8 Products That Were Ahead of Their Time

We all love innovation…when it works. Unfortunately when it comes to technological breakthroughs, timing is everything. For instance, did you know that Microsoft showed off its tablet PC way back in 2000? And who could forget Nintendo’s attempt at a VR headset with its Virtual Boy in 1995?

Many of those gadgets were simply ahead of their time. To give credit where credits due, we thought we would round up eight of these lone-gone pioneers.

Virtual Boy

In 1995, the Virtual Boy promised true 3D graphics. That obviously failed…miserably, but hopefully the Oculus Rift will succeed where the VB failed. We just hope Facebook doesn’t mess this up…

Super Tower Cases

Dream Machine 2000 featured a massive desktop chassis. With them being really popular now, it looks like we were ahead of the curve, again.

Solid State Drives

The first desktop SSDs were big, slow, and insanely expensive. Now SSDs are more and more popular have great performance and capacity at an acceptable price.

3DFX SLI

3dfx introduced the world to Scan-Line Interleave in 1998, paving the road for Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire.

Nokia Communicator 9000

Hailed as the world’s first smartphone, this techno-brick surfaced in 1996 with a 24MHz CPU.

HP Compaq TC1000

Microsoft showed off a tablet PC prototype back in 2000, but it never caught on.

Rio PMP 300

The original MP3 player, it was around for three years before Apple’s iPod stole the spotlight.

Dell Streak

The world laughed at this phone/tablet (plablet) Frankenphone in 2010, but now they’re catching on with phones like Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Sony’s Xperia Z. [via maximumpc]