Students have access to an Academic Pass to NYTimes.com allowing you to browse the site without hitting a paywall message.
Instructions for how to set up your account can be found here.
Newspaper articles are considered a primary source because they are written at the time of an event and show us how people reacted to those events. For this assignment, the "event" would be the introduction of technologies when they were new.
TIP: Look at the "Years Covered" in each database description below to see if your selected technology would be covered by the news.