30 products that haven’t been around for as long as you’d think

According to Slate, the pull-tab top on cans became standard after removable tops were deemed a health hazard — they could be accidentally swallowed or cut people’s feet on beaches.

Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran created Sriracha in 1980.

Sriracha is the eighth-most-popular hot sauce in the United States, according to 2023 data from Instacart. But before a worldwide Sriracha shortage, it was in the No.2 spot, per Instacart data shared by AllRecipes.

Olson was 19, living in Waconia, Minnesota, and dreamed of joining the NHL when he saw a pair of inline skates in a sports catalog and thought they’d help him train. Even though they were not a popular item at the time, he knew immediately they had potential — they just needed some updates to appeal to a broader audience.

He told Marketplace he didn’t invent the concept, only the product. “The inline skate started back before roller skates were even invented, back in the early 1800s,” Olson said.

Though there were earlier models of map guidance tools introduced as early as 1930, the Mazda 1990 model was the first that had a true GPS built in to a commercially available car. It took another 10 years after its release to become available in the United States, Popular Mechanics reported. The US military had to allow for its commercial usage, since they had launched the GPS satellites.

Dina Campion, a Starbucks employee, helped launch the Frappuccino.

She told Starbucks, “It was the summer of 1993, and Los Angeles is very hot in the summer. We noticed there were some smaller coffee shops that did some sort of blended coffee beverage. A couple of store managers and I felt there was a huge opportunity for Starbucks.”

It has certainly paid off for the chain.

In August 2023, Starbucks said 75% of its drink sales the previous quarter were for cold drinks, QSR reported. Even over the winter — between January and March 2024 — cold drinks accounted for 63% of drink sales, Starbucks reported in April.

In 2021, an employee told Business Insider that Starbucks was becoming a “frappuccino factory.”

The McFlurry was invented by a Canadian franchisee, Ron McLellan, at his McDonald’s in Bathurst, New Brunswick. 

“I never expected that my creation would circle the globe with countries mixing together their own unique flavours,” McLellan told CTV News in 2015.

In 1997, Warner announced its first 30 DVD titles, which included “Blade Runner,” “Casablanca,” and “Twister,” Variety reported.

The first IBM USB was called the DiskOnKey, and held just 8 megabytes. However, within 10 years, the drive’s storage capacity increased to 256 gigabytes.

The car was first introduced in Japan in 1997. Today, Toyota is up to its fifth generation Prius.

Samsung’s phone with a built-in camera, the SCH-V200, was released in South Korea in June 2000. Its camera was capable of taking 20 photos, but had to be hooked up to a computer for users to access them, per Digital Trends.

In 2022, the number of iPhone users in the US overtook Android users for the first time. Globally, however, the Android operating system is far more popular, according to StatCounter data.

The drink, created by American businessman Manoj Bhargava, made $1 billion in retail sales in its first eight years, Forbes reported.

Stride is made by Kraft and is marketed as “The Ridiculously Long Lasting Gum.”

There are more than 130 million iPhone users in the United States, accounting for nearly half of all smartphone users in the country, per Statista.

Alexa long led the way in voice-assistant technology but has slipped into third place in the US in recent years. Google Assistant is pacing for 88.8 million users in the US in 2024, followed by Siri with 84.2 million, per 2022 Insider Intelligence data. Meanwhile, Alexa has a projected 75.6 million users this year.

Amazon is working on an upgraded version of Alexa, slated for a summer release.