Yeah, when Sega ruled the roost. If you’ve been following our CES coverage you’ve seen how things look today, but think back three decades… things were a little different then. This was half a dozen years before DVDs, back when cartridge games were the biggest thing out there. This was the year Windows 3.0 came out.
Take a look for yourself
You’ll have a lot of fun with this Flickr set showing one person’s impressions of that year’s Consumer Electronics Show. This seems to have been largely scanned from some sort of print publication… remember folks in 1990 we were 3-5 years away from widespread internet access, 10 years away from affordable digital cameras and almost 20 years away from ubiquitous cameraphones. That’s what makes this set so special. It’s the past version of the future. It’s also proof that literally everything can be found online in one form or another. The internet, like an elephant, never forgets.
My history with CES
I didn’t start going to CES until 2006 but I recently looked at some of the photos I took back then and they look just as bad. There’s me posing next to a giant replica of a portable XM radio, me marveling at the RAZR phone, me taking in a slew of 42″ TVs that each probably cost $2,500. I’m not going to post them here because, as I said, the internet never forgets. I don’t want them used at my funeral, whenever that ends up being.
From 2013 to 2020, this blog actively covered the CES show, witnessing its decline in both attendance and relevance. You can see that coverage here. The show was once home to practically every new innovation, but as the 2010s dragged on, it suffered from an overall lack of relevance. Why travel to a trade show when most companies just released information online?
The nail in the coffin
The show went through a change of management, and that new management made one decision that probably doomed the whole show. They started enforcing the rule that you needed to actually be in the tech industry to attend, and imposed high fees on people who had never attended before. While this did have the (believe it or not) intended result of cutting attendance by about half, it also just made the show unimportant.
Needless to say, the CES show was completely online in 2021, and the 2022 show was extremely poorly attended for the same reason. 2023 saw a return to a full show, but by then the damage was done.
The CES show, such as it is, will be taking place next week in its traditional home in Las Vegas. You’ll see the typical puff pieces, I’m sure. There will be an absurdly large or otherwise weird TV. There will be gadgets that look cool but no one wants. And, a few companies will try to do legitimate business there. If only those folks back in 1990 knew how far the show would fall. But then again, they just might be amazed it lasted that long at all. I know I am.
