{"id":2579,"date":"2024-11-08T20:08:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T02:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/?p=2579"},"modified":"2024-12-22T14:11:08","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T20:11:08","slug":"twenty-year-old-ces-tech-countdown-has-begun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/?p=2579","title":{"rendered":"Twentieth anniversary review of 2005 tech: the countdown has begun for the 2025 CES show"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking at 2005 tech is akin to watching a tidal wave just starting out in the deep ocean by making ripples \u2026 what was coming in the next few years was unimaginable, but the hallmarks of a sea change were<\/em> there. I seriously don\u2019t even think Steve Jobs really recognized or fully understood the full implications of what was brewing at that time. I could tell that many, many new items appeared to hang onto the coattails of folks who were clueless too. Such is tech \u2026 innovate or die.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 And unsurprisingly, many companies that were around in \u201905, are today mere footnotes in tech history.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 But for me, this was the golden age of new tech \u2026 there were so many breakthroughs, and the sheer number of new products was unimaginably huge. Only problem was, no one knew how to merge them. So much promise was about to bear tech-fruit as never before. I literally had surprises every week as the technology world changed faster than anyone predicted. I remember the show being a blur of people and plastic \u2026<\/p>\n

So here, in no particular order, are a few of the more notable items of 2005.<\/p>\n

The debate of which is better \u2026 LCD or Plasma, is actually being debated. At this time LCD was fairly lousy in so many respects, to put it politely. LCD TV\u2019s were pricey, but so terrible compared to Plasma, that it was an absurd argument. Plasma sales were up by 150% over last year, but still too pricy for anyone other than \u201cearly-adapters.\u201d So, the old, heavy glass-tubed CRT<\/a> TV\u2019s were still the biggest sellers. A popular audio\/video magazine called Sound & Vision did their first ever test between LCD and plasma TV\u2019s and it was an easy win for the plasma sets.<\/p>\n

Portable DVD players were a big deal and there were an almost uncountable number of them.<\/p>\n

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The greedy copyright companies were busy suing Grokster<\/a>, Limewire<\/a>, Morpheus, KaZaA and 25 college students for sharing music or a movie. The president of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, proudly called suing the students \u201can important educational tool.\u201d And as usual, when someone in a company touting a CEO or Presidential title doesn\u2019t understand technology, bad things ensue for those companies. It just resulted in the file sharing servers going overseas to countries with no U.S. copyright laws to worry about. Of note \u2026 Limewire was installed on over a third of ALL computers on the globe by 2007 \u2026 and if you have version 5.5.10 or older of it, it still works to this day! They tried to get a law passed \u2026 \u201cThe Inducing Infringement Copyrights Act of 2004\u201d introduced by Senator Warren Hatch \u2026 it makes perfect sense as no one could be more technologically qualified to establish a law that would be used to criminally prosecute<\/em> 11-year olds for sharing a Nickleback song, than a 70-year Utah senator. If only he felt that strongly about a law stopping a particular Utah “church\u2019s” male members from bedding 12-year old girls. I guess you have to have your priorities \u2026<\/p>\n

Creative had a MP3 player ironically called \u201cZen\u201d that was doomed from the start. It did have a few things going for it like a removable battery, 2,500 low-quality (by today\u2019s standards) song storage, voice recorder, a FM radio and came in ten colors! What it didn\u2019t have was the common sense NOT to include the ability to actually record songs directly off the radio. You can guess how well that was received by the RIAA<\/a>. The word \u201cpiracy\u201d was been bandied about \u2026it incited very un-Zen reactions from the music studios \u2026<\/p>\n

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The number of adapters to pair an iPod to a car radio were as plentiful as geeks attending a hard drive sale at CompUSA on \u201cBlack Friday.\u201d<\/p>\n

PDA\u2019s were still a thing and would continue to be until about 2007 \u2026 but now, a few had phones in them \u2026 How did these very folks not recognize they had a world changing invention?<\/p>\n

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A company called Kaleidoscope showed a $27,000 DVD home media server. This media server ripped DVD\u2019s and stored them digitally so the consumer could watch the DVD\u2019s they legally<\/em> purchased more efficiently as there wouldn\u2019t be any jumping up and thumbing through a bunch of DVD cases. This company notified the DVD CCA (DVD Copy Control Association) what they were doing, kept them updated during the whole process, paid for the license, and got the approval to do so. As expected, when they started selling this $27,000 media server, the DVD CCA sued them for violating the exact thing that Kaleidoscope paid and gotten approval for, by claiming that even if they were licensed to do it, it was illegal. Eventually, again as expected, when Kaleidoscope paid more money after a TEN-year legal battle, the litigation ended on June 2nd<\/sup> of 2014. For these licensing companies, greed hath no limits \u2026 While the DVD CCA was busy screwing over Kaleidoscope, the public simply used easily available ripping tools and did exactly the same thing to put the movies on their computers.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 So essentially, the DVD CCA wound up losing anyway due to folks now copying DVD\u2019s to take with them anywhere and post them on sharing sites.<\/p>\n

Samsung came out with a gaming phone \u2026 yeah, it was awful unless you think a great gaming phone consists of a low-resolution tiny screen, slow CPU and poor controls.<\/p>\n

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A truly awful, no-name 20\u201d standard-definition LCD TV was offered at dealer<\/em> cost for $480.00. Today, anything that terrible isn\u2019t available anywhere on the planet. You\u2019d really have better luck finding one at the local landfill.<\/p>\n

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In a truly ironic twist, the president of CompUSA, Tony Weiss, was inducted into the Dealerscope \u201cHall of Fame\u201d \u2026 in that trade magazine, he was quoted about his addiction to his Blackberry. Somehow, looking back, this seems weirdly appropriate \u2026 given his other decisions about the future of the company. In common with Blackberry, he successfully turned the most famous USA business in its’ category, into a bankrupt fire-sale failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking at 2005 tech is akin to watching a tidal wave just starting out in the deep ocean by making ripples \u2026 what was coming in the next few years was unimaginable, but the hallmarks of a sea change were there. I seriously don\u2019t even think Steve Jobs really recognized or fully understood the full […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2579"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2634,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2579\/revisions\/2634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecaffeinatedgeek.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}