I'm unreasonably enamoured with the concept of the in-between space between the last tech in a space that caught on and the next to catch on where people are trying really weird stuff that ends up looking alien from both sides of the timeline. The real experimental hours when people can tell a tech is entering obsolesence but the new hot thing isn't in stone yet.
That gives us things like "Internet Appliances" and PDAs despite both being obsolesced 3 years later by the first real smartphones.
@trysdyn I still think there's a space for Internet appliances but I'm weird