TechStuff's 10th Anniversary Spectacular!

episodes into this run, which is pretty incredible. And uh, today I'm gonna look at stuff that launched in two thousand and eight and how all that stuff has changed in the last ten years. I thought that would be a fun way to kind of break down the tenth anniversary. I didn't want to pick just a topic a company or a person or anything like that, because I didn't feel like there was anything that would really encompass all

that tech Stuff is. So instead, we're gonna look at stuff that was going on in two thousand eight and then kind of compared to what's going on today. The first thing I wanted to talk about, however, was the show itself. The very first episode of Tech Stuff that ever aired, and that's an important designation, was on Tuesday, June tenth, two thousand and eight, and it had the title how the Google Apple Cloud computer will work? Say what. It was based off an article that was written by

Chris Pallette. He was my original co host on tech Stuff. He's also one of the editors I used to work with back when I was a writer for the house Stuff Works website. And this, uh, this episode. First of all, it was very short. It's about five minutes long. Uh. The early episodes of tech Stuff were all that short. Maybe some of you really wish for those days to return, but back then we were told we could not go longer than five minutes, and that was really really hard.

This particular episod it was again about this article, and the article was about a hypothetical partnership that could happen between Google and Apple, and this was something that was being talked about by various analysts, but there weren't any you know, hard evidence to point out to say, hey,

this is a this is absolutely happening. But the guess was that Google and Apple were going to work together, with Google providing the back end computing system for an Apple based lightweight computing product, possibly a portable one, so something along the lines of like the iPad, but where all the computing elements would be handled over the cloud, sort of like netbooks and later the Chrome books that would come out, and as it turned out, that never

really materialized in the way that people were suggesting, although we did see that model of cloud computing start to take shape, so it's not like it was totally off base. But that was the very first episode, and of Tech Stuff as a podcast has changed dramatically since those days. Um Obviously, one thing is that it's now a single host show, and that happened after Chris Pollette after several years, decided he wanted to go pursue other career opportunities. He

was not terribly interested in being in the limelight. I can't necessarily blame him for that. He wanted to kind of separate that from his life. He wanted to have a more uh private life, and so he left the show and pursued his other interests and is doing quite well.

And then Lauren Vogelbaum joined the show for a while as co host, and then she too wanted to go and launch some new shows, work on some other projects and how stuff works, and she couldn't do all that and be co host of Tech Stuff, so she also left, and since then it's been pretty much just me with occasional guest co hosts and uh and obviously the show has changed quite a bit in length as well. When we first started, like I said, was about a five

minute long show per episode. We eventually got the um the notification that we could go to ten or fifteen minutes, and then eventually they said just go as long as you need to go for whatever the topic happens to be, and that's when we started seeing episodes get into that forty minute to an hour long range. And we were publishing twice a week. Then for a while we were publishing for just once a week, and now we're publishing five times a week, with classic episodes running on Fridays.

So the show keeps on changing, except I've been on every single one of them, so I guess I'm the one constant in all of tech stuff. And uh, yeah, we're almost up to a thousand, and by the way, just in case you guys are worried, there are no plans to get rid of tech stuff. We're going to keep on going. We're gonna keep on making shows about technology. There's no shortage of topics to cover, and I'm really

looking forward to doing more of those. But now to talk about some other stuff that was going on in two thousand eight. So one thing that happened in two thousand eight was the high definition War sort of came to an end. Leading up to two thousand eight, there were two big formats that were really battling it out. H D DVD, which was sort of championed by Toshiba, and Blu Ray, which was championed by Sony, and the two different standards had been fighting it out in the

marketplace for a while. Both companies have been luring various movie studios and television production companies to provide content for their particular platform exclusively. It was pretty ugly, and in two thousand eight it ended up being kind of concluded. H D DVD ended up bowing out to Blu Ray. Now, if you're wondering what the difference was between the two formats, well,

first of all, they were not compatible. So unless you had one of just a couple of pieces of equipment that could play both, you had to choose one or the other. The HD DVD could hold about fifteen gigabytes of data on a single layer of a h D DVD. You could do multiple layers and increase that but uh, it was fifteen gigabytes for just a standard single layer

h D DVD. Blue Ray could hold twenty five gigabytes on a single layer h D DVD was less expensive than Blu ray, but Sony was able to lure more major studios to support Blu Ray over to h D DVD, and in January eight just before c e S, in fact, Blu Ray was able to lure Warner Brothers away to jump ship because they had been with HD DVD, but then they switched over to Blu Ray, and then HD DVD would cancel their c E S press conference. In the wake of that news, they said, well, we really

need to reevaluate things. We can't just go ahead with our press conference anymore. It was a real sabotage of h D DVD and Blu Ray one out, and usually lack of competition is a bad thing for consumers, but in this case, what it meant was that more people ended up by Blu ray players because it was really the only platform that was going to actually continue to exist.

H D DVD was going to go away, and with more people buying it, that actually helped bring the price down on Blu rays and make it more affordable, because before that only really early adopters with a good deal of disposable income had bought into the system. Next, I want to talk about an SLR camera because this is kind of a funny story. This is two thousand eight, remember, and that's when the Nikon D nine D came out, and the D ninety was a twelve point three megapixel

digital camera. Still is I guess it's an SLR. SLR stands for single lens Reflex and it was the first digital SLR to feature video recording capabilities. YEP, and two thousand eight, this was brand new. It was a DSLR capable of shooting video. Before that was all just still images. It could record video up to seven P resolution with

twenty four frames per second and only mono sound. So the camera also had an auto focus feature whenever you're using it for still images, but if you wanted to use it for video you had to use manual focus tracking. I just thought that was interesting that it wasn't until two thousand eight that we had a digital SLR that could take video. And of course now it's a standard feature that you're gonna find on all DSLRs. Pretty much.

And it's just interesting to me because some of the cameras, in fact, a lot of the cameras we use here at hell Stuff Works are DSLRs, and it's just one of it's funny to think of a time when that was new, and funny to think that that was the same year that tech Stuff came out. Also in two thousand eight, USB three point oh was completed as a standard, and actually happened in November two thoight, so it happened

after tech Stuff launched. The three point oh standard for USB represented a huge jump from USB two point oh. It allowed for data transfer speeds of up to five gigabits for a second, plus included two unidirectional data paths. This made USB three point oh about ten times faster than USB two point oh for unidirectional data transfers. It was even faster if you wanted to exchange data between

two devices. So what I mean by that is with USB two point oh, you had one pathway and it was one way per data transfer, so you could send data from one device to another device in a single direction. Then you could stop and send data back the other way, but you could not do it simultaneously. You only had

the one channel. USB three point oh had two unidirectional pathways, so it's like you have a pathway from device one to device two and a different pathway from device two back to device one, and you could send data back across each device simultaneously, so it could be much much faster. The first products to feature USB three point oh would not come out until two thousand nine, and even those weren't really consumer products. The consumer products wouldn't come out

until two thousand ten. In so it's still a couple of years out before USB three point I would really fall into the hands of consumers. Bill Gates retired as Chief Software Architect for Microsoft in June two thousand and eight. I actually remember the c E S presentation where he and Steve Balmer came out and they even showed a video of what Bill Gates's, uh, the last day in the office would be like. It was very comedic. It

was a very funny, little self deprecating video. He would stay on as chairman of Microsoft until two thousand fourteen. They would he would then hand over the role of chairman to John W. Thompson. Steve Balmer, who was the CEO of Microsoft since two thousand would also step down in two thousand fourteen and was replaced by Satya Nadela, and Microsoft went on to acquire Nokia in two thousand

fourteen for seven point two billion dollars. Also, but mo Yang or Mojang for a two point five billion that's the game company that created Minecraft. Uh. Microsoft has of course been struggling a little bit, especially in areas like mobile. They were never really able to crack mobile in a significant way. They weren't able to go up against iPhone and Android in a way that was really meaningful. And the cloud has also changed the way the company does

business significantly. It's not only Microsoft is in danger of just going away, but they've certainly kind of lost some steam with the domination that the company had had back in the eighties and nineties. Also in two thousand eight, in March, just a little bit before we started tech Stuff, Hulu launched for public access. Now the site actually went live in two thousand seven, and originally when it went live,

it was a website that didn't have any content. You just went there and it said it was coming soon. But then a private beta test followed in late two thousand seven early two thousand and eight. The actual service would not launch until the spring of two thousand eight. It was a joint venture still is a joint venture between lots of different media companies, but originally it was NBC, Universal and Fox, and they've been in the works of designing this project for a couple of years. It launched

with shows and movies from around fifty media companies. There were a couple of notable absences from that group, CBS and ABC. We're both absent from that. Of course, CBS and ABC are competing broadcast networks with NBC and Fox,

so it's not a huge surprise. But in two thousand nine, the Walt Disney Company announced it would purchase a twenty seven percent steak in Hulu, and later when Disney announced in twenty seventeen that it intended to acquire twenty first century Fox, it would mean that Disney would end up having a thirty percent additional steak in Hulu because Fox ownedtent of Hulu, so that would give Disney controlling interest

in Hulu. And two thousand and sixteen, Hulu would end its free ad supported service because up until then you could actually log in and watch television shows and movies with ads without having to make an account or anything. You could just watch it. Then it would require users to sign up for either a seven dollars and ninety nine cent tier of service that had limited commercials, or an eleven dollar and ninety nine cent tier for an

ad free service. I remember when this happened, a lot of users got upset because they didn't like the idea of having to pay for a subscription service where you still had ads at all, even if there was another option to pay a little bit more and get an ad free experience. The idea was, hey, I already had an ad an ad experience that was otherwise free. Why am I now having to pay for that? So there

was a bit of a backlash on that. Hulu announced in January two eighteen that had seventeen million subscribers at the end of two thousand seventeen, which is about a third of what Netflix had at that same time in the United States. Also, Hulu and Netflix are very different things. Netflix is a global entity. It's got a lot of services and a lot of different countries, whereas Hulu is US centric but still even in the United States, Netflix is about three times more popular than Hulu right now.

In two thousand and eight, Tesla began production on the Tesla Roadster, and there's a sports car that was an electric sports car of very fancy, kind of sleek looking sports car. But they had a lot of issues before it came out, had a really rocky journey to production, and the company nearly collapsed in on itself several times before the Roadster ever went into mass production. The company held a launch party for the Roadster back in two

thousand and six. This was sort of a preview event with prototype Tesla Roadsters, and they were meant to kind of show off to investors and potential customers and give people rides in these prototypes. Elon Musk, who who is frequently cited as a co founder, though he really came on board after the company had already been founded, but was able to propel it towards its actual eventual ability

to do business. He later said that the earliest versions of the Roadster were quote completely unsafe end quote, and that they quote broke down all the time end quote. The Roadster could accelerate from zero to a hundred kilometers an hour or at sixty two miles per hour in four seconds, with a top speed of two d one kilometers per hour or hundred twenty five miles per hour, and on a full battery, it was said to be able to travel about two miles or three two kilometers.

It costs just a touch less than a hundred grand if you weren't getting any options on it, and the first Tesla Roadster was delivered to Elon Musk. Big surprise, it's the same car that is now in outer space. Musk's other big project is SpaceX, and SpaceX launched his Tesla into heliocentric orbit on February six, two thousand eighteen, using a Falcon heavy rocket. So the car is supposed to end up in the neighborhood of Mars, and it's blasting David Bowie on the radio, which is pretty appropriate.

In two thousand eight top Gear gave the roadster a bit of a shakedown on their program. They claimed that it ran out of juice a little early, and Tesla ended up suing the BBC for libel, but British courts decided against Tesla and in favor of the BBC. Tesla sold fewer than two thousand, five hundred roadsters during the run of cars which stretched hill two thousand twelve, and today Tesla has produced more than three hundred thousand vehicles.

The company recently held a press conference where it revealed it was closing in on its production goal of five thousand vehicles per week for the Model three series, and the company still has some analysts concerned because it burns through a lot of cash and it may require more funding to day in business. So it's it's not all the woods yet. Next, I want to talk a little bit about Spore. Spore was a real time strategy game in which you would shape the evolution of life forms

that came out in two thousand and eight. It was highly anticipated and it actually experienced several delays before it finally came out. But it also included some digital rights management technology called secure rom s e c U upper case r o M like read only memory, and that potentially could open up the possibility of security risks to users computers. That was later revealed, So that was a

bit of a black eye against the game. Uh. It got decent reviews, good critical reception, but it well largely it underperformed. That same year, Blizzard announced Diablow three, which ended up being a big hit. Games that came out that year included stuff like Burnout, Paradise, Super Smash, Brothers, Brawl, Ti Rock, Army of Two, Command and Conquer three, Assassin's Creed for Windows, Mario Kart, we Grand Theft Auto four, Mass Effect, Ninja, Guidan To Star Wars, The Force Unleashed

Bioshot came out for the PS three. It had already come out for Xbox the year before Fallout three came out, and Left for Dead came out. So it was a good year for games. And that's just a tiny sample of the games that came out. I picked and chose from a huge list. Those are pretty good year for games. I fall Out three and Left for Dead or two of my favorites. So and I actually really like Grand Theft Auto four, although it has a much darker and more grim tone than a lot of the other entries

in that series. Also in two thousand and eight, Nintendo would release the we Fit. This was a very very good selling peripheral for the Nintendo we This was the little balance board that you could play with and uh play various games. And the we Fit, a game where you would use it to exercise, was really popular. So popular, in fact, that it was really hard to find a

we Fit it even months after a debut. Nintendo is pretty famous for producing fewer units than what demand calls for, and the we Fit was no exception, and I remember when I was looking for one, it took months before I finally found one. Um I think it's the third best selling video game peripheral of all times, so it's

pretty impressive. Also in two thousand eight, the Intel Core to duo was the state of the art in microprocessors at the time, and the york Field quad core processor from Mentel had forty five nanometer components came out in March two thousand and eight. The state of the art now, if you were to compare it to the top of the line of Intel, would be the I nine seven nine eight x C processor, which has eighteen cores, and that will set you back nearly two thousand dollars now.

Earlier in eighteen, there was a report that revealed that two security flaws and Intel chips called Specter and Meltdown were in practically every process are made by Intel for the last twenty years, and to be fair, they don't just affect Intel processors more than that in a second. So meltdown is a problem where you're you're supposed to have isolation between applications and a computer's operating system. They're supposed to be bits that prevent data exchanges from happening.

Willy nilly. It protects data from one app from being accessed by other apps. But this flaw in various processors breaks this down. So potentially you could create a program that would be able to access the information generated by other programs, and it's possible that since the information could be sniffed out and leaked. Specter is kind of similar, but using a different vulnerability. Specter is harder to implement, but it's also harder to fix, so if you can

effectively leverage Specter, it's harder to fix it. Jan Horne, who worked on Google Project zero, was one of the individuals to report these flaws. They were report did by others independently around the same time. It's interesting that Horn was able to find both of these on Intel chips, and the vulnerability would allow an attacker to see all sorts of sensitive information, including passwords and log in information, not to mention sensitive stuff you've stored on your computer.

Now the meltdown vulnerability affects all Intel processors that were produced since n with the exception of Intel Titanium and the Intel Atom processors from before specters. Even worse, it affects Intel A and D and ARM processors. Now, this is a problem that affects MAX and PCs, and it's likely to be an issue for a really long time, and there's not an easy fixed respector various operating system

builds can be patched against meltdown. However, now I have a lot more to say about what happened in two thousand eight and how it's changed in the ten years since. But before I get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, so Twitter. Now, Twitter was already a thing in two thousand and eight. It had had a soft launch in two thousand six. It got bigger in two thousand seven after it had a good showing at south By, and it continued to grow.

In two thousand eight, Jack Dorsey stepped down from his role as the Twitter CEO and Evan Williams would take over and Twitter would experience rapid growth. So Twitter had a pretty good year in two thousand eight. Now it's interesting because Jack Dorsey would become the interim CEO again. In July two thousand fifteen, he would take over, and then he was named permanent CEO in October two thousand fifteen.

So Dorsey started as CEO, stepped down, took over as an interim CEO in twenty fifteen, and now as CEO of the company once more. Twitter's revenue depends almost entirely a UoN advertising, so here's a quick rundown of how

it's been doing recently. From the two thousand eighteen financial report, the company states that more than eighty five of all revenue comes from ads, and that nearly all that revenue comes from promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends, and the net income for seventeen was sixty one million dollars with a margin of nine monthly active users. During the first quarter of two thousand eighteen, earnings Call was cited at three d thirty six million people, with sixty nine

million of those in the United States. So not the dominant factor that it once was, maybe, but still doing quite well. One thing that debuted in two thousand eight that really helped shape the way our world works today was the iPhone three G and the App store as well.

Apple's iPhone three G was actually the second generation iPhone, and the name refers to the cell net work technology it was compatible with, not the generation of the iPhone, and that caused some confusion at the time because obviously it was the second iPhone. It was called the iPhone three G, and so there had some people wondering, well, what happened to the iPhone two, Well, it is the

iPhone two. It's just it's called the three G because the three G network provided faster data transfer speeds than the edge network that the original iPhone depended upon. The price tag for the phone was just a hundred dollars. This was a big price cut from the previous iPhone, although that came along with some pretty hefty UH contract requirements, so it wasn't like you were really saving money in the long run. The money was just shifted to a

monthly fee as opposed to the upfront fee. The iPhone three G was in many ways similar to the first iPhone, apart from this three G capability. For example, had the same sort of camera, a two megapixel camera. There was no additional camera, just the one, and it didn't have video capabilities. At that time, it didn't look that different

from the original iPhone. If you put them side by side, they look very similar, although the iPhone three G had a slightly thicker black border around the perimeter of the screen, and also the back of the iPhone three G was in plastic. It was either in white or black plastic. The original iPhone had a recessed three point five millimeter headphone jack, which meant that it was really kind of

hard to use third party headphones with it. Because of that recessed uh nature, you couldn't a lot of the plugs wouldn't reach, and it frustrated a lot of people who didn't want to just have to buy Apple products to to use the iPhone. So the iPhone three G no longer had a recessed three point five millimator headphone jack. It was flush with the end of the phone, so

it made it easier to plug stuff into. The three G also included GPS hardware in the phone, and that would pretty much foretell the beginning of the end of stand alone GPS devices. It's not like they've all disappeared. There's still stand alone GPS devices on the market, but they've been largely replaced by smartphones, and the iPhone three G was kind of the harbinger of that. So for those people who still have a stand alone GPS receiver, it's kind of interesting. But most people, I think have

switched over to smartphones. Just as I think a lot of people have decided to depend upon their smartphones as their MP three player they're streaming video device, they don't tend to have as many people depending on stand alone dedicated devices. I used to be a holdout for that. If you've been listening to tech stuff for a long time,

you know that. Chris and I when we would have these discussions, I would talk to them about how I don't want to have all my music on my phone because at that time phones had very limited storage space, and there weren't a lot of streaming services that you could use to listen to music. Uh and if you did want to do that, you were eating up a lot of data. And if you didn't have a really good network nearby or Wi Fi hotspots you could connect to, then you have a lot of interruption in your service.

So I preferred having a dedicated MP three player and a dedicated GPS. But these days the technology has improved so significantly over the last ten years that I can't imagine having carrying around extra MP three player or having an extra GPS system to UH to depend upon in a vehicle. There's just no need for it anymore. Today's iPhones are, of course, way more advanced and sleek than the iPhone three G was. They also did away with

that three point five billimeter headphone jack entirely. Of course, the iPhone is not alone in this, A lot of phones have gotten rid of that as My Android phone, for example, doesn't have a three point five millimeter jack either, So I can't just point fingers at Apple for this. Apple also launched the apps door in two thousand and eight, which is, you know, kind of hard to believe. It didn't exist during the original iPhone run. For the full year iPhone was out and there was no app store

at all. Initially, the app store had about five apps available, and today it's more than two million, and it wasn't always a guarantee that we would get an app store. Steve Jobs initially opposed the idea of allowing third party developers to create applications for the iPhone. He was worried that it would negatively impact the Apple experience. It's a very Apple thing, and a very Steve Jobs thing to want to control that experience precisely to deliver to the

user what Steve Jobs felt was the ideal experience. Jobs was not about giving the user what he or she wanted. Jobs was all about giving the user what Jobs wanted, and he was worried that allowing third party developers to create apps would fracture his device, it would make it uh do things that it wasn't intended to do and

perhaps dilute the experience. But eventually he was convinced to do otherwise, and it ended up being a incredibly profitable decision for Apple because Apple would take about thirty of the revenues generated from apps, whether it was a purchase price upfront or an ongoing subscription fee or whatever it might be. Apple would get a thirty percent take, so developers would take the other sevent This made Apple truckloads

of money, like massive truckloads. A Forbes piece from January two eighteen stated that the App Store earned eleven point five billion dollars in revenue for Apple in two thousand seventeen, So it ended up being an incredibly beneficial decision for Apple to go with this app store approach. It's a very uh low cost way for Apple to make a huge amount of money. Google Android came out in two thousand and eight. We even did an episode titled how the Google Android Phone will work back in the early

days of tech Stuff. Android was revealed in two thousand seven, but the first device running on Android did not come out until the fall of two thousand eight. Android had started out as a startup in two thousand three. It was founded by Rich Minor, Nick Sears, Chris White, and

Andy Ruben. Reuben wanted to create an operating system platform for mobile devices that would allow for more rich experiences and one's the largely depend upon context like the location of the user, for example, and Google would acquire Android the company in two thousand five for a bunch of money, but it was kind of a private affair, so that number has never been officially acknowledged. Most estimates put somewhere

around fifty million dollars. The first phone to feature the Android operating system was the HTC Dream a k a. The g One on the T Mobile network. I don't think I had a g One. I remember I got the HTC G two. I don't remember event HTC Dream, but the HTC G two, which came out in I definitely had. And both of those featured a screen that would slide up to reveal a physical keyboard underneath, and

I really like that. I don't like on screen keyboards, even though I've had phones for the last several years and that's the only kind that I've bought were the ones with on screen keyboards. I've always preferred the physical ones. I just felt like it gave a better experience. Android would trail a year behind iPhone and the iOS obviously that came out in two thousand seven, and Android didn't have a phone out till two thousand and eight. But

Dad didn't hurt Android very much. In the Android operating system accounts for nearly eighty six percent of all smartphone operating system market share worldwide eight six percent. Compare that to iOS is about fourteen percent. Pretty Much everything else is scrambling for less and a per cent of the share. So it's down to mostly Android, a little bit iPhone, and then everybody else. So why did Android dominate? It's not necessarily a sign that it's a superior operating system.

Now I prefer Android to iOS, but I think Apple's smartphone operating system is pretty amazing, and I don't deny that it's it's fantastic. It really is great. I just prefer Android. But I think the reason why Android outperforms Apple. In fact, i'm pretty sure this is the reason, is that Google allows numerous handset manufacturers to use the Android operating system on their products. You just license it from Google, and if you want an iOS device, you have to

go through Apple for hardware. Apple is the only company that makes devices that run iOS, so there's a limitation on what sort of models and which price points you can get if you want an iOS device, Whereas with Android, there's an entire spectrum. You can expands everything from budget smartphones to high end models. So there's a lot more availability there, and I think that's the secret to why Android is such a dominant player in the operating system space.

It's not that Android is necessarily superior, although I definitely prefer it. It's that Android is available on a lot more products than iOS is, and that's the real reason. Now, something else that came online in September two eight, and also was from Google, was the Chrome browser. It is hard for me to believe that tech stuff is older than Google Chrome. So what the heck was I using to do research back then? That's a rhetorical question. Actually,

remember it was Firefox. But Chrome's big innovation was that every tab was to run as a separate instance, which meant that the overall browser was much more stable. All processes were isolated, so if something went wrong in one tab, it would not cause the entire browser to fail, so you can keep your other tabs active. So let's say that you have a plug in that has a compatibility issue or something, and one tab ends up giving you

an error. The other tabs would still be fine, so you could close out the problematic tab and everything else would still be there. Chrome combined a search and address bar into a single bar, and that also got people confused at first, but that was a very new innovation. You could either type a web address directly into the bar, or you could just type in some search terms and it would pull up a Google search related to that. This is, of course, the way Google Chrome still works

to this day. According to stat Counter, which aggregates data to determine market share percentage of various products, Chrome is the dominant web browser out there today, accounting for nearly six of all browsers. The next highest is Safari, which is around four. All other browsers each command ten percent or less of the market, so Chrome now dominates. But when our show launched, there was no such browser in existence. In October two thousand eight, Spotify would launch, so our

show is actually older than Spotify as well. Now. The domain Spotify was registered all the way back in two thousand six, and it was founded by Daniel Eck and Martin Lawrence En in Stockholm. The service ran a beta test that started back in two thousand seven, so that predates my show that included running test ads in early two thousand eight before they had their official launch. Now upon launch, Spotify was initially only available in Scandinavia, the

United Kingdom, France, and Spain. What's more, the free service was invitation only. Now anyone could sign up for a premium service that was like a subscription based service, but to use just the free ad supported one you had to get an invite first. Spotify landed licensing deals with most of the major music studios out there, so they were able to play lots of music. Apparently it took a really long time, like two and a half years to get all of that signed up and and sealed

up before they could launch. Spotify would end up getting a bit of a boost from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame, but Spotify just didn't become available in the United States until two thousand eleven, and by then the company was already valued at one billion dollars. In April two thousand eighteen, Spotify filed for a direct listing on the stock market

rather than an initial public offering. This involves doing away with intermediaries like underwriters and selling shares directly to the public without issuing new shares of stock, so those who held stake in the company when it was a private entity are free to sell their shares to the public. At that point, Reuters calculated Spotify's value at nineteen billion dollars. And now let's talk about one of my favorite technologies that really came online into the sand eight, the Large

Hadron Collider. It started up at ten a m September two thousand eight. It fired a proton beam around the twenty seven kilometer collider for the very first time. And the Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator and collider. It uses very narrow beams of particles moving at very fast speeds, like near the speed of light, in this massive circle, going around and round and round, until two beams going in opposite directions are directed to have collisions

at one of several detectors. There. There are several major detectors around this circumference of this device, and there you have these particles slamming into each other at very high velocity and they break apart, and then we pay attention and see what happens. Very those magnets are have to be super cool. They have to be cooled with first liquid nitrogen and then liquid helium to get them so cold that they are super conductors. They they you don't

lose any energy to resistance at that temperature. And the collisions produced information about the very basic stuff of our universe. Since it came online, and it took a while before the Large Hadron Collider was actually able to do collisions that would produce data. The online process was a very long, laborious one, but since then they were able to prove or at least a show evidence for the Higgs boson particle that have been hypothesized up to that point but

never proven. And now we've thought that we've observed it. You've got very good proof that we've observed it to to a very high degree of certainty. And this particle is why matter has mass. It's predicted by the Standard model, and it's pretty cool. Also, the Large Hadron Collider in general has shown that the Standard model of physics is really really good. That there's no stic decays, there are no fundamental rules of the Standard model that don't appear

to hold up. There are no deviations significant deviations from the standard model. And in case you're wondering, the standard model covers three of the four fundamental forces in the universe, and those would be the strong and weak nuclear forces. That's two of them, the electromagnetic force that's the third. But the fourth one, gravity is not included in the standard model. So the Center model is not a complete model of how our universe works. It's more of a

model of how a bunch of our universe works. And there's a whole lot left unexplained, including stuff like dark energy. So while the LHC has done a lot to reinforce the standard model, we still have a lot of questions, which is one of the reasons science is so freaking cool.

Some people are a little disappointed that the LHC hasn't turned up stuff outside the standard model, but it has only collected about two percent of all the data it will generate during its life time, so it's still incredibly early in the process. Also, just so you know, it did not create an enormous black hole and destroy all of us, So that's good. I've got a little bit more to talk about with two thousand and eight, but before I do, let's take another quick break to thank

our sponsor. All Right, here's something else that happened in two thousand night that I thought was pretty cool. The white paper Bitcoin, a Peer to peer Electronic Cash System was published in November two thousand eight, written by someone or possibly more than one someone using the pen name Satoshi Nakamoto. This was the white paper that explained the

principles behind Bitcoin. And in case you don't remember what bitcoin is, it is a digital currency and it relies upon a system that puts all of the transactions of bitcoin into blocks of data, and those blocks end up forming a chain we call it blockchain, and the the process of verifying a transaction is UH, and it involves solving a really difficult math problem. And if you have the computer that solves that math problem first and verifies

those transactions, you're rewarded with some bitcoins. It's a process called mining. The number of bitcoins you're rewarded with decreases over time. After a certain number of bitcoins are released out into the wild, UH, you get a reduction by about half. Actually it is half of the number of bitcoins that are released after the next series of successful verifications.

And this goes on for quite some time until you hit another limit, and that's halved again, and so on and so forth, until eventually you have all the entire supply of bitcoins that will ever exist out in circulation. And from that point forward, when you verify a block of transactions, you are awarded a small amount of mone

me as a transaction fee sort of. You're you're rewarded for the verification, but you're no longer getting new bitcoins at that point, you're just getting a portion of the bitcoins that were used in whatever the transaction happened to be. It's kind of like getting a charge to run a credit card scan. So that's typically how Bitcoin works are from a very high level, and no one was really sure if it was going to take off or not, or if it was just going to be kind of

this weird scheme. I mean, it's a decentralized currency, there's no government agency that dictates what it should be. And it's value has changed dramatically over time. So since bitcoin became a real thing, well I mean as as real a thing as digital data gets anyway, it's value has gone from less than less than a dime per bitcoin to a high of nearly twenty thousand dollars per bitcoin

in December two thousand seventeen. Now, as I researched the show the value was closer to seven thousand, five hundred dollars per bitcoin. That was in early juneens. That's pretty wild to think that it used to be twenty grand per bitcoin. Now it's per bitcoin, and who knows what

it will be next month. Now. Recently, a report that relied on stylo metric analysis of Nakamoto's white papers, concluded that Gavin and Reason, a lead developer on bitcoin, is actually Satoshi Nakamoto, saying that Andreason's writing and the white papers that were attributed to Nakamoto share a lot of similarities and and reason denies that claim. Stylometry, as the name implies, compares the writing styles of multiple pieces of work in an effort to determine if those pieces were

in fact written by the same person. Stylometry looks at word choice and vocabulary and some other elements, and it's not an exact science style of metric. Results can be easily influens by tweaking a few different inputs, and that's led some people to dismiss the strategy, saying it's not really reliable. You can't really be sure that the outcome is is truly evidence that two pieces of work were written by the same person. But what's the big deal?

Why why do we care who Knakamoto is anyway, because after all, we just need to know the currency works well. Nakamoto is believed to own about five percent of all bitcoins, which would make him a multibillionaire at this point, at least on paper, But there's a generally held belief that if Nakamoto were to cash in on this five percent, it would be viewed as a vote of no confidence in the virtual currency, and the value of the currency

would plummet. As a result, so Nakamoto would make out like a bandit that everyone else would see their currency start to lose value, and it could create a sort of a run on the currency as everyone tries to cash in before the currency is valueless. On a related concern, there are these entities called bitcoin whales, and these are people or organizations that own a relatively large number of bitcoins. According to Bloomberg, about one thou people own of the

entire bitcoin market. Now that could spell trouble. The worry is that if these whales were to sell off a significant portion of their holdings, it would precipitate a steep drop in bitcoin value, just like I was talking about with Nakamoto, and if they all corroborated to cash in at the same time, it could cause a total collapse of the system. So let's say that you are one

of these whales. Let's say that you own a significant number of bitcoins and you notice that the value has crept as high as it's ever been, maybe it's not that twenty dollar mark, and you think, I want to cash in now because my investment has grown so much it's gonna make me a multi millionaire. But it doesn't do me any good just to hold onto bitcoins. I would rather have quote unquote real currency, because is it's hard to spend a currency, a unit of currency if

its value fluctuates so dramatically so quickly. If one day it's worth in the next day it's worth twenty dollars and you spend it back when it was, you can't help but think, wow, I lost thousands of dollars on that transaction because I spent it too quickly. But if you trade it in for a more stable currency, then

you might feel better about it. So if you did that, if you went and traded this in, other people might see it as a sign that you feel the value of bitcoin is as high as it's ever going to be, and other people might want to cash in as well, And pretty soon you've got a lot of people selling it, not a whole lot of people buying, and the value of the coin drops as supply greatly outpaces demand, and then eventually the value could collapse in on itself. So

it's a dangerous thing. Hasn't happened yet, though, and at least not on that scale. We've definitely seen massive fluctuations in value. But some people say it's just little market corrections that have returned it to a more stable bitcoin per dollar exchange rate. Still astronomical, I mean, for a bitcoin is pretty incredible. Also, in two thousand eight, Facebook launched a major site redesign that forced all users to opt in by September of that year, and people hated it.

And of course the same thing has happened several times since then. Whenever Facebook does a redesign, you can expect the next month to be filled with people talking about how much they hate the redesign. And these would be the same people who hated the last redesign. So eventually, what happens is people get used to the redesign. They might not love it, but they get used to it, and then they hate change anyway. Facebook would turn cash flow positive for the very first time in two thousand nine.

The Social Network, A film about Facebook's early days, would debut in two thousand ten. Google Plus would launch in two thousand eleven. I'll talk more about that in our next episode. Facebook Messenger would launch in two thousand eleven. Facebook would acquire Instagram in two thousand twelve for one billion dollars. I talked about that recently in the Instagram episodes, and Facebook would hold its initial public offering in two thousand twelve, and it would be valued at one hundred

four billion dollars upon opening of the stock market. In Facebook acquired Oculus Virtual Reality and also acquired the messaging service WhatsApp that year for a massive amount of money. My Space was way ahead of Facebook in traffic up through the beginning of two thousand and eight until April nineteen, and that was the first time when Facebook would take the lead in traffic, and then Facebook pretty much kept it.

So it's hard to remember that now. It's hard to believe it, really, but in two thousand eight when tech Stuff launched, my Space was a real contender with Facebook. It was it was doing well, or at least it was on the tail end of doing well. It was

just on the precipice of dropping off the map. So News Corps, which had bought my Space in July two thousand five for five hundred eighty million dollars, would hold onto the site until two thousand eleven, and at that point they tried to sell it, and their first attempts to sell it failed. They were looking to get somebody to at least put in a bid of fifty million

dollars and that didn't work. Eventually, they were able to sell my Space to a company called Specific Media for an undisclosed amount, although it was rumored to be around thirty five million. So News Corps bought it at five eight million and sold it at thirty five million. Ouch. Eventually, Time Inc. Bought my Space in and it used to be the most visited site on the Internet, at least for US users. Now it's ranked below one thousand, six

hundred in the United States. And that's just kind of a quick overview of some of the things that were going on in two thousand eight and how they've changed in those ten years. In our next episode, I'm gonna dive into this a little bit on a different different path. I'm gonna look at things companies that did not exist in two thousand and eight but they do exist today

and tell you a little bit about those. So stuff that popped up in the decades since we started doing this show, stuff that launched after tech stuff did but did not stick around. So I'll talk about companies like Pebble and Cool and Yik yak, stuff like that, and then the stuff that existed before tech Stuff launched but don't exist no more, stuff like Jawbone companies that had been around but no longer exist today. So make sure

you tune into that next episode. It will be kind of a part two celebration of tech Stuff's ten years to talk about how time has really made a huge impact, how technology changes as years pass, and how things that we kind of count on one year can go away another year and then five years later you don't even think about it anymore. But guys, I want to thank you for listening to tech Stuff, for supporting this show. Some of you have been with me since the very beginning.

Huge thanks to you, guys. Some of you have probably started listening pretty recently, and thanks to you as well. I'm glad all of you can be part of this community. I really look forward to doing a ton more shows. We've got a lot of really cool things coming down the line that I think you guys will be excited about, including you know, have you ever wanted to buy like

a tech stuff T shirt? Stay tuned, guys. That's all I can say about that, But I'm really excited to keep on working on this show and to do brand new episodes about all sorts of technology topics. If you have a suggestion for something I absolutely should cover, whether it's a technology, maybe it's a person that I should I should profile, or a company, let me know, or maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest host. Send me a message.

The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook to handle it both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.