Products that made a splash at CES (photos)

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CES held its first show in 1967 and throughout the years it has been the launching pad for many wildly popular devices as well as many huge duds. Here's a look at some of the more notable pieces that made it on the stage.

In 1970 Philips showed off one of the first VCRs for consumers that sold for about $2,000. This Philips N1500 model was available in the early 1970s

Credit: Colin99 (Colin McCormick) at English Wikipedia
Laser discs, which first appeared at CES in 1974, were of better video and audio quality than VHS or Betamax videocassetes, you can see their biggest problem above - their size (compared here to a regular-sized DVD disc.

Source: Kevin586
Here's Atari's Pong Home Console which appeared at CES in 1975.

Credit: Wikipedia
The 1976 CES show was given credit for making digital watches mainstream. In the early 1970s, LCD watches that used less battery power gained popularity over the LED watches which required you to push a button to read the time and save power. Texas Instruments was able to reduce their cost down to $10 each by 1976.

Credit: Flip R
Compact disc players were an upgrade to Laserdiscs and appeared in 1981.

Credit: Arun Kulshreshtha, Wikipedia
The 8-bit Commodore 64 which made its debut in 1982 turned out to be the best-selling personal computer of all time.

Credit: Evan-Amos
A prototype of the Amiga computer was displayed at summer CES 1984. It proved to be a lower cost alternative to the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh.

Credit: Kaiiv, de.wikipedia
Nintendos wildly popular 8-bit video game console took CES 1985 by a storm.

Credit: Evan-Amos
The video game Tetris, published by Spectrum Holobyte for IBM PC and Commodore 64, was the big hit at CES 1988.

Credit: Wikipedia
The DVD which was designed to replace CDs debuted at CES in 1996.

Source: Wikipedia
Digital Video Recorders used to record and store videos in a digital format onto a disk drive were revealed at Comdex in 1999.

Credit: Whats new?, Wikipedia
Xbox made its public debut at the 2001 CES show.

Credit: Microsoft
HD DVD was a high format disk technology designed to be the next genereation DVD. It was developed at the same time as Sony's Blu-ray technology and was introduced to the public at CES in 2004. Although they were cheaper, HD DVDs lacked the quality and space of Blu-rays and eventually were phased out beginning in mid-2008.

Source: Ofahcuts, Wikipedia
Blu-ray technology also made an appearance at CES in 2004.

Credit: Wikipedia
The digital video recorder appeared at the 1999 show.

Credit: TiVo
3D was big in 2009.

Credit: CNET
Like many manufacturers, CES has been the launching pad for products that never really took off. In 2010, everybody was talking about netbooks like this one from The PsiXpda.

Credit: CNET
In 2011 the talk was tablets. Here's the Spiderpodium Tablet from Breffo.

Credit: Breffo

CES held its first show in 1967 and throughout the years it has been the launching pad for many wildly popular devices as well as many huge duds. Here's a look at some of the more notable pieces that made it on the stage.

In 1970 Philips showed off one of the first VCRs for consumers that sold for about $2,000. This Philips N1500 model was available in the early 1970s

Credit: Colin99 (Colin McCormick) at English Wikipedia

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