S02E23: The Hum and the Light: They Invented the Electronic Future and Did Not Get to Keep It (Accutron, Pulsar, Nintendo).

What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast · Sep 6, 2026 · 31m

Title: The Hum and the Light: They Invented the Electronic Future and Did Not Get to Keep It

Description:

There is a man in Kyoto named Gunpei Yokoi who won by refusing the newest technology. He called it lateral thinking with withered technology: take the cheap old chip everyone else has thrown away and understand it so completely you can do something nobody expects. In 1989 he put that idea in a gray plastic box called the Game Boy, and the color screens that were supposed to bury it were the ones that got buried.

This episode is about two American companies who believed the exact opposite…