Philips released the compact cassette with the goal of offering a small, convenient, and affordable medium for recording and playing back sound. Designed to replace bulky reel-to-reel tapes, it made personal recording accessible to the public and quickly gained popularity for music, dictation, and home taping, laying the groundwork for portable audio culture in the decades that followed.

While the NTSC standard was created in 1953, there weren't a significant number of capable TVs bought in the US until the mid-1960's, when more color TV programmes began to be broadcast.

Broadcasts in PAL officially begin across Europe.

The 1st countertop microwave. The 1st microwave was actually released in 1947, a very large device for $5000! These were $495 and kept decreasing in price as history went, as the creation of popcorn increased....

DJs, Hip-Hop, and many more music genres could now use turntables like an instrument or perpetually mix music in clubs.

Designed by Ralph Baer, it used removable circuit board cards to switch between built-in games and connected to a television through an RF adapter. Its TV output was limited to white objects on a black TV screen, and users were given physical plastic overlays to attach to the screen to add the rest. It had no sound.

The CPU that made home computing plausible was the 6502 from MOS Technology. In a team led by Chuck Peddle, they launched a CPU that was cheaper than others by a wide margin. The same team originally worked on the Motorola 6800 but the company didn't want to go down this path. Commodore bought MOS in 1976 but still supplied CPUs to all competitors.

Previously computers were only used by businesses due to price. This CPU started companies racing to build cheap home computers for business and the home, like MOS/Commodore and Apple; firstly in kit form to be built by enthusiasts, and pre-built computers from 1977. 

In 1976 Frederico Faggin left Intel and also made a very cheap version compatible with the Intel 8080, the Z80 that was used in the TRS-80 in 1977 and many other devices after.

Pros: Used a built in monitor instead of TV, so more characters per line as expected by business.

Cons: Monochrome. Bad keyboard for touch typing, including the full stop key being the decimal point on the numpad.

Large international seller through Commodore's pre-existing sales and distribution channels for their calculators, more than it sold in its home country of the US.

Pros: Under $600 for a complete system, it was the most affordable for the home.

Cons: Monitor was a stripped-back black and white TV. Only uppercase characters.

Made by Tandy to sell in their Radio Shack stores making it a big seller worldwide, it was then only of the "Holy Trinity" computer makers to attempt to reach a broad market with their first mode.  Within the US though, store exclusivity unfortunately meant a limit on their sales from what it may have achieved otherwise.

Color was introduced in 1980 with the TRS-80 Color Computer, and the TRS-80 series remained popular until sales ended in 1991.

Pros: Colour TV connector and expansion slots.

Cons: Only much later models had lowercase characters and cursor keys. Base price was twice that of competitors, which also came with monitors, so out of reach of many consumers.

Debatably a better product of the three computers of 1977 but initial worldwide sales were lower than the others. In 1979 sales shot up thanks to a third party releasing the VisiCalc killer app, the world's first spreadsheet, luckily on Apple first because it was the only computer they had access to at the time. Through various model iterations it remained in production for 16 years.

VHS ("video home system") cassettes and their player/recorder device, known as a VCR (video cassette recorder) became the dominant standard for home video for over two decades. The VCR would play back on a TV, and had a built-in TV tuner to record from a chosen TV channel.

Developed by JVC and taking off in Japan in the previous year, by 1984 25% of Australian households had a VCR.

The home microcomputers released in 1977 used cassettes as their storage medium, which was too slow for serious business users.

Despite 5 1/4" drives being released by Shugart in 1976, they didn't enter the home until they could be attached to the new microcomputers. Apple released their own drive, while the TRS-80 got an "Expansion Interface" allowing 3rd party drives and extra RAM. Commodore released their own more advanced drive for the PET later in 1979.

Cinema-quality video for the home on large playback-only optical discs. Initially branded as MCA DiscoVision, the first LaserDisc player was the Magnavox VH-8000, by Philips, and the first disc was the movie "Jaws".

The first handheld game console with interchangeable games. It featured a limited 16×16 pixel LCD display, a built-in keypad, and a single control dial. Unlike other consoles, each game "cartridge" additionally contained the CPU and an overlay for the screen. Though limited in graphics and prone to hardware failures, it was moderately successful until discontinued in 1981. There was no other contender until the Nintendo Game Boy it partly inspired,  a decade later.

Nintendo launched the Game & Watch series after designer Gunpei Yokoi was inspired by seeing a bored businessman idly pressing buttons on a calculator during a train ride. Created to provide portable, pick-up-and-play fun, each handheld combined an LCD game with a clock or alarm, quickly becoming a commuter favourite and laying the foundation for Nintendo’s handheld gaming success.

IBM decided very late that they needed to make a home computer. While more suited to business than basic home use, it was made from off-the-shelf parts to lower its price to a high-end consumer level. CGA (Colour Graphics Adaptor) typically showed only 4 colours at a time, far less than cheaper home microcomputers. The preferred operating system for it was PC DOS made by Microsoft.

The first home computer for the US. It didn't have enough on-screen characters or memory to be much good for large business, but it was very capable and a great price for many home users. Prior computers from US companies were sold to those that could afford the higher price tag, like business and education. This was the first computer model in history to ship over a million units. It was actually released in Japan first in 1980 as a testing ground but then worldwide in 1981, and thus to english-speaking homes, because it had proven itself. It was obsoleted by Commodore bringing out the more powerful Commodore 64 only one year later.

Notable for more than the product itself. The  British government championed a whole generation to get into computers; the BBC made a TV programme and a microcomputer to go with it. They commissioned Acorn to create it, who made the Atom in 1979.

Pros: So cheap that it scared all other competitors, at £69.95 in the UK or $100 eventually in the US.

Cons: No on-screen colour. Hard to use small membrane keyboard.

The ZX80 was released in the prior year but the ZX81 design allowed for massive price reductions and was sold to the British public via high street retailers. The ZX80 would also blank the screen when processing, so this was fixed too in the ZX81!

Sony aimed to offer a more compact, durable, and portable alternative to the larger 5 1/4"-inch disks. With a hard plastic shell and a sliding metal shutter protecting the magnetic disk inside, this new format quickly became the industry standard for data storage and transfer throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Commodore delivered powerful custom hardware for advanced sound and graphics at home but, thanks to owning MOS, at an affordable price. It sold around 17 million units.

Sony and Philips introduced the first commercial compact disc (CD) players, aiming to provide a digital audio format that offered clearer sound and greater durability than vinyl records and cassette tapes. This innovation quickly transformed the music industry, becoming the dominant format for music playback throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Since the IBM PC was made from off-the-shelf parts, other companies were able to replicate it by legal means. Compaq was the first of many more. Eventually the "PC" became a dominant hardware configuration in later years, long after IBM gave up making them because users cared more that they were a PC that ran a Microsoft operating system than it being by IBM.

With over 5 million sold, it was one of the most popular British-born home computers ever. LIke the ZX81 it was very cheap, in a small compact size with a rubber keyboard and limited memory, but could still display colour graphics on a TV.

A digital synthesizer based on frequency modulation (FM) synthesis licensed from Stanford University. It featured a 61-key keyboard, 16-note polyphony, MIDI support, and a distinctive sound that included bright electric pianos, basses, and bells. The DX7 became one of the best-selling synthesizers of its era and a defining instrument of 1980s popular music.

The first portable compact disc (CD) player designed to let users listen to digital music on the go. Building on the popularity of the Walkman, it offered high-quality sound in a compact form, helping to popularise CDs as a portable audio format.

The CEO of Commodore had quit and purchased Atari instead (excluding their arcade business). Atari designed one of the cheapest popular 16 bit home computers in only 5 months by using pre-existing components, including being the 1st computer ever to have a desktop GUI that was in colour. Its special feature were MIDI ports ("Musical Instrument Digital Interface"), bringing to it many professional musicians and music software companies.

The 8-bit console that took the US by storm with the game Super Mario Bros, after the US-only video game sales crash of prior years. For the US its housing was designed to look and operate like a VCR, to distance itself from the poor-performing US games market and look like a home entertainment device.

Sega followed later in 1986 with the competing Master System console, which saw more popularity in countries like Australia.

The first of the Handycam line, the CCD-V8, was an analog compact camcorder designed to record directly onto 8mm video cassettes. It featured a single CCD image sensor, autofocus, and a lightweight design that made it far more portable than VHS and Betamax video cameras of the time, helping establish the 8mm format as a popular choice for home video recording.

IBM introduced the VGA (Video Graphics Array) standard with its PS/2 home computers, offering a resolution of 640×480 pixels (the square-pixel resolution of NTSC which has non-square pixels) and 256 colours. VGA became the industry standard for PC displays, greatly improving graphics quality.

It was a high-end stereo receiver notable for its support of Dolby Surround decoding. This allowed it to process matrixed four-channel audio from stereo sources, creating an immersive surround sound experience in the home. Combined with powerful amplification and multiple inputs, the TX-SV7M was popular among audiophiles embracing early home theater setups.

PC sound was limited to beeping noises only, until this became popular. It consisted mainly of a Yamaha synthesizer chip that could be found in many products before, but this expansion card now allowed this chip to added to IBM-compatible PCs.

Compatible with AdLib by using the same Yamaha chip, this card also gave PCs the ability to play sampled audio. When combined with VGA graphics, for the first time PCs could rival 16 bit home computers and game consoles.

However its very large inconvenient size and low battery life begs to differ with the portability.

The 3rd party developers of this device first brought it to Nintendo who secretly revealed they were already making the Game Boy, so they took it to Atari instead.

While only having a grayscale screen, this had everything else needed for handleld gaming that competitors did not; excellent portability and long battery life.

Obviously the superior replacement for Nintendo's Game & Watch products, the head of R&D said the Game Boy was also inspired by the Microvision from a decade earlier - lucky nobody else had released something else, until now!

With late subsequent revisions Nintendo slowly introduced both colour and better screen lighting.

Released in Japan in 1988, this is the 1st 16-bit home video game console. Designed to beat Nintendo’s NES, it had a fast processor and advanced graphics, with a large library of popular arcade-style games. In the US it was known as the Genesis.

High-resolution analog video recording on compact 8mm tapes. Popular among consumers and semi-professionals, Hi8 provided better picture quality and became widely used throughout the 1990s before being gradually replaced by digital formats like MiniDV.

The first successful CD-based video game console, with a 32-bit CPU and 3D graphics.

While the TurboGrafx-CD came out before, it only had an 8-bit CPU and a limited number of games in English.

Companies like Sony, Panasonic, and JVC created camcorders around a standardised codec, DV. This fully digital format recorded high-quality video onto compact tapes, offering easier editing and better picture clarity than analog formats like Hi8.

The first consumer camcorder to record in the DV digital format was the Sony DCR-VX1000, and others came out the following years. It featured three 1/3-inch CCD sensors for improved color accuracy, a 10× optical zoom lens, and FireWire (IEEE 1394) connectivity for direct digital transfer to computers. The VX1000 became especially influential in independent filmmaking and skateboarding videography due to its high image quality and compact size.

DV quickly gained popularity among consumers and professionals throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s before being gradually replaced by tapeless digital camcorders.

Canon's early consumer digital camera aimed at making digital photography accessible to everyday users. Featuring a 0.38-megapixel sensor and simple controls, it offered a compact, portable alternative to film cameras.

Palm introduced its first PDA, featuring a monochrome touchscreen with stylus input for handwriting recognition and easy navigation. Many attempts to make a device like this had failed due to taking bigger known operating systems and cutting them down, but PalmOS succeeded by making an OS specific for PDA tasks from the ground up. It was preceded by the Apple Newton but that too was a failure due to poorer handwriting recognition. Popular for portable organisation tasks like calendars and contacts, PDAs eventually declined in the 2000s when smartphones combined PDA features with phone & Internet access.

DVDs (digital video discs) and players were introduced in Japan in 1996, and the US after. They provided higher-capacity, high-quality digital video and audio playback compared to VHS tapes. Using laser technology similar to CDs but with greater data density, DVDs quickly became the standard for home video, offering improved picture clarity, durability, and additional features like commentary tracks or small clips. This was later improved in 2006 with the higher-storage-density Blu-Ray discs.

Flat-panel TVs using LCD and plasma technology became widely available, offering slimmer designs and improved picture quality compared to bulky CRT sets. These lighter, energy-efficient displays quickly gained popularity throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, eventually replacing CRTs as the standard for home television.

High-definition TV (HD) was introduced to deliver significantly higher resolution and improved picture quality compared to standard-definition TV (NTSC or PAL). Using digital signals and widescreen formats, HDTV transformed broadcast and home entertainment by providing clearer, more detailed images and enhanced audio, eventually becoming the global standard for television viewing

Sold for decades in Japan and continental Europe, e-Bikes didn't catch on in English-speaking countries until the late 90's. Brands like BionX, Raleigh, and KTM began offering pedal-assist systems and fully integrated e-bikes. These early models featured hub motors, rechargeable batteries, and controllers to provide pedal-assist power, allowing users to ride longer distances with less effort. E-bikes gradually gained popularity for commuting, recreation, and eco-friendly transportation.

WiFi was invented by the Australian government's science agency and then launched for homes with the IEEE 802.11b standard, supported by companies like Apple (eg. AirPort Base Station), Lucent, and 3Com. Offering wireless networking at up to 11 Mbps, it allowed home users to connect computers and devices without cables, paving the way for the widespread adoption of wireless internet in the 2000s.

Samsung released the SPH-M100, also known as the UpRoar, the first mobile phone to integrate an MP3 player. It featured 64 MB of internal flash memory for storing music, a monochrome LCD, and basic phone functions on CDMA networks. The device marked an early step toward converging mobile phones with portable media players.

Bose' first consumer model with active noise-cancelling technology. The design was based on earlier Bose headsets developed for pilots in the late 1980s, which reduced engine noise in aircraft cockpits. Using external microphones and electronic circuitry to cancel ambient sound, the QuietComfort brought this aviation technology to travelers and commuters.

While Sony did release the compact MDR-NC10 noise-cancelling earbuds in 1995 for plane travellers, they weren't as effective as the killer Bose over-ear headphones launched in 2000.

The ESR750, a high-performance electric scooter designed for both recreational and practical use. It featured a 750W brushless DC motor, 24V battery system, and chain drive, achieving speeds up to 20 mph and a range of approximately 10 miles. The ESR750 was constructed with a lightweight, foldable frame made from aircraft-grade aluminum, 10-inch pneumatic tires for enhanced comfort, and front disc brakes for reliable stopping power. Its compact design and portability made it a popular choice for urban commuters seeking an eco-friendly alternative to traditional transportation methods.

A home video game console featuring controllers that could be detected in orientation and movement. Other consoles tried for very high end graphics, but the Wii had much lesser Standard Definition resolution/colour graphics of any old TV. Like with the earlier Game Boy, Nintendo had proven again that consumers care more about the overall experience than high end specs, far outselling the competition.

One of the first dedicated ebook readers featuring an e-ink display designed to mimic paper and reduce eye strain. With support for multiple file formats and a slim, portable design, it helped pave the way for mainstream adoption of digital reading before Amazon’s Kindle launched in 2007.

While not the first smartphone, this was the first to do it well. Apple combined a quad-band GSM phone, an iPod, and an internet browser in one device. It implemented ideas like the earlier LG Prada smartphone also had; a large capacitive touchscreen with minimal buttons and camera. It additionally had multi-touch gesture input, WiFi, far more storage (so music could be synced from a computer to the device), and an os that tied internet available information to actions seamlessly.

After buying another company and developing the smartphone Android OS for years, in 2007 Google created the Open Handset Alliance. Like the MSX initiative years before, or "IBM compatibles" before that, it was a group agreeing on a common architecture standard so all manufacturers could run Android and its apps; eventually paying off in them together claiming the vast majority of the smartphone market. The first phone released was the HTC Dream in 2008, also known as the T-mobile G1.

YouTube was released in 2005 and Netflix in 2007, but without a dedicated custom made media client (via a Flash Player on a PC or set-top-box), streaming TV didn't enter the living room via ready made appliances until smart TVs emerged. One of the first to be able to stream YouTube was the Samsung Pavv Bordeaux 750.

Fitbit launched its first wearable activity tracker, designed to help users monitor steps, sleep, and overall fitness.

One of the first consumer quadcopters controllable via smartphone. It featured built-in Wi-Fi, front- and downward-facing cameras for live video streaming, and onboard sensors for stabilization. The AR.Drone introduced many consumers to drone flying and helped establish the recreational drone market.

The Ultra HD spec was agreed upon, to delivery 4K and 8K video, and finally 4K Ultra HD televisions were released. 4K meaning a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels—four times that of 1080p HDTVs. Early models from companies like LG, Sony, and Samsung featured large screen sizes and HDMI inputs capable of handling the higher bandwidth. Although initially limited by high prices and a lack of native 4K content, these TVs set the new standard for high-resolution home displays.

A single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It had a launch price of only $35, despite having a 700 MHz ARM11 processor, 256 MB of RAM, HDMI and composite video outputs, two USB ports, and an SD card slot for storage. Adding also its wide availability, it was great for non-commercial hardware experimentation, bringing it into classrooms and homes worldwide.

The Pebble was a smartphone-connected smartwatch, released after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Its e-paper display, 7-day battery life, and smartphone notifications set it apart. Pebble released upgraded models in 2015 with colour displays. However, later smartwatches from major tech companies began to dominate the market, offering deeper smartphone integration and more advanced health tracking.

Pebble was bought by their competitor Fitbit, who subsequently discontinued it. Many years later Pebble OS became open source and the original creator started making them again.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) TVs were released, supporting formats like HDR10, Dolby Vision, and later HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma). To show far more lifelike colour these standards enhanced contrast, brightness, and colour beyond the range of SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) TVs, a format which had been around for half a century.

Virtual reality (VR) headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR were introduced, aiming to bring immersive, room-scale 3D experiences into homes. These devices featured advanced motion tracking and high-resolution displays, sparking renewed interest in VR for gaming, education, and simulation after decades of earlier, limited attempts.

A hybrid handheld and console video game unit. It featured detachable Joy-Con controllers, a 6.2-inch touchscreen, and a TV dock that allowed the console to connect to a television for full HD gameplay.