Old School Monday: The Lust List '96
Old School Monday: The Lust List '96
Posted 11/22/2010 at 5:55pm
| by The Maximum PC Staff
8
Comments
Print
While everyone is prepping for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we decided to take a look back at the tech goodies of yesteryear. What was the must-have gadget from fourteen years ago? What was the one item that we needed to have, to hold in our hands? What were we lusting after?
In order to answer those questions, and many, many more, may we present the Lust List from boot December 1996. We got Editorial Director Jon Phillips and Reviews Editor Michael Brown to chime in about their picks from '96.
"Yikes. I don’t know which is more cringe-worthy: Me lusting over the Global Village NewsCatcher (10 bucks a month for online news? Really?), or the photo of me wearing granny glasses. The Cambridge SoundWorks MicroWorks, on the other hand, remains a solid speaker system to this day.
Looking at some of my former colleagues’ lists, I can’t imagine what the world would be like today if a 9GB hard drive cost three grand, a 100Mb/sec Ethernet hub cost $2,400, and we accessed the Internet using 56Kb/sec modems." -Reviews Editor, Michael Brown
“I must have written my Lust List just a few months before I transitioned from full-time work on The Net magazine to boot. Yet even before I became a diehard hardware enthusiast – which is what boot would do to you, back in the day -- it seems I was lusting after lasers. In 1996, it was a table-top laser that cost more than $100,000. Some 15 years later, it’s a $300 laser you can hold in your hand. But I bet today’s $300 model is even more powerful than the $100,000 model from 1996. Is there a Moore’s Law for lasers?” - Editorial Director, Jon Phillips
Tags:
More like this
8
Comments
Comments are closed on this article
radven
December 17, 2010 at 10:31am
"Ricochet Wireless Modem: Taking the Net with you on the road helps blur the boundaries between cyberspace and reality. A Ricochet and a notebook are the first step to being the technomad I've always dreamed of becoming. Next, I need a HUD headband and a palm keyboard. I wonder if the Borg have any job openings..."
Wow. What a blast from a past. I so remember working on this list! And now I am indeed living the Technomad dream - full time on the road for over four years now...
- Chris // www.technomadia.com
violian
November 23, 2010 at 2:58pm
I remembered when I was in high-school drooling over that Nokia 9000. I eventually got my first Palm Tungsten PDA for $200! It only had 8MB of onboard memory, so I had to shell out an additional $50 for a 128MB SD card. And then another $30 for their app that allowed the Palm to be used as a music player. And the plastic screen scratched up within 2 weeks of use. I used it until when Apple released their first iPod Touch - putting the Palm PDA in its death bed for good.
HeartBurnKid
November 23, 2010 at 11:23am
Way to back a winning horse there, Dunphy. Hopefully, you did get that N64 instead of waiting. :)
lunchbox73
November 23, 2010 at 6:46am
Great find. It never gets old looking at these crusty old products and the prices they were going for at the time. It's especially fun looking at the specs of some of these $4000 "gaming" rigs.
By the way, $55 for Diablo? I thought games over $50 was a recent trend that's only a couple years old. MW2 was one of the first $60 I can remember. Most of the games in the article are $40.
devastator_2000
November 22, 2010 at 9:19pm
WOW!! $2,400.00 for a 10/100 hub! Prices have really dropped, I picked up a brand new 10/100 switch off of Newegg for like 10 or 15 bucks.
Eoraptor
November 22, 2010 at 7:34pm
I weep for my age... I had to hook up a Connectix Quick cam for our TA in highschool... thing plugged in with a PS2 passthrough to the keyboard! god the days when 56k and Zip were king *goes and cries in a corner when a gig 9 gig drive isn't even enough to install windows anymore
FunkySquirrel
November 22, 2010 at 7:28pm
Nice spam catcher, guys.
And it's funny that you seem to have had no problem lately, getting all these articles scanned in and up on the web site... But whenever somebody asks why you can't provide web archives of boot, your excuse is always "Oh, it's too much trouble to track down an old program and scan things and convert things and waah".
Don't believe me? There's a thread in the Magazine feedback forum right now where they say exactly the same thing. Isn't that funny?
JonPhillips
November 23, 2010 at 11:09am
I think you know there's a big difference between scanning one boot article a week, and scanning the ENTIRE back catalog of magazine content.
Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
The gang discusses the GTX 690, Trinity, Ivy Bridge, Amazon, big-box stores, MMOs,...
This month's issue
Feature
Build a PC On Any Budget
Feature
Cloud Services Showdown
How-To
Encrypt Your External Drive
Build It
Upgrade an X58 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Want to work at Maximum PC? Our Online Managing Editor, Alex, is moving away, so we need a new one. http://t.co/9Z7JCh0E1 day 3 hours ago
- maximumpc: Fraps 3.5.2 fixes lots of bugs, so if your motto, like @PCGamer's, is "always be frapsing," you should pick it up http://t.co/3DW3WUI01 day 6 hours ago
- maximumpc: Google Chrome Becomes World's Most-Used Web Browser, Kinda http://t.co/Xqgscmrp2 days 30 sec ago
