Again to the Tech Future: The Historical past of CES in 4 Iconic Devices

I’ll always remember the most important TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a conference middle in Las Vegas, a PR consultant for Samsung calmly ushered me previous employees organising for the night occasion. They have been making ready for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the corporate’s most formidable dwelling leisure {hardware} for the approaching yr. Hundreds of journalists and business insiders would quickly have entry, however I used to be getting a behind-the-scenes preview.

We moved previous kiosks in mid-construction dedicated to PC screens, sensible TV options and wacky shows constructed into modernist bookshelves. I brushed by the Sero, a TV that might rotate its display into portrait mode. Then, behind the half-constructed stage, I noticed it: The Wall, 292 inches of micro-LED glory, brighter than any film display and a lot bigger than life. 

That was at CES, the world’s largest tech event, in 2020. Every yr, Samsung is likely one of the present’s most essential exhibitors of shopper electronics, and I knew that its enormous TV could be the discuss of my business. As it towered over me, I felt like I used to be a part of expertise historical past.

I’ve been attending CES for many of my grownup life. With the exception of two years in the course of the COVID pandemic, I’ve gone yearly since 1999. I fly to Vegas in January, proper after the vacations, to hustle for a stable week. There, alongside a whole lot of different journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot movies in regards to the coolest devices on the planet. Tough gig, I do know.

Read extra: CNET Is Choosing the Best of CES 2026 Awards

CNET has a protracted historical past at CES. Teaming up with the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the present, we have bestowed the official Best of CES Award on a handful of choose merchandise. We’re doing it once more in 2026, this time along with our colleagues at PC Magazine, ZDNet, Mashable and different Ziff Davis publications. The huge present is scheduled for the week of Jan. 5, and we have spent months planning easy methods to deal with it. 

Huge TVs stay probably the most recognizable symbols of CES, and so they’ve solely grown in significance because the introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998. 

“HDTV was the biggest thing in my lifetime for video, no question about it,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. “HDTV fundamentally changed the viewing experience.”

But there’s much more to CES than TVs. Over the years, the patron electronics extravaganza has been the place we first bought a glimpse of expertise that we use day by day — recreation consoles, cutting-edge telephones, even streaming companies — in addition to extra futuristic tech, together with humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and private electrical plane. CES is the place hundreds of corporations debut their splashiest improvements, and it is probably the most essential predictors of the subsequent huge tech pattern.

And though bellwether corporations like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Samsung hype their very own occasions and livestreams all year long to launch main merchandise, CES has endured. 

Other main commerce exhibits have come and gone. Comdex, which ran from 1979 to 2003 and was additionally primarily based in Vegas, showcased the pc expertise of the day, competing instantly in opposition to CES. E3, a large online game business occasion spawned from CES, occurred yearly from 1995 to 2021. A handful of worldwide expertise commerce exhibits, together with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are nonetheless going sturdy, however CES stays king.

We can see the affect of the present on TVs, VCRs, recreation consoles and PDAs. These 4 gadgets, every with a wealthy historical past at CES, have a tech legacy that continues to push ahead. I anticipate to see a continuation of that evolution at CES 2026, together with different gadgets, companies and applied sciences nonetheless of their formative levels. 

The subsequent wave of family robotics, autonomous mobility, AI-assisted well being care and salt spoons will exist in a sales space or show at this yr’s present. It may be years earlier than they’re inexpensive, accessible and helpful sufficient to turn out to be a part of our lives. The street from wild idea to family mainstay is lengthy and fraught with many useless ends, however it typically begins at CES.

CES 1967: In the start, there have been TVs

The very first CES — on the time, it glided by its full title, the Consumer Electronics Show — occurred in New York City in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by in the present day’s requirements. By comparability, CES 2025 featured greater than 4,500 exhibitors and drew 142,465 attendees, and pre-COVID exhibits have been even bigger. 

The inaugural CES was a by-product of one other technology-focused commerce occasion, the Chicago Music Show, the place audio expertise confirmed up within the type of pocket radios. 

From its introduction, CES featured TVs. Invented lengthy earlier than the Sixties, that decade noticed the adoption of shade tv broadcasts within the US and the launch of TV satellites. 

At the 1967 CES, essentially the most cutting-edge TVs displayed have been these with built-in circuits, a expertise that mixes a number of digital elements right into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that finally would turn out to be the heart of each laptop computer and smartphone. During that present and for many years afterward, most TVs used a cathode ray tube, or CRT, which made the screens small and the units heavy. When we have been children, my sister and I sat a few ft from our tube TV at dwelling watching cartoons, regardless of our dad and mom’ warnings that sitting too shut would damage our eyesight.

No matter the period, the perfect TV is at all times one thing greater, one thing that guarantees to deliver the immersive, magical really feel of a movie show into a house. During my profession, I’ve watched TVs broaden and enhance, yr after yr, with larger decision, higher distinction, extra sensible shade and brightness, chasing actuality in constancy and dimension. 

A 2025 CNET survey discovered folks do certainly crave enormous screens. Nearly half of the respondents stated that if cash have been no object, they’d desire a TV greater than 65 inches of their properties. 

“A lot of people ask what size TV should I buy, and I always tell people to buy one size bigger than you think you need,” Chris Hamdorf, government vp at TV maker TCL, advised CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give folks the identical recommendation, however there was a time when 65-inch TVs have been removed from widespread.

During the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market utilizing a expertise just like film projectors. Called rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed contained in the TV cupboard and created a picture from behind the display. Then, in addition they used CRTs, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of different applied sciences (assume DLP, LCD and LCoS). Numerous rear-projection TVs outlined my first few years protecting CES, earlier than they were replaced by flat-panel expertise, typically skinny and light-weight sufficient to hold on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use in the present day for our Netflix binge-watching.

Plasma expertise arrived in 1995 with the world’s first large (42-inch) plasma show by Fujitsu, and at CES 1997, Philips showcased the primary commercially out there model. The expertise advanced in succeeding years however remained costly by in the present day’s requirements — in 2005, Toshiba bought a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for instance. Just just a few years later, plasma hit mainstream pricing and have become very recommendable. 

In 2010, the Best of CES award went to the primary plasma TV with 3D functionality, the Panasonic V10, chosen by a bunch of CNET journalists, together with myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer within the convention middle car parking zone and debated our solution to the very best total winner. I touted the very good image high quality of earlier Panasonic plasmas I’d reviewed, together with a promising new 3D video, full with glasses. Oops! Within just a few years, that idea was a strolling corpse, and I commented on its demise in 2017 

LCD-based shows have been evolving on the similar time, and that expertise quickly outsold each plasma and different non-flat applied sciences. With the appearance of 4K decision, plasma expertise turned much less in style and eventually left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV expertise ever since.

Nowadays, CES is awash in huge screens, though none are fairly as giant because the 292-inch micro-LED TV that impressed me a lot. At CES 2024, I used to be notably enamored by the 132-inch, $200,000 folding TV by C-Seed. LG’s sales space is one other spectacular instance, with its unimaginable OLED multiscreen shows. But innovation in TVs has definitely slowed down, as bigger TVs with wonderful picture high quality have turn out to be more and more inexpensive through the years. 

“To be honest with you, the importance of TV at CES is definitely diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “Because it is such an amazing consumer product that it’s almost cheaper than wallpaper now.”

CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR units the stage for affordable streaming

For so long as TVs have existed, they’ve seemingly delivered the identical primary idea: a display with transferring video and sound that you simply look ahead to leisure at dwelling. Other groundbreaking expertise concepts, nevertheless, have advanced considerably over a brief time period. 

In 1970, simply three years into the historical past of CES, Philips showcased the N1500 VCR. It could be the primary system that recorded TV exhibits onto cassette tapes. Originally a chunk {of professional} broadcast gear, it hit the UK market in 1972, the place it bought for £600 — the equal of $13,000 in the present day. It had a built-in TV tuner to document tv packages broadcast over the air, in addition to an analog clock that routinely initiated recordings.

“The VCR was important on so many different levels,” Shapiro tells me. “It changed the concept of TV. It empowered consumers to choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it.”

The concept that you might “time shift” to observe a present at a later time was revolutionary, finally reworking dwelling leisure ceaselessly. Until then, tv programming had set broadcast occasions. To expertise “appointment TV,” you needed to observe a present’s schedule in the intervening time it aired. With the power to document and archive video independently, folks took extra possession of their leisure. 

The format utilized by the N1500 was really known as “VCR,” however it was by no means efficiently marketed within the US, opening the door for 2 different codecs: Betamax (launched by Sony) and VHS (developed by JVC). Betamax hit the market in 1975, the yr I used to be born, and was seen by many as technically superior to VHS, with higher picture high quality. My father was a Beta man, and took nice pleasure in his assortment of Disney films recorded off-air. 

VHS launched at CES in 1977. It used a bigger cassette tape than Beta and promised longer recording occasions (2 hours versus 1 hour). Over the subsequent few years, the 2 incompatible codecs and their gadgets — each now known as VCRs — battled it out available in the market, one-upping one another in advertising, model assist and technological innovation, equivalent to recording lengths. 

“There was a format war going on between VHS and Beta,” Shapiro says. “And it was intense.”

Over time, Betamax gross sales declined as extra households adopted VHS. By 1988, 170 million VCRs had been bought worldwide, with solely 13% being Betamax fashions. Sony additionally introduced that it might manufacture VHS VCRs. The format battle was successfully over.

The VCR had a 40-year reign, characterised by Blockbuster video rental shops and their reminders to “be kind, rewind.” But the expertise of dwelling video was about to get a digital makeover. 

The DVD format delivered superior picture high quality in a smaller, extra sturdy disc that did not require rewinding. It additionally allowed recording by way of DVD-R discs. Around the identical time, a disc-free system made its debut: the DVR. It proved rather more in style than DVD-R for recording TV exhibits and films.

TiVo and Replay TV have been among the many first DVRs, gadgets that saved a whole lot of hours of TV exhibits and enabled automated recording to a tough disc. With a DVR, the “work” of programming recordings was a lot simpler. You might merely point out that you simply needed to document each new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it routinely. There have been no discs to hassle with, so you did not have to fret about damaging them. 

DVRs additionally allowed you to fast-forward via commercials and skip forward in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the power to skip previous commercials routinely, with out having to press a button in any respect. One of these DVRs, the Dish Network Hopper, debuted at CES and was named the 2013 Best of CES winner by CNET.

Until it wasn’t. The firm that owned CNET on the time, CBS, was within the technique of suing Dish over its commercial-skipping capabilities. CBS intervened within the awards course of and instructed CNET’s editorial workers to pick another winner as a substitute. 

“When I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that must have been devastating to the staff,” Shapiro tells me. “Then I realized this is, like, a gift. This is gonna get more publicity than ever.” He wrote a column for USA Today headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me keep in mind for instance of company pursuits overstepping editorial integrity.

DVRs stay a staple in US households in the present day, sometimes bought by cable TV corporations. But as extra Americans ditch their cable subscriptions and substitute them with streaming companies, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The first stay TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package deal that included channels equivalent to ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I stated on the time that it stole the present and presaged a brand new period of reducing the cable TV wire.

Today, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV and extra — all provide cloud DVRs. They allow you to document TV exhibits routinely and watch them each time and wherever, and even allow you to fast-forward via commercials. But you will need to press a button to take action.

Beyond TV exhibits and films, one other form of leisure shares a wealthy historical past of CES debuts. It bought its begin on tv at dwelling, however has moved quickly into transportable codecs and even digital actuality. I’m speaking about video video games.

CES 1977: The Atari 2600 is no matter occurred to Pong

Debuting at CES on June 4, 1977, the enduring Atari 2600 console launched the house online game business. The announcement of the console was a little bit of a shock. Attendees on the present anticipated the large information to contain the debut of the VHS format. 

The 2600 is not the primary dwelling console (a distinction that belongs to the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972), however Atari’s was the primary to go mainstream. Atari was based in 1972, and its breakthrough recreation, Pong, is broadly thought of the earliest profitable online game. Originating as a stand-up arcade recreation, Pong then made its solution to dwelling consoles, together with the Home Pong, a TV-connected console that was launched at CES in 1974. 

Atari staff included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who quickly went on to discovered Apple. In 1974, that they had teamed as much as develop one other seminal recreation, Breakout. Atari was bought to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million to fund the event of a tool code-named VCS (Video Computer System), which was finally renamed the Atari 2600.

Video video games have been new on the time and playable on devoted arcade machines. Much just like the VCR, a house recreation console was a TV accent that opened up one other world with out requiring you to go away the home. Allowing customers to work together with the display and management the contents, in addition to compete in opposition to one other participant, was groundbreaking. 

Gaming has since advanced to embody quite a few different techniques and platforms, extending past the confines of TVs to incorporate computer systems, telephones, VR headsets and extra. It’s in every single place and extra in style than ever, and CES has performed proper alongside.

“We were very important to the game industry. We had Nintendo and Sony and Sega,” he says, including, “I remember the guy from Atari was on our board.”

The 2600 was an enormous hit, outselling its preliminary manufacturing run in 1977 and finally promoting 30 million models worldwide. My uncle and aunt purchased it for the household one Christmas, and I vividly recall hours spent with my youthful cousins — and the adults — as we sat mesmerized, kicking butts in Defender, Combat and Space Invaders. Safe to say I used to be hooked on gaming, together with hundreds of thousands of different folks.

Atari remains to be round in the present day and even launched the throwback Atari 2600 Plus a few years in the past, however different corporations and gadgets have dominated gaming because the early Nineteen Eighties. In 1985, Nintendo unveiled the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System, on the June CES. I purchased the console with my paper route cash, and hid it from my father, who did not approve of video video games. 

Nintendo is considered probably the most influential recreation gadgets ever. It featured add-ons just like the Zapper mild gun and launched Nintendo’s best-known franchises, together with Mario, Metroid and Zelda. Numerous TV-based and handheld successors adopted, culminating within the Nintendo Switch, the primary hit console to mix each at-home and transportable gaming right into a single system.

“CES always felt a little off-timed for gaming compared to E3’s late-spring gaming reveals, but it’s still been a place where new gaming tech has pushed the envelope,” says CNET Editor at Large Scott Stein, who’s been attending CES exhibits since 2004. “The Razer Edge gaming tablet gave a preview of where the Switch was later heading, all the way back in 2013.”

Another fashionable recreation console additionally bought its begin at CES. In 2001, Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, revealed the ultimate design of the pc firm’s first foray into console gaming — and the primary main console produced by an American firm since Atari. It was known as the Xbox. 

In a memorably over-the-top CES keynote address, Gates took the stage with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, then knowledgeable wrestler, to hype up the system. Gates pulled apart a black fabric with the phrases: “For the first time, let me unveil Xbox.” The placing black monolith, with neon inexperienced highlights, had an enormous “X” embossed on prime and a large wired controller. 

Microsoft aimed to compete with Sony’s profitable PlayStation console and added comparable options to the Xbox, together with a broadband connection and the power to play CD-ROMs and DVD films. The Xbox was the primary console with a hard-disc drive, which presaged the fashionable variations of gaming consoles. (Both the present PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S lack exterior disc drives altogether and depend on video games performed from the exhausting disc.)

The Xbox was additionally massively profitable, partially due to the recognition of considered one of its launch titles — Halo: Combat Evolved — however it by no means matched the recognition of its direct competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 2. The Xbox versus PlayStation rivalry continues to at the present time, with Microsoft and Sony buying and selling unique titles, shopping for recreation studios and matching each other spec for spec. 

The unique Xbox was the final main console announcement at CES. The present’s relevance for gaming was eclipsed by E3, a competing conference in Los Angeles that attracted recreation builders and different {hardware} makers. 

“That’s definitely one of my biggest career failures, when we lost that segment,” Shapiro says after I ask about gaming. “We made some bad decisions, and they created E3, which has gone through a life cycle of its own.”

Nonetheless, CES has remained an essential venue for gaming {hardware} debuts. PC makers, chipmakers like Nvidia and VR and AR corporations, together with Oculus — now folded into Meta — nonetheless debut merchandise in Vegas. Meanwhile, huge gaming corporations launching consoles have opted to dribble information and rumors out over months, culminating in devoted occasions just like the PS5 showcase in 2020 and Nintendo Direct for the Switch 2 earlier this yr.

The transfer towards launching essential tech merchandise at separate, company-specific occasions has definitely diminished the significance of CES through the years. No firm illustrates that pattern greater than Apple.

CES 1992: Apple drops Newton, a failed precursor to the iPhone

Much like its on-again, off-again relationship with gaming corporations, CES is not actually a telephone present in the present day. That title belongs to the Mobile World Congress. Yet even the MWC performs second fiddle to the person telephone launches placed on by huge cell corporations: Samsung Unpacked, the Google Pixel occasion and, most significantly, the Apple iPhone occasion. That’s the place potential telephone consumers and tech journalists collect to get all the main points in regards to the yr’s latest cell gear.

In 1992, 15 years earlier than Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Apple’s press occasion, the corporate attended its first CES. Apple’s CEO on the time was John Sculley, and the system he unveiled was known as the Newton MessagePad. Sculley hailed it as “nothing less than a revolution,” and it marked the pc firm’s first new product line because the introduction of the Macintosh. 

The Newton was extremely formidable at the moment, and it is not tough to see a straight evolutionary line from the MessagePad to the iPhone. Apple known as it a PDA, for private digital assistant. The Newton was a handheld and transportable system, dominated by a big display, and was designed to assist customers take notes, manage contacts, calendars and extra. It allowed folks to learn ebooks greater than a decade earlier than Amazon launched the Kindle. A Newton commercial boasted: “Send faxes without paper and receive pager messages and email.” 

Ultimately, nevertheless, the Newton was a market failure. Its chief characteristic was handwriting recognition — the system might convert phrases written on the display with an included stylus into textual content. That characteristic did not work effectively, typically failing to precisely convert even easy phrases to textual content, and was famously skewered by the Doonesbury comic strip. For a glorified notepad, the Newton itself was approach too costly, beginning at $700 when it hit the market in 1993, which might be greater than $1,500 in the present day. 

Other PDAs on the time included the IBM Simon and the Nokia 9000, each of which featured early cellular telephone performance. Devices like BlackBerry and handhelds working tiny cell variations of Microsoft Windows additionally appeared across the mid-Nineties, however early smartphones — mainly, PDAs with mobile expertise inbuilt — rapidly overcame them. One of essentially the most buzzworthy merchandise of CES 2009 was the Palm Pre, a smartphone utilizing the corporate’s brand-new WebOS cell software program. The Pre received CNET’s Best in Show and the People’s Voice Award, cementing its place in CES historical past.

“Palm knew exactly what it was doing using CES to launch a comeback phone with a daring new OS,” remembers Jessica Dolcourt, now CNET’s vp of content material, who was, on the time, an editor protecting cell expertise. “It was a brilliant play that said the Pre wasn’t ‘just’ a phone — it was as consequential and dazzling as any TV or gaming laptop.”

The Pre introduced one thing recent and new to smartphones at a time of great distinction and variety, Dolcourt says. “I could not wait to get my hands on it.”

Apple, in the meantime, made sporadic appearances at CES however more and more appeared to treat the sprawling, splashy occasion as a direct rival for its consideration within the tech world. One of my most vivid CES reminiscences was in 2011, after we discovered that the iPhone was coming to Verizon. Apple made the huge announcement in New York throughout CES, utterly upstaging the Vegas conference. In later years, Apple appeared at CES to discuss privacy and introduce AirPlay to TVs, amongst different initiatives, however none of its CES bulletins might examine to the impression of the Newton.  

“John Sculley was a keynote speaker,” Shapiro says. “Steve Jobs never was. And when I asked him about it, he said, ‘Love to keynote. Just move it to San Francisco and call it Macworld.'”

CES 2026: What’s subsequent for tech historical past?

If there’s any lesson I’ve discovered from CES in spite of everything these years protecting the present, it is that flashy tech concepts can take longer than you would possibly anticipate to turn out to be part of our on a regular basis lives, in the event that they do in any respect. In every of the circumstances above, the gadgets that have been first launched didn’t instantly revolutionize the market, or all by themselves. It took years and intense competitors to determine a “winner.”

And they don’t seem to be the one examples. I did not point out camcorders, CDs, Windows Media Center, Blu-ray versus HD-DVD, SACD versus DVD-Audio, 4G, smartwatches or Impossible Pork.

The 2026 version of CES is about to kick off in Vegas for the present’s 59th yr. As tech giants maintain their very own occasions, and improvements shift more and more from the world of bodily {hardware} (telephones, laptops and TVs) to digital software program (apps, social media and AI), the decades-old query arises: Does CES even matter anymore? 

If you ask the 150,000 folks anticipated to attend this yr, the reply is inappropriate. CES is right here, steeped in historical past, and it is positive to be filled with futuristic, formidable and bizarre new expertise. It’s nearly definitely going to be round subsequent yr, too. 

So I say cross the inconceivable lobster and level me to the flying robotic AI automobiles.

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Visual Designer | Lily Yeh

Art Director | Jeffrey Hazelwood

Creative Director | Viva Tung

Video Presenter | David Katzmeier

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Editors | Corinne Reichert

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