that. The Power Glove was ambitious, impressive, even important - one of the very first mainstream devices that let you control a game using your body instead of just your thumbs - but it was not good. In some ways, its not-good-ness is a key part of the story.

The Power Glove showed up in the late 1980s, at a complicated time for the gaming industry, when Nintendo was a hugely powerful force for the future of fun. But the Power Glove wasn't really even a Nintendo product. It started as a research lark, became a toy, and only wound up with Nintendo's name on it after a part …

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How AIM taught the internet to chat

2025-12-21T08:58:36-05:00

If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there's a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat with your friends or your crush. Maybe memories of how AIM changed the way your company did business. Certainly memories of your old screen name, and the angsty song lyrics you put into your away message.

AIM was, for a time, the most important chat app on the internet. It also barely managed to continue to exist. The app was created by a semi-rogue team inside of AOL, and …

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