In the late 1990s, Sony made a consumer video camera with a rudimentary “night vision” mode, which just removed the usual infrared filter from the CCD sensors used at the time. It became extremely popular, and then discontinued, when people realized you could photograph women in form-fitting swimsuits, and certain…

The Commodore 64 was one of many personal computers in the 80s, and I can’t think of anything that made it stand out for changing “the way we thought about computers” or of such significance that “we would not have experienced the computer revolution of the 80s if there had been no Commodore 64.” It had a huge but…