It was also a time before social media, mass consumer internet, and all the high-tech things we take for granted today. It was a futuristic device that looked and sounded fantastic with no real competition. People were amazed by the balancing tech alone (and there was a similar wheelchair prototype).
I remember spending far too much time on a forum built around what “it” was, called theitquestion.com. Nobody knew what it was going to be so there was a lot of speculation. Personally I was extremely disappointed by “it”.
>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.
Precisely. There was a lot of press about a "secret" transformative invention w some mysterious tech related to transportation.
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.
I think the era--to the grandparents' point--was a significant factor. Back then we still believed in immediately transformational technology. There was a widespread belief that an aviation or space-travel breakthrough was imminent. There was hope for incredible new energy sources. Effectively, there was a collective hope that there were undiscovered realms of physics that would unlock a completely new period of human history.
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 was also a time before ... mass consumer internet
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.
Some people I knew had cable modems in 2001, and a few years before that. Though I read an article much like the one I linked on a 56k modem. (not AOL)
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.
