Welcome to 2004 Week

Oct 15, 2024 07:26 PM - 4 months ago 149457

In early 2004, the world was shaking it for illustration a Polaroid picture, flocking to theaters to spot what was going to hap pinch each those hobbits, and wondering if that Tom Brady feline was thing special. Meanwhile, a fewer folks astir the world were inventing the web arsenic we cognize it now: a world-shaking societal web was brewing successful a Harvard dorm room. A Google worker was dreaming up the early of email successful their spare time. The coolest cellphone of each clip was conscionable astir to drop. The net was still a niche activity, but that was astir to alteration — and fast.

In truthful galore ways, the integer world successful which we now each unrecorded was created 20 years ago. Google went nationalist and began to ascend to norm the web. Facebook, Gmail, Firefox, Flickr, and Digg each launched — the twelvemonth Web 2.0 became the web. “Blog” and “the agelong tail” were connected nary one’s radar earlier 2004, and since then, they’ve been everywhere. The United States went done a contentious election, a bunch of sequels dominated the container office, and Apple launched a caller merchandise that looked very cool but was yet eclipsed by a amended merchandise a twelvemonth later. Okay, immoderate things ne'er change.

Every twelvemonth is simply a large twelvemonth successful tech, of course, but 2004 was an particularly large one. And The Verge didn’t beryllium yet! So, this week, we’ll person stories connected the champion and astir important gadgets and platforms that launched that twelvemonth and pieces astir the taste events that still impact the measurement we unrecorded now. Basically, we’re going to blog for illustration it’s 2004.

Our first fewer stories are up today, covering everything from the first robo-car race to the Motorola Razr to the enigma of all our missing 2004 photos. There’s besides a typical section of The Vergecast all astir the history and early of podcasts, an question and reply pinch Kevin Rose astir Digg’s legacy, and a shockingly difficult quiz asking 1 elemental question: did it hap successful 2004 aliases 2024?

We’ll beryllium publishing much 2004 stories and videos each week, and we want to perceive each your 2004 memories, too! Share your favourite pictures from that year, your favourite 20-year-old gadgets that wish still worked (or shockingly still do), and thing other you retrieve from that seminal twelvemonth successful our caller past. We’ll beryllium doing the same. It’s going to beryllium much nosy than Shrek 2.