Y2K & Beyond
(90s / 2000s / 2010s)
(90s / 2000s / 2010s)
In 2000, Reed Hastings approached this dominant blue-and-yellow video rental giant with an offer to sell his DVD-by-mail company for $50 million, an offer that was famously laughed out of the room.
What is Blockbuster?
"IAD" data center projects are named after the three-letter international airport code for this major transportation hub.
What is Washington Dulles International Airport?
Located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas, this peak sits on the border of China and Nepal and continuously grows about a quarter of an inch every year due to tectonic shifting.
What is Mount Everest?
In this 1999 sci-fi classic, a hacker named Thomas Anderson is offered a choice by Morpheus: take the blue pill and wake up in his bed, or take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
What is The Matrix?
Introduced in 1930 and packed with peanuts, caramel, and nougat, this best-selling chocolate bar was actually named after the Mars family's favorite horse.
What is Snickers?
Before Facebook or Instagram, this social networking site ruled the internet, famously forcing users to rank their friends in a highly stressful "Top 8".
What is MySpace?
This brightly colored, unplumbed job-site necessity was first patented in the 1940s and is famously serviced by a vacuum truck often jokingly nicknamed the "honey dipper."
What is a Porta-John (or Porta-Potty)?
Completely enclaved within the Italian city of Rome, this independent city-state serves as the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and is the smallest country in the world by both area and population.
What is Vatican City?
Based on Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, this 1972 cinematic masterpiece features Marlon Brando as a powerful mafia patriarch who notoriously "makes him an offer he can't refuse.
What is The Godfather?
Originally invented in the 1880s and marketed under the name "Chicken Feed" because of America's heavily agricultural roots, this highly polarizing, tri-colored treat is now the unofficial candy of Halloween.
What is Candy Corn?
This iconic 2005 mockumentary sitcom follows the everyday lives, office romances, and HR violations of employees working at the Scranton branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.
What is The Office?
Originally developed in 1953 to prevent rust on the outside of nuclear missiles, this legendary spray can takes its name from the fact that it was the chemists' 40th attempt to perfect a "water displacement" formula.
What is WD-40?
Reaching a maximum known depth of nearly 36,000 feet at a point called the Challenger Deep, this crescent-shaped oceanic trench in the western Pacific is the deepest location on Earth.
What is the Mariana Trench?
Costing more to produce than the actual 1912 ship it was named after, this James Cameron epic became the first film in history to reach the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office.
What is Titanic?
When Mars Incorporated famously refused to let M&M's be used in a 1982 Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Hershey stepped in and saw a 300% sales spike for this specific peanut butter candy.
What are Reese's Pieces (from the movie E.T.)?
In 2014, the creator of this highly addictive mobile game featuring a pixelated yellow bird navigating green pipes suddenly deleted it from app stores, causing people to sell phones with the game pre-installed for thousands of dollars.
What is Flappy Bird?
First mandated for a large-scale project during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, this essential piece of safety gear was originally designed by E.W. Bullard based on the steel "Doughboy" helmets he wore in World War I.
What is a hard hat?
Located approximately 250 miles off the coast of East Africa, this massive island nation is renowned for its immense biodiversity, with over 90% of its wildlife, including lemurs, found nowhere else on Earth.
What is Madagascar?
Entering the Guinness World Records as the most critically acclaimed TV show of all time, this AMC series follows a mild-mannered Albuquerque chemistry teacher who adopts the street name "Heisenberg" to build a massive criminal empire.
What is Breaking Bad?
Published anonymously in 1818 by a 20-year-old author who won a friendly ghost story competition during a rainy summer in Switzerland, this novel gave birth to one of the most famous monsters in pop culture history.
What is Frankenstein (by Mary Shelley)?
Costing its parent company over a billion dollars in extended warranty repairs, the dreaded, blinking "Red Ring of Death" was a massive hardware failure that traumatized millions of users of this specific 2005 video game console.
What is the Xbox 360?
Invented by a mother of two during World War II to waterproof military ammunition cases, this ubiquitous silver job-site staple was originally named after a water-resistant bird before its modern name became associated with HVAC work.
What is duct tape (or duck tape)?
Bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel to the west, this salt lake's shores sit at the lowest land elevation on Earth, making its waters so hyper-saline that humans can naturally float in it without effort.
What is the Dead Sea?
The intense, suspenseful music used to signal the approach of the title creature in this 1975 Steven Spielberg blockbuster consists of just two alternating musical notes, E and F, composed by John Williams.
What is Jaws?
The ancient tradition of carving Jack-o'-lanterns originated in Ireland, where locals originally carved scary faces into this specific root vegetable to ward off evil spirits, long before they discovered pumpkins in America.
What is a turnip?