It has been quite a long time since we have taken a stroll down Memory Lane and today’s edition is not exactly technology related, but it was so obvious that we could not resist.  Last week, American Express announced their brand new prepaid card for teens called Pass.  Almost exactly ten years ago, American Express was rolling out a new non-credit card for teens, the Cobaltcard.

The large and in charge Sony Clie NZ90 was a businessman’s Swiss Army Knife, in every sense.  If the UX50 we previously covered was the ultimate Palm OS PDA, then this was the device that usurped it and took over as supreme PDA.  The NZ90 was the culminating point for not only Sony’s lineup of N-series portrait tablet Clies, but also for Palm OS devices in general and PDA’s at large.

Back in 2002, digital cameras were expensive, bulky and hard to use.  Logitech, the popular mouse and keyboard maker, tried to change that with its Pocket Digital camera.  It was like the Flip camcorder of the camera world, expect unsuccessful.

In the early 2000s it seemed like every middle, high school and college student was on AOL Instant Messenger.  Much to the chagrin of parents everywhere, kids would lord over the family computer all afternoon after school, chatting with their friends over who knows what.  Since laptops were still luxury items back them, kids had to develop shorthand code (such as P911 for when a parent walked in to the room) to protect their super private conversations.

In the days before netbooks, the marketplace for affordable, portable computing was small and bleak.  One of the few bright spots was AlphaSmart, which made a few devices which were basically new-age typewriters.  Read on to find out about the Neo and the Palm OS-powered Dana.

This time in Memory Lane, we look at the Tapwave Zodiac.  This Palm OS PDA was not only a great organizer, but also a surprisingly good gaming device.  However it succumbed to pressure from bigger competition like the Sony PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS, so it did not last long in the marketplace.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder and CEO of Oracle, indeed saw this whole netbook/nettop trend coming, 8 years too soon.  In 2000, Ellison thought the time was right for a PC replacement that could access the internet and do little else.  He imagined that all work would be done in the browser and data would be stored on servers somewhere [in the cloud].  Sound familiar?

All the news about the Always Innovating Touch Book reminded me of another not quite notebook from tech history that had a very unique form factor.  The Vadem Clio and identical rebranded Sharp Mobilon TriPad were Windows CE Handheld PCs in the same class as the IBM WorkPad z50 and HP Jornada, however the Clio and TriPad had a design like no other.

The iPaq was one of the last big introductions from Compaq before it merged with HP.  It was made fun of because its name sounded too much like Apple’s iMac, but the iPaq actually grew into quite a diverse family of gadgets.

In light of the recent iMac updates, let us take a look back at the original Bondi Blue iMac that irrevocably changed the game of computer design.  Instead of trying to innovate their designs to match, some PC manufacturers just settled for mimicking the iMac style.  Here are two culprits and their knockoffs.