Yours portly recently dug into his Drawer of Forgotten Technology and found some unusual bits of ancient alien (well, human) technology.  I’m currently trying to sell them on eBay (here and here).  In writing their listings, I made short little videos and uploaded them to YouTube, and may start uploading bits of old and/or weird technology on Fridays.

When I was a nerdy child in the late 1990s, I desperately wanted a laptop computer.  At that time, I dreamt of being able to play Civilization II on family road trips, in the way that I would play my Gameboy.  To me, that seemed like the peak of human advancement:  conquering the world in the back of an Astro van.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a fascinating time of oddball technology.  Remember, these years were before Facebook and, even more consequentially, YouTube (I learned about YouTube from an article in Newsweek, of all places; at the time, it was touted as a place to watch old public domain television shows and movies).  It was also the time before the iPhone came along and totally transformed the world.  As such, every computer company was trying to create “the next big thing,” or at least were attempting to explore where technology was heading next.

These two devices represent two possible paths along the tree of technological evolution that were either dead-ends or, perhaps more generously, stepping stones to technology to come.  The first is the iOmega ZIP drive, which promised a disk comparable in size to the classic 1.44 MB, 3.5″ floppy disk, but with a whopping 100 (and, later, 250) MB of storage; the second is the HP Jornada 680, one is a series of “palmtop” computers that attempted to bridge the gap between full-fledged laptop and palm assistants (PDAs, or “Personal Digital Assistants,” like the once-ubiquitous Blackberry).

It’s hard to understand how mind-blowing the iOmega ZIP drive was.  I remember vividly reading an article that speculated that the 3.5″ floppy disk wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and in the late 1990s, it sure seemed like it.  Flash memory was in its infancy, and as far as I can remember, I didn’t even know about it.  It was mainly used in the early digital cameras (although I also remember using a digital camera from my high school that used a 3.5″ disk), not on convenient USB sticks that were plug-and-play ready (indeed, USB was mind-blowing in its own way:  attaching a peripheral and not having to reboot was huge).  So having a disk that could hold 100 MB, not a mere 1.44 MB, seemed like the future had arrived.

But like a glam metal band getting their one big hit in 1993, it was a brief flash of technological brilliance before USB sticks with gigs of memory became affordable.  Now I’ll routinely see kids leaving 32 GB flash drives sitting around at school like they’re pencils or scraps of paper.

As for the Jornada series of palmtops, they were probably less consequential, but to a pudgy tech nerd, they seemed awesome.  I purchased my Jornada second-hand on eBay probably around 2008 or 2009, at which point the technology was already a decade old.  I did manage to get my hands on a Palm III Palm Pilot, a little handheld PDA, when I was in high school, and that would have the familiar form factor that we all know and love (or loathe) today.

I toyed with the idea of writing a blog post on the HP Jornada 680, then exporting it (via CompactFlash) to my computer and plugging it into WordPress.  It has a dial-up modem, but I haven’t a clue about how to connect that to the Internet.  I doubt many modern sites would load on whatever ancient version of Internet Explorer runs on a machine whose operating system is Windows CE (3.0, I believe).

I’ll share videos of these two devices soon—probably this Friday.  In the meantime, enjoy gazing in wonder at the pictures in this post, and dream about the world of yesteryear, when men flew flying balloons in grand races around the world in eighty days.  Ah, yes, the late 1990s—what a glorious time to be alive and a nerd!

Also, a very Happy Birthday to my mom today!  Thanks for always supporting my chubby dreams, Sug!  —TPP