The TV, VCR, game console and iPhone have rich beginnings and enduring legacies at the world’s biggest tech show.

can’t forget the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. Deep inside a convention center in Las Vegas, a PR representative for Samsung calmly ushered me past workers setting up for the evening event. They were preparing for Samsung’s First Look, the annual unveiling of the company’s most ambitious home entertainment hardware for the coming year. Hundreds of journalists and industry insiders would soon have access, but I was getting a behind-the-scenes preview.

We moved past kiosks in mid-construction devoted to PC monitors, smart TV features and wacky displays built into modernist bookshelves. I brushed by the Sero, a TV that could rotate its screen into portrait mode. Then, behind the half-constructed stage, I saw it: The Wall, 292 inches of micro-LED glory, brighter than any movie screen and so much larger than life.

That was at CES, the world’s largest tech event, in 2020. Every year, Samsung is one of the show’s most important exhibitors of consumer electronics, and I knew that its huge TV would be the talk of my industry. As it towered over me, I felt like I was part of technology history.

I’ve been attending CES for most of my adult life. With the exception of two years during the COVID pandemic, I’ve gone every year since 1999. I fly to Vegas in January, right after the holidays, to hustle for a solid week. There, alongside hundreds of other journalists and my CNET colleagues, I write articles and shoot videos about the coolest gadgets on the planet. Tough gig, I know.

Read more: CNET Is Choosing the Best of CES 2026 Awards

CNET has a long history at CES. Teaming up with the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the show, we’ve bestowed the official Best of CES Award on a handful of select products. We’re doing it again in 2026, this time in conjunction with our colleagues at PC Magazine, ZDNet, Mashable and other Ziff Davis publications. The massive show is scheduled for the week of Jan. 5, and we’ve spent months planning how to tackle it.

Huge TVs remain one of the most recognizable symbols of CES, and they’ve only grown in significance since the introduction of HDTV broadcasts in 1998.

“HDTV was the biggest thing in my lifetime for video, no question about it,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. “HDTV fundamentally changed the viewing experience.”

But there’s a lot more to CES than TVs. Over the years, the consumer electronics extravaganza has been where we first got a glimpse of technology that we use every day — game consoles, cutting-edge phones, even streaming services — as well as more futuristic tech, including humanoid robots, AI-powered laundry machines, and personal electric aircraft. CES is where thousands of companies debut their splashiest innovations, and it’s one of the most important predictors of the next big tech trend.

And even though bellwether companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Samsung hype their own events and livestreams throughout the year to launch major products, CES has endured.

Other major trade shows have come and gone. Comdex, which ran from 1979 to 2003 and was also based in Vegas, showcased the computer technology of the day, competing directly against CES. E3, a massive video game industry event spawned from CES, took place annually from 1995 to 2021. A handful of international technology trade shows, including Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IFA in Berlin and Computex in Taipei, are still going strong, but CES remains king.

We can see the influence of the show on TVs, VCRs, game consoles and PDAs. These four devices, each with a rich history at CES, have a tech legacy that continues to push forward. I expect to see a continuation of that evolution at CES 2026, along with other devices, services and technologies still in their formative stages.

The next wave of household robotics, autonomous mobility, AI-assisted health care and salt spoons will exist in a booth or display at this year’s show. It might be years before they’re affordable, accessible and useful enough to become part of our lives. The road from wild concept to household mainstay is long and fraught with many dead ends, but it often begins at CES.

CES 1967: In the beginning, there were TVs

The very first CES — at the time, it went by its full name, the Consumer Electronics Show — took place in New York City in 1967. It attracted 117 exhibitors, which is tiny by today’s standards. By comparison, CES 2025 featured more than 4,500 exhibitors and drew 142,465 attendees, and pre-COVID shows were even larger.

The inaugural CES was a spinoff of another technology-focused trade event, the Chicago Music Show, where audio technology showed up in the form of pocket radios.

From the start, CES featured TVs. Invented long before the 1960s, that decade saw the adoption of color television broadcasts in the US and the launch of TV satellites.

At the 1967 CES, the most cutting-edge TVs displayed were those with integrated circuits, a technology that combines multiple electronic components into a small “chip,” or microchip — the stuff that eventually would become the guts of every laptop and smartphone. During that show and for decades afterward, most TVs used a cathode ray tube, or CRT, which made the screens small and the sets heavy. When we were kids, my sister and I sat a couple of feet from our tube TV at home watching cartoons, despite our parents’ warnings that sitting too close would ruin our eyesight.

No matter the era, the ideal TV is always something bigger, something that promises to bring the immersive, magical feel of a movie theater into a home. During my career, I’ve watched TVs expand and improve, year after year, with higher resolution, better contrast, more realistic color and brightness, chasing reality in fidelity and size.

A 2025 CNET survey found people do indeed crave huge screens. Nearly half of the respondents said that if money were no object, they would want a TV bigger than 65 inches in their homes.

“A lot of people ask what size TV should I buy, and I always tell people to buy one size bigger than you think you need,” Chris Hamdorf, executive vice president at TV maker TCL, told CNET in 2025. As a TV reviewer, I give people the same advice, but there was a time when 65-inch TVs were far from common.

During the ’80s and ’90s, larger-screen televisions hit the market using a technology similar to movie projectors. Called rear-projection TVs, the projector was housed inside the TV cabinet and created an image from behind the screen. Then, they also used CRTs, and in later iterations, an acronym-heavy array of other technologies (think DLP, LCD and LCoS). Numerous rear-projection TVs defined my first few years covering CES, before they were replaced by flat-panel technology, often thin and light enough to hang on a wall, a harbinger of the screens we use today for our Netflix binge-watching.

Plasma technology arrived in 1995 with the world’s first large (42-inch) plasma display by Fujitsu, and at CES 1997, Philips showcased the first commercially available version. The technology evolved in succeeding years but remained expensive by today’s standards — in 2005, Toshiba sold a 42-inch plasma for $4,500, for example. Just a few years later, plasma hit mainstream pricing and became very recommendable.

In 2010, the Best of CES award went to the first plasma TV with 3D capability, the Panasonic V10, chosen by a group of CNET journalists, including myself. We met in CNET’s double-wide trailer in the conference center parking lot and debated our way to the best overall winner. I touted the superb picture quality of previous Panasonic plasmas I’d reviewed, along with a promising new 3D video, complete with glasses. Oops! Within a few years, that concept was a walking corpse, and I commented on its death in 2017.

LCD-based displays were evolving at the same time, and that technology soon outsold both plasma and other non-flat technologies. With the advent of 4K resolution, plasma technology became less popular and eventually left the market altogether by 2014. LCD has been the dominant TV technology ever since.

Nowadays, CES is awash in massive screens, although none are quite as large as the 292-inch micro-LED TV that impressed me so much. At CES 2024, I was particularly enamored by the 132-inch, $200,000 folding TV by C-Seed. LG’s booth is another impressive example, with its incredible OLED multiscreen displays. But innovation in TVs has certainly slowed down, as larger TVs with excellent image quality have become increasingly affordable over the years.

“To be honest with you, the importance of TV at CES is definitely diminished,” CTA’s Shapiro says. “Because it is such an amazing consumer product that it’s almost cheaper than wallpaper now.”

CES 1970: A $13,000 VCR sets the stage for cheap streaming

For as long as TVs have existed, they have seemingly delivered the same basic concept: a screen with moving video and sound that you watch for entertainment at home. Other groundbreaking technology ideas, however, have evolved significantly over a short period of time.

In 1970, just three years into the history of CES, Philips showcased the N1500 VCR. It would be the first device that recorded TV shows onto cassette tapes. Originally a piece of professional broadcast equipment, it hit the UK market in 1972, where it sold for £600 — the equivalent of $13,000 today. It had a built-in TV tuner to record television programs broadcast over the air, as well as an analog clock that automatically initiated recordings.

“The VCR was important on so many different levels,” Shapiro tells me. “It changed the concept of TV. It empowered consumers to choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it.”

The idea that you could “time shift” to watch a show at a later time was revolutionary, eventually transforming home entertainment forever. Until then, television programming had set broadcast times. To experience “appointment TV,” you had to follow a show’s schedule at the moment it aired. With the ability to record and archive video independently, people took more ownership of their entertainment.

The format used by the N1500 was actually called “VCR,” but it was never successfully marketed in the US, opening the door for two other formats: Betamax (introduced by Sony) and VHS (developed by JVC). Betamax hit the market in 1975, the year I was born, and was seen by many as technically superior to VHS, with better image quality. My father was a Beta guy, and took great pride in his collection of Disney movies recorded off-air.

VHS launched at CES in 1977. It used a larger cassette tape than Beta and promised longer recording times (2 hours versus 1 hour). Over the next few years, the two incompatible formats and their devices — both now called VCRs — battled it out in the market, one-upping each other in marketing, brand support and technological innovation, such as recording lengths.

“There was a format war going on between VHS and Beta,” Shapiro says. “And it was intense.”

Over time, Betamax sales declined as more households adopted VHS. By 1988, 170 million VCRs had been sold worldwide, with only 13% being Betamax models. Sony also announced that it would manufacture VHS VCRs. The format war was effectively over.

The VCR had a 40-year reign, characterized by Blockbuster video rental stores and their reminders to “be kind, rewind.” But the technology of home video was about to get a digital makeover.

The DVD format delivered superior image quality in a smaller, more durable disc that didn’t require rewinding. It also allowed recording via DVD-R discs. Around the same time, a disc-free device made its debut: the DVR. It proved much more popular than DVD-R for recording TV shows and movies.

TiVo and Replay TV were among the first DVRs, devices that stored hundreds of hours of TV shows and enabled automatic recording to a hard disc. With a DVR, the “work” of programming recordings was much easier. You could simply indicate that you wanted to record every new episode of The Simpsons, and the DVR would do it automatically. There were no discs to bother with, so you didn’t have to worry about damaging them.

DVRs also allowed you to fast-forward through commercials and skip ahead in 15- or 30-second increments. Some even included the ability to skip past commercials automatically, without having to press a button at all. One of those DVRs, the Dish Network Hopper, debuted at CES and was named the 2013 Best of CES winner by CNET.

Until it wasn’t. The company that owned CNET at the time, CBS, was in the process of suing Dish over its commercial-skipping capabilities. CBS intervened in the awards process and instructed CNET’s editorial staff to select an alternative winner instead.

“When I heard that CNET gave an award and CBS reversed it, that must have been devastating to the staff,” Shapiro tells me. “Then I realized this is, like, a gift. This is gonna get more publicity than ever.” He wrote a column for USA Today headlined “CBS orders crush CNET credibility.” The reversal sparked a controversy that CNET veterans like me remember as an example of corporate interests overstepping editorial integrity.

DVRs remain a staple in US households today, typically sold by cable TV companies. But as more Americans ditch their cable subscriptions and replace them with streaming services, DVRs have moved to the cloud. The first live TV streaming service, Sling TV, debuted at CES 2015 with a $20 package that included channels such as ESPN, CNN, TNT and Disney Channel. I said at the time that it stole the show and presaged a new era of cutting the cable TV cord.

Today, Sling and its rivals — YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV and more — all offer cloud DVRs. They let you record TV shows automatically and watch them whenever and wherever, and even let you fast-forward through commercials. But you’ll have to press a button to do so.

Beyond TV shows and movies, another kind of entertainment shares a rich history of CES debuts. It got its start on television at home, but has moved rapidly into portable formats and even virtual reality. I’m talking about video games.

CES 1977: The Atari 2600 is whatever happened to Pong

Debuting at CES on June 4, 1977, the iconic Atari 2600 console launched the home video game industry. The announcement of the console was a bit of a surprise. Attendees at the show expected the big news to involve the debut of the VHS format.

The 2600 isn’t the first home console (a distinction that belongs to the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972), but Atari’s was the first to go mainstream. Atari was founded in 1972, and its breakthrough game, Pong, is widely considered the earliest successful video game. Originating as a stand-up arcade game, Pong then made its way to home consoles, including the Home Pong, a TV-connected console that was introduced at CES in 1974.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/features/back-to-the-tech-future-the-history-of-ces-in-four-iconic-gadgets/