In December 1996 I was still using my three year old 486 DX2-66 as my primary computer but Pentiums had been around for a couple of years. The cover feature of the December 1996 issue of boot was about the sexiest gear of the year which includes computers, computer components and accessories and other tech devices.
One of the devices was the Palm Pilot, which was a newly introduced PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) by U.S. Robotics. PDAs were what people used for smart phone like functionality before smart phones. Essentially, they were pocket computers (though obviously more limited). The Palm Pilot line was the most popular for a long time but they never successfully made the transition to the smart phone market.
Another item on the list is the Iomega Jaz drive. The Jaz drive was an external disk drive that used 1 GB disk/cartridges. 1 GB was a lot in 1996. I had added a 1 GB hard drive to my 486 (which had a 340 MB hard drive) the previous year. I had an Iomega Zip Drive but never a Jaz drive. The Zip drive was similar in concept but it used 100 MB disks. It was extremely useful for storing lots of data (for the time) and the disks were affordable. The Jaz drive was never as successful because by the time it came out, CD-R drives were available and the media was much cheaper. Jaz drives also had some reliability problems.
Other interesting items on the list were the BeBox (the PowerPC based computers stopped being produced long ago but the OS is still around) and the Ricochet Wireless modem (a cell phone based modem).
