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Ghosts of CES past

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As we stand at the threshold of another Consumer Electronics Show, we’d like to take a glance over our shoulders and note a handful of technologies that were launched at CES in years past. While many seemed bizarre at the time, they have since become ubiquitous household items.

The VCR, for instance, debuted at CES in 1970. Remember Pong? Atari unveiled the home console version at the show in 1975. And 1981 was a good year for CES, with the introduction of the Camcorder and the CD player. Who can forget the DVD, which was called the digital versatile disc when it came out in 1996? High definition televisions, which are now in more than one-third of U.S. homes, came out 10 years ago at CES, followed three years later by plasma TVs. That same year, Bill Gates took the wraps off the Xbox video game console at his CES keynote.

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Ah, the good old days. Next week, more than 2,700 exhibitors will jostle within 1.8 million square feet of convention floor space in Las Vegas. They will compete for the attention of the 140,000 people attending this year’s convention, hoping to offer up the next must-have technology.

So what do you think it will be?

-- Alex Pham

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