Before it was revealed, I remember reading an article where the author said something like, "we're pretty sure it's a 2 wheeled electric scooter that self corrects it's balance."
I remember thinking "this doesn't seem worthy of the hype."
That being said, even though it didn't revolutionize transportation, its use was certainly more widespread than I had expected.
We have made amazing technological leaps in the last 20 years, but you don't have to go far searching Hacker News to find articles complaining about evolutionary progress instead of revolutionary.
I wonder what Gen Z thinks about technological progress. As a millennial that straddled the analog-digital divide, I took huge leaps of progress for granted. My friends and I compared American and Soviet fighter jets, we compared horsepower in muscle cars, we compared specs on processors. We also tinkered with everything, and nearly every system could be easily understood by poking at the internals. Now, what's the point?
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that the Segway hype is a generational thing, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.
Those years before the digital transition held a lot of optimism and general hype around what the future would bring. The lack of constant media stimulus also let imaginations run wild. It reminds me of the fantastical predictions of the 70s with jet cars and robot maids.
It seems like the stupid hype over it killed the product when they revealed it was just some boring gadget on wheels...
talk about hype!
>This mysterious invention, reportedly created by National Medal of Technology Award winner, Dean Kamen, is on everyone's lips and has captured everyone's imaginations.
[0] : https://web.archive.org/web/20010220161915/http://theitquest...
I remember reading about its launch on mass consumer internet. (Why do I feel like people place the date for the start of mass consumer internet too late?) Here is a contemporaneous article from Time Magazine's website, which is a pretty mainstream, mass consumer publication: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...
In 2001 people still had dialup with AOL CDs. ISDN was the expensive corporate line. DSL was the fancy new broadband. Palm Pilot's and other mobile organizers were still common. Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
I think my first wifi gear was ~1 year after that. Orinoco chipset. That was a bit ahead of most people at that time though.
But yes, this part wasn't there:
> Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.