Nine machines that ran the decade — counting down to the one almost every kid carried in a schoolbag.
Launched in 1992, it recorded 74 minutes onto a rewritable disc in a plastic shell — and unlike CDs, it never skipped. Japan loved it. The West mostly shrugged.
Your calendar, contacts and to-do list in a shirt pocket, years before smartphones. You wrote with a stylus in Graffiti — a shorthand alphabet you had to learn.
Portable CD players went mainstream once anti-skip memory arrived, buffering seconds of audio ahead so a jog or a bus ride no longer turned an album into stutters.
One 1994 cartridge held 100 MB. A floppy disk held 1.44 MB. Suddenly you could carry a whole project home in your bag instead of a stack of twenty disks.
An egg-sized virtual pet that beeped to be fed at the worst moments. More than 80 million sold, and classrooms worldwide banned them for the interruptions.
The 1999 phone that hid its antenna inside the case, swapped its own covers, and put Snake in millions of pockets. Around 160 million were sold.
In 1998 Apple sold a computer you could see through. It dropped the floppy drive entirely and bet on USB — a decision everyone called reckless, then copied.
Cartridges were expensive and small. Sony's 1994 console used cheap CDs instead, and became the first games machine ever to pass 100 million units sold.
A grey-green screen, four AA batteries and Tetris in the box. Rivals had colour and lost anyway — with the Game Boy Color it sold roughly 118 million units.
Every one of these did a single job well. The phone in your pocket now does all nine at once — and still runs a Game Boy emulator.