50 years of tech devices
Ben's session #7
Overview
Hello again :)
I went to Legoland yesterday with the kids - very impressive to see all the cities they’ve built with lego. Who’s job is that?!
Sorry I missed last week - I’m nearly done with my talk prep and the first bath of pages for a course/manual/something, its a little in-between formats let’s say and I’ll share more on that soon.
Off to SF Sunday, looking forward to a long flight out of touch - why do so many people want WiFi on planes? I love being disconnected (by force).
I’ll be at:
OpenAI Dev Day
OmFest
Supabase Select
Say hi!
This week I built this fun site to see a bunch of popular devices from over the years. It only took a morning to make, started in Codex, finished with Factory.
Stats:
87 devices, 1976 to 2026, all images generated by Astra
40 messages from me
7 subagents
1,455 votes so far (thank you!)
Where it started
Two weeks earlier I had an idea for a site of forgotten devices. I sent it to Astra, mostly to see what Astra could do (I wasted a few banked resets with builds like this 😅 )
i want to make a site for forgotten devices from my childhood, they should look realistic, and usable for their intended purpose
i want 50 devices in a grid.
It made a grid called "still works". Every image on it is an Astra generation. It went up on here.now. And as you can see below, it looks like an Astra site.
Details
Then I saw this awesome timeline scrubbing demo by Cole where you drag through the years and a Mac button changes under your cursor. So I thought I’d like to make the same kind of thing, and thought to resurrect the devices thread. Stick ‘em together.
I’m often sending tweets to my agents to take inspiration and remix with my own stuff.
So I asked Codex:
We built a little website with images of forgotten devices on here.now. So can you find where those devices were all rendered and created? And I want you to make a very simple site that is a timeline scrubber, and as you scrub the years from left to right, you get to see which device is different. Like you get to see the device of the year, or like when that device was popular or around, like the site is doing for this button timeline.
A minute later it had found the images and the prompts that made them. And it made three versions. I always do this because I often don’t know what I want until I can see it.
Do option C, but I want the timeline to be scrubbable, where I can drag my finger left and right across the timeline, and that will change the device. And we need to make sure we find the exact dates for each of the devices when they were released, because right now we've got a bunch of devices that are just in 1990s.
Filling the gaps
The original fifty stopped around the 2000s so I thought to generate more up to today.
ok now we need devices from 2009 to today (today the iphone duo) use subagents
A subagent is just another agent that reports back from its own session - I use them when there’s a bunch of work that can be done in parallel instead of clogging up my main thread.
A kind of thing, not a thing
For each one it worked out the real model, found a reference photo of it, and generated a new image of that exact device.
The image prompt it wrote for the new one is pretty specific:
Subject: silver Casio Data Bank CD-401 (1984), matching the silver metal bracelet model shown in reference. Square silver case, black calculator face with four small silver memory buttons ABOVE the rectangular gray LCD, twelve small silver calculator buttons BELOW it… Exact reference layout, not later DBC model.
Had or wanted
Then I thought wouldn’t it be fun if you could say you had one of these, or if you’d wanted one and see a real count of every vote. And if you vote, you should get a page of your own showing what you picked.
I moved over to Factory’s Droid as I trust it to get the most out of the models.
when a user votes had/wanted we should give them a page or something that they can share to show what devices they had. mock something up with image gen
Three mockups again.
Then a few rounds on the small stuff: the buttons, and where the keyboard shortcuts go.
On my site
I wanted it on my own domain.
then publish it to bentossell.com/devices, link to it from my bentossell.com homepage (repos/bentossell on my machine)
My homepage and the devices site are two separate sites on here.now. It can "mount" a site at a path on your domain (I didn’t ask for the mount). So bentossell.com is one site and bentossell.com/devices is another, and nobody can tell.
The agent read the here.now docs itself, set up the mount, added a line to my homepage and published both.
How it works
It's a really simple setup.
The list of devices is one file. The images in another. The votes are the only thing stored anywhere, and here.now handles that.
The "my devices" page doesn't store anything (so I don’t need auth + a database). Your picks are in the link, so when you share it, the URL carries them, ugly but it works well.
Slow images
Just before I posted it, it felt slow. You'd load the site, drag, and wait for the picture. So I opened a Droid thread.
look at devices. the images are a bit slow to load when the site loads - how can we make it instant or feel it? its noticeable if i load the site and scroll and have to wait
It came back with a list of reasons and fixes. I said do it and test it, show me a preview so I can see the dimming, then redeploy.
Leaderboard
A new session. I wanted a leaderboard of the most 'had’ and most ‘wanted’, so 3 versions again, pick one and ship it.
Game Boy Color is winning. It may be because the page loads there - I think I’ll have it randomise what device is shown…
Video
The GIF at the top of this email? And the video in my twitter post? Also done by the agent.
create a video demo, use a luna subagent to do it. scrub through the timeline relatively quickly but pause on some devices throughout. video should be no longer than 10 seconds long.
I used this new skill that came out, and I asked for a few tweaks but very good to use.
Counts
After the leaderboard went live the counts stopped updating. I asked what was going on, and how this would cope if a lot of people voted.
i am seeing "Counts unavailable. Retrying…" - so what can we do about the counts then? if 100k people voted how would that break the site and what could we do about it?
I wasn’t expecting 100k but giving it something to aim for. The response was long and a bit technical so I got a visual.
explain like I'm someone who knows nothing about this topic, using a HTML artifact with big pictures and few words. explain the current situation and what you propose we do about it.
It slopped up something that could’ve been better. But for artifacts to help me during a task I don’t really mind - I can do some tweaking with a skill or instructions but if it does the job for me, it’s not being published anywhere anyway.
Turns out my own testing had used up the limit on how many times one person can read the votes in an hour. And there's a wall at 25,000 votes.
So I said to make the improvements and it now works well.
This all started from a session on my phone - getting all those images generated (both times, actually). You should remix other people’s stuff all the time (and credit them too), so many people are posting so many awesome demos every day. It’s hard not to join them.
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Tools mentioned are not sponsored, I am an investor in Factory and Here Now - I only use what I like, I only invest in what I use.
Source
Originally published at www.bensbites.com.
