Back in 1996, I was doing an undergraduate honors independent study project on integrating computer technology into elementary-school classrooms. As part of tha

Back in 1996, I was doing an undergraduate honors independent study project on integrating computer technology into elementary-school classrooms. As part of that, my university and I had worked out an arrangement with a local public elementary school to let me teach a class on computer skills to a class of 5th-graders (ages 10 to 11, for those of you not in the US) a couple of days a week for a year. I had some friends in the campus bookstore, which had a very close relationship with Apple (as was common in those days), and through them was able to get my hands on a QuickTake 100 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake), one of the earliest consumer-level digital cameras. As soon as I started working that camera into my curriculum it became obvious to me that digital cameras were going to be a Very Big Thing. The kids took to it like fish to water, they loved taking pictures with it, and then when I showed them how to transfer those pictures to one of the Macs in the school computer lab and then publish them in a simple static-HTML Web page for their friends and family to see they were practically over the moon. As with many Apple innovations of that era, the QuickTake was doomed by being just a little too far ahead of its time -- too expensive for average people to afford, too low-res due to the primitive sensors, and too clunky to use from the lack of simple ways to interface with a PC (USB 1.0 had only just been standardized and wouldn't start showing up in PCs for another year or two). It died at Steve Jobs' hands in the great massacre of Apple products followed his return in 1997, so that part of the future was left for others to make fortunes off of, at least until the iPhone came along a decade later. But even now, more than 20 years later, I still remember that camera.