Platforms & apps

A full-screen intro between you and the content, with a button reading 'Enter site' or 'Skip intro'. Died because search engines did not click it either.

The egg-shaped keychain pet from Bandai, released in Japan in November 1996, that needed feeding, cleaning and attention every few hours or it died, and that was banned from schools across the world in 1997 for causing grief in the middle of lessons. Sold 40 million by 1998, went quiet by 2002, and came back in 2018 and again in 2023 for the adults who had killed the originals. The record notes it was the first device to make people feel guilty about a notification.

Software you did not ask for and cannot remove — a 1990s term for programs that had grown fat, which by 2013 meant the carrier's own weather app, a trial of an antivirus and a game called 'Candy Something' pre-installed on a new phone, greyed out in the uninstall menu. The record notes 'bloatware' is why people rooted phones, and that a laptop with a clean install is now a luxury good.

What officially happened in a story — canon — as opposed to headcanon, fanon, and what should have happened, from Sherlock Holmes societies into every fandom, and the record's entry for the word that has caused more arguments than any plot.

Fiction written by fans about someone else's characters — fanfic — from 1960s zines into the internet's largest body of writing, and the record's entry for the form that trained a generation of novelists and is still apologised for. It shouldn't be.

A page where strangers wrote that they had visited. The first comment section, and the last one where every entry was sincere.

Microsoft's browser, launched in August 1995, which won the browser war by being free and bundled, held 95 per cent of the web in 2003, then spent the next twenty years as the thing you used once to download Chrome. Retired on 15 June 2022, an occasion marked in South Korea by a gravestone reading 'a good tool to download other browsers'. The record notes IE6 kept web developers awake for a decade, and that the 'e' logo is still what many parents call the internet.

Text that scrolled sideways across the page for no reason. Outlived the blink tag by pretending to be useful, and still renders today in every browser out of embarrassment.

A badge insisting the page looked better in the browser you were probably already using. The first time the web asked you to install something to see it properly.

Text that flashed on and off. Its own inventor apologised for it, and browsers took nineteen years to switch it off.

The friendly, wobbly typeface Vincent Connare drew for Microsoft in 1994 to fit a cartoon dog's speech bubble, which escaped into every school newsletter, church notice and lost-cat poster on Earth and became, by 2010, the internet's shared object of typographic contempt. The record notes it was used to announce the Higgs boson in 2012, that it is genuinely easier for some dyslexic readers, and that hating it is the easiest opinion in design.

The browser that was the web in 1995 — 80 per cent of users, a $2 billion IPO that started the dot-com bubble, and a throbbing 'N' in the corner while the page loaded — and that lost everything to a free Internet Explorer by 1998, gave its code to Mozilla, and had its last version supported until 1 March 2008. The record notes that Firefox is its grandchild and that 'Netscape' is the word people use to date a memory to before Google.

Two graduate students listing every website by hand, in categories. Worked until the web became too large to be listed, which was about 1998; formally admitted in 2014.

The software that fixes your typos and, since the iPhone of 2007, replaces the word you meant with the word it prefers — 'ducking' being the canonical example, and the subject of a 2023 Apple keynote promise to finally learn it. Born in Word in 1993, it became a comedy genre with the 'Damn You Autocorrect' blog in 2010. The record notes autocorrect is the only editor most people have, and that they hate it.

Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia, launched in March 1993, which for a decade was where every homework essay came from, with its video clips, MindMaze quiz game and the sound of the disc spinning up. Peaked around 2000, and discontinued on 31 December 2009 because a free website written by strangers had made it pointless. The record notes 'Encarta' is the word millennials say when explaining what research used to feel like.

A gathering of people, their desktop computers, monitors, cables and a case of energy drinks in a basement or hall, to play Doom, Quake or Counter-Strike on a local network, at its peak in the early 2000s when broadband was rare and carrying a CRT up a staircase was love. Dying since online play made the staircase optional. The record notes DreamHack still fills an arena with them, and that the smell is part of the tradition.

The full-screen blue crash of Windows — white text, a hexadecimal code, everything unsaved gone — which terrorised the 1990s, was tamed by Windows XP and 7, and was assumed dead until 19 July 2024, when a faulty CrowdStrike update showed it on 8.5 million machines, airport departure boards and Times Square billboards at once. The record notes it was, for one day, the most photographed screen on Earth, and that Microsoft changed it to black in 2025.

The grid of hidden mines that came free with every copy of Windows from 3.1 in 1992 to 7, taught a generation the right mouse button and the flag, and was the world's most-played game by the simple method of being on every office computer. Removed from Windows 8 in October 2012 and moved to the Store with adverts, which the record considers a crime. The record notes that most people never learned the rules and clicked until they lost, and were happy.

Text channels with operators, kicks and bans, running continuously since 1988. Everything Discord does, in a form that never asked for your phone number.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. Older than the web and hidden in more websites than any other sequence of buttons; the man who invented it died in 2020 and it was typed at his memorial.

The animation that took over an idle monitor to stop images burning into the phosphor — flying toasters from 1989, Windows' 3D pipes and maze from the mid-1990s, the bouncing DVD logo, and the family photos your father set in 2004. Peaked in the late 1990s as the one bit of personality on an office PC, and died around 2015 when LCD screens made the burn-in a memory and 'sleep' made the animation a waste of power. The record notes the DVD logo hitting the corner is still an event.

A character too perfect to be interesting — the Mary Sue — from a 1973 parody of Star Trek fanfic into the general vocabulary of criticism, applied to protagonists in films with a budget. The record's entry for the oldest criticism in fandom, and for the argument about whether it is fair.

The removable disk — 8-inch in 1971, 5.25-inch in the late 1970s, and the rigid 3.5-inch 1.44 MB square from 1982 that everyone under forty knows only as the save icon. Peaked in the mid-1990s when every program came on twelve of them, was abandoned by the iMac in 1998, and Sony made the last one in March 2011. The record notes a child once asked why someone had 3D-printed the save button, and that the record has not recovered.