Didn't some mac book have like a strip of touch screen above the keyboard?
It didn't seem like too bad of an idea.

I was a victim of those. When my 3.5" backup floppy disk collection grew too large I decided to save in physical storage space by acquiring a brand-new Iomega Zip 100. What a marvel! More than 70 floppies fit in a single Zip disk! That certainly was the future!

Fast forward to little over one year later and CD-RW drives had become pretty affordable and relegated my Zip drive to obsolescence. :_(


EDIT: Hadn't seen Lifthrasil's and AB2012's posts. I'm glad to see I'm not alone with that one. :)

I think the thing that really killed them was the USB flash drive, and the fact that Zip (and similar) disks were individually too expensive.

CD-ROMs did have one significant disadvantage; you can't re-write them that easily. That is, you can't easily just add or change one file, and re-writing a disk (or even writing the disk for the first time) required special software; it's not just as simple as drag and drop. Floppies didn't have this issue.

The main issue with Zip drives, aside from the cost of individual disks, is that zip drives were not a standard component of computers; if you want to load a file on an unfamiliar computer, there's no guarantee that it will have such a drive. Therefore, Zip drives were unsuitable. This actually meant there was a time when there was no good option; floppies had low capacity and were unreliable, CD-R(W) is a bit of a waste for small files, and Zip disks weren't guranteed to be usable.

USB flash drives solved all these issues; you could easily write to them without special software (and without having to rewrite the whole disk just to make one little change), you get good capacity and reliability, and computers were guaranteed to have USB ports. (I believe USB ports became common before the devices that used them did.)

Yes, zip drives really were the way of the future at the time, but never took off. CD's were ok, never really got on with them. Same with DVDs. Funnily enough my rewrite dvd' are now hanging on poles to keep the birds off the lawn seed in the front garden. I only use hard drives now, capacity vs size and price is much better. The dream now of course is a raid 5 device with 4 10tb ssd's in which is the size of small hdd - its possible, but not at that size and costs a lot.

Oh, we can add blu-ray's to the list, they seem to have failed to take off at all.

Duke 3D on the original Build engine, not Polymer/Polymost? I'm trying to imagine how Y-shearing and VR could possibly work together.

It's been many years so I can't remember exactly, but it's possible that you couldn't actually look up and down with the system. But if you could, which may very well have been the case, then yes, probably there was Y-shearing since I don't think that would've been anything other than the original engine. I mean it couldn't have been more than 1 or 2 years after the game's release.

DirectX 10

Peltier coolers, which apparently were faddish enough that nobody else remembers them. ;) Sounds nice but in practice may as well just submerge the system in mineral oil instead.

The Iomega PocketZip "Click!" which was interesting, to transfert small data, but then the market began to be very competitive with Compact Flash, SD Flash, usb keys, and so on. Like PCMCIA flash cards.

Not really PC tech, but who remembers calculator watches?

VR, Android watches, laughing yoga.

oh wait, my joke was stupid and made no sense :P
nvm

Me, my elementary school classmate who share the same desk got that sweet Casio.

Not PC, and not all that long ago, but remember when you couldn't buy the Xbox One without Kinect? 'It's too heavily integrated into the console, besides it's the way of the future!' That's a curious bit of logic. Are people only allowed to reminisce about their early childhood?
I'm seeing at least four colours in screenshots of Virtual Boy games - black and three shades of red. Not dissimilar to the Gameboy in terms of colour depth then, but obviously the red was a lot more eye searing (if I understand correctly it was basically red LEDs shining into your eyes).