Microsoft's Xbox was the last great CES reveal

CES was a different show 17 years ago. In 2001, the Best of Show award went to the DataPlay disc, a postage-stamp-size memory card that held up to 500MB of data. If you can't remember it, don't worry -- the company went out of business shortly thereafter as SD became the de facto standard. Microsoft was still the biggest tech company on the planet at that point -- Apple wouldn't release the original iPod for another nine months -- and each CES began with a keynote hosted by Bill Gates. The first 80 minutes of its 2001 keynote consisted of clunky tech that now, in some form or another, lives in Google Home or your smartphone.