50 years of tech devices

Ben Tossell published a website showing popular and forgotten tech devices over time, at bentossell.com/devices. He wrote that it took a morning to make, started in Codex and finished with Factory, and that it covers 87 devices spanning 1976 to 2026. All images on the site were generated by Astra.

The project began about two weeks earlier as a site for forgotten devices from his childhood, rendered as a grid called "still works" on here.now. After seeing a timeline scrubbing demo by Cole, he asked Codex to find where the earlier device images and prompts were created and to build a simple timeline scrubber that changes the device shown as the years are scrubbed. He said the agent found the images and prompts within a minute and produced three versions.

The original fifty devices stopped around the 2000s, so he had more generated up to the present, using subagents, which he described as agents reporting back from their own sessions for parallel work. He wrote that for each device the process worked out the real model, found a reference photo and generated a new image of that exact device.

He added voting for whether users had or wanted a device, with a shareable personal page whose picks are carried in the link rather than stored, and a leaderboard for the most had and most wanted. He wrote that Game Boy Color was winning and that he might randomise the device shown on page load. A video and GIF were also produced by an agent. After the leaderboard went live the counts stopped updating; he wrote that his own testing had used up the hourly limit on reading votes and that there is a wall at 25,000 votes, and that fixes were made.

He stated he is an investor in Factory and Here Now.