15 Most Amazing Gadgets Of Past 20 Years

#11 Palm Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000

Year: 1996

The Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 were early Palm PDAs produced by Palm. It was introduced in March 1996.

The Pilot used a Motorola 68328 processor at 16 MHz, and had 128 KB (Pilot 1000) or 512 KB (Pilot 5000) built in memory. It was the first of its kind to sync with Macintosh and Windows platforms, plus supported great handwriting touch recognition, the ability to store 750 addresses, and operated for several weeks on just two AAA batteries. Thank Palm for paving the road for today’s smartphone conglomerate.

#10 IBM ThinkPad 701C

Year: 1996

IBM ThinkPads have always been famous for their solid keyboards. In 1995, IBM debuted the revolutionary ThinkPad 701c, which put a full-size laptop keyboard into a much smaller package by using an innovative butterfly configuration. The notebook measures only 9.7 inches wide when it's closed. But as the lid is lifted up, like magic, the computer has a full-sized, 11.5-inch wide, 85-key keyboard that unfolds and slides into place as the computer is opened for use! And it had a centered joystick pointer, which puts most of today’s trackpads to shame in terms of user navigation.

Read more: 5 Amazing Tablets That Work Like Smartphones
Read more: 6 Best Professional Digital SLR Cameras