In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject "Furby Alert." According to the Post, the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including "toys, such as'Furbys,' with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound." That holiday season, the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, had been a retail sensation; nearly two million were sold by year's end. They were now banned from N.S.A. headquarters. A worry, according to one source for the Post, was that the toy might "start talking classified." Tiger Electronics, the makers of the Furby, was perplexed.

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.