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).

Read More »