Top 50 gadgets of the past 50 years

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Jeff @ Dec 24th 2005 12:38PM

"a few left us scratching our head; the Rolodex REX (a PDA that fit into a computer's PC Card slot) didn't exactly take the world by storm"

You'd be surprised. I was selling electronics for a J&R at the time this was out, and for about six months it seems like every other call we had was an order for this stupid thing. And it's not like we didn't have a big selection; I mean J&R sells everything.

This was definitely a big fad. You may not remember it now because, like most fads, it faded away just as quickly as it took hold. But Rolodex had a whole huge business plan based around the popularity of this thing; they had a whole slew of new models set to come out and they were going to transition their whole company to just making Rex products.

You can still argue it shouldn't be on the list because it died an early death, but I'm sure it had some influence on the industry that's not completely obvious (the whole Blackberry thing was really combining the Rex and the PDA, since most of what people were using the Rex for was stuff like syncing email with their PC's that they could then easily take with them).

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