Existential Comics @existentialcomics.com · Dec 3 Younger people who didn't witness it cannot fathom the hype around the Segway. Every news station agreed it would revolutionize the entire social fabric of the Earth. That all future humans would divide history between the savage days of the past, and the soon to be new era of zoom zoom scoot scoot.
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Thought that was “stay sippin” got dam
ironically, the scooters have kinda done the things that were expected of Segways
Illusion, Michael.
I remember, and now the only time I see the device is with DC tourists on them for goofy-looking “Segway tours”.
Hell, I remember the hype around the announcement that there was going to be an announcement of... something. "The market was up today on the news that this guy who did a thing announced he had another thing he's doing that he is going to announce in the future." It was... weird.
I tried it in middle school; A rent a cop at an event let children try it. Last time I saw it in the wild.
...younger people today are all riding electric scooters and other "micromobility" devices based on the same tech as the Segway.
I've never seen anyone riding on a Segway out of their own free will.
It's the most successful time a disability aid has been marketed to the general public.
What about all the conjecture leading up the unveiling of the mystery invention? Many people were convinced it was some sort of anti-gravity riding surfboard that we'd all be swooping around on🙄
I remember the morning news talking about it in code for weeks before they said what it was. It was code-named "ginger" and also "It", and we were told whole cities would be designed around it, and that we could order one online while it was still a secret what it was. My sister and me expected they
Meanwhile, the inventor went on to create a device providing portable solar power plus distilled water (being distributed to impoverished villages via a non-profit), as well as the Freestyle soda machine. WHY ISN'T THIS GUY A HOUSEHOLD NAME?
Didn't the guy who invented the segway die in a horrible cliff-related segway accident?
I remember when they were talking about rebuilding all of Manhattan to widen sidewalks for it
The first three hours of media coverage media anchors just called it “It” and would not say what it did
this is what I always think about when I hear endless hype around things like "ai" (understood to be the common abbreviation for bullshitter chatbots)
I remember when it was still called Ginger, and everyone thought it was going to be such a big deal we'd all get rid of cars and just use these to get around.
hey they revolutionised the walking-tours-for-tourists-too-lazy-to-walk industry
The hype was massively overblown, and the fundamental problem with the Segway is that you look goofy on one, but the e-bikes and scooters you now see everywhere owe a debt to the humble rentacop conveyer
I remember when the sketch was leaked and it got wall to wall coverage. Many of us were like: that’s it?
And they were right
Witnessed. It was like that. A brewery I worked at had one of those owners who thought he was VC and wore blazers etc. he got us a Segway for the tours, but we ended up just using it to race against the fork truck. Segway is faster, but most of us flew off on the turn. Fork trucks turn like pros.
I remember being like 10 and seeing a Segway bit shoehorned into Battlebots.... COMEDY CENTRAL, of all things, got hyped on Segways. I never saw one until about a decade later, when the mall cops got them.
This was the ai of its day
I was in college at the time and the campus police department got a bunch of these. I'm a librarian at the same institution now and . . . I do wonder if they have the old cop segways squirreled away somewhere. They definitely don't use them anymore.
didn't the owner die from falling off a cliff riding one?
Ah … the Halcyon days prior to the Segway … It’s introduction is where humankind leaned to the side and spun out of control …
It evolved into the hoverboard my 3 yro grandson rides on mercilessly
And then it turned out to be another way donut-embiggened cops could patrol neighborhoods without ever engaging or getting to know anyone, and that's about it for Segways.
I remember working in a transport department at the time and all of us going "people are going to ride these on the road? because they're sure as hell not going on footpaths."
Warren Ellis got so hyped about how big "IT" was going to be and oh the disappointment
The laughs we had. Good times.
this is the perfect segway photo. it doesn't get much more segway than this.
In retrospect, just a deeply funny moment in the history of humanity.
That would be very unfortunate, considering walking is the most exercise a lot of us get on most days. 😅
It was the AI of its time.
Nobody stopped to think how fucking dorky these things look.
George W. Bush crashing one was a week's worth of news.
I remember Dean Kaman was going to change humanity. it was about to be the most consequential invention since the Steam Engine.
It did give us this though
In a way, they got excited about a thing that was a dumb-ass version of an electric bike.
I think I was already too old to hear any if that hype. By the time I knew what a Segway was, it was already regarded as stupid.
there was a "walking"-tour company who had a fleet of them for many years. every year like a dozen people got seriously injured. idk how they stayed in business so long.
I spotted one the other day. it was decked out as a security scooter (though it was being driven by some rando). I pointed it out to my kid, he laughed and laughed.
The rumors before the launch were so wild it was speculated in might be teleportation.
I don't remember bosses saying that all their workers should learn how to ride Segways or they'd be left behind.
First Segway I saw in the wild was a cop in Palo Alto who wasn’t paying attention. He plowed into the back of a car.
Yeah, that was... A thing. I feel like I read their wheelchairs were actually really good, but I imagine they suffered from the same affordability problem, and the people who really would have benefited would never be able to.
Still sad i havent gotten to try one
They truly died the moment gw fell off one
To be fair, whoever thought to make the wheels big and put them one in front of the other was into something
Hard to forget the NYPD Segways, which I remember most vividly in the Union Square subway station. I don't think I ever saw a cop actually riding a Segway, the devices just sat outside of the underground police station.
The Segway walked so that the Lime Scooter could destroy cities.
It was absurd on its face. (And didn’t one of the execs meet his end and off a cliff on one).
I console myself with this memory as I watch companies ram AI down our throats at every turn. It is not inevitable no matter how much they tell us it is.
Old enough to have been aware of how incredibly blatantly manufactured said hype was.
^Yeh. Sooo easy to pick up and take on the bus with you.^
In hindsight, that should have been what radicalized me against the tech industry hype cycle, but it took me a few more turns on that asinine merry-go-round to realize "Oh, these idiots are just the lucky ones holding the bag, they don't know shit about shit."
Got to have been one of the most disappointing inventions ever - as soon as every country said “Great, but you can’t use it on the road or pavement” it was finished about a month after it was launched.
Not especially innovative, either. www.newspapers.com/article/the-...
I always wonder if things would have been different if Jony Ive had designed the thing.
Setting aside that it is impossible to look cool on a Segway, it looked like it was going to fucking kill you at any moment. One hard stop and you'd faceplant so hard that your teeth would sever your spinal column.
We rode Segways at Epcot and here at Wilderness Lodge.
Seriously though, Steve Jobs said it was "as big a deal as the PC", and future cities would be designed around it, and John Doerr (another tech billionaire) said it it would be MORE important than the internet.
And there was the big hype before it was unveiled. People were digging through the clues such as Dean Kamen's patent filings etc.
I love going on Segway city tours when I travel with my family. It’s so fun! But since they’re not manufactured anymore, all those touring outfits have to take extra-special good care of their units since they can’t ever be replaced with new ones. :/
Is this about AI?
I remember reading the extremely credulous reporting, then finally seeing one in real life— let’s just say the mismatch was stark.
Good God, and I was in the middle of all that nonsense on the Microsoft campus 🤓
Nah. Everyone hyped it to F before it came out and anyone knew what it was. And the actual humans saw it snd were like “oh”. And that was that.
The happiest human being I have ever seen in my life was a tourist on a segway
I rode one for the first time at the beginning of this year and immediately fell and broke my ankle. 0/5 stars, do not recommend, anything with a motor should have distinct acceleration and brake mechanisms, none of this "just lean forward or back" bullshit.
Lol I also think a lot of the hype was how they revealed it gradually with a countdown and everything. I remember when they revealed It and my response was... okay, I guess?
zoom zoom scoot scoot *dying*
Segues are fine. I feel like most complaints about it was whining about novelty. Then they took the stick away and now half the kids know it as their version of the skip it. bsky.app/profile/bmhu...
And Oasis was gonna be bigger than the Beatles. So was Arcade....Arcade....Fire! Arcade Fire!
Yep - was the first true hype cycle I experienced. Quite a ginger.
I've still never ridden one of these stupid things. I'd still like to try one, but I doubt it will revolutionize my life
They are certifiably stupid as fuck. Also so much fun to drive
It's a solid example of how fashion trumps utility. Same with Google glasses and the Metaverse. But all utility is disregarded, solely because I, among others, wouldn't be caught dead using them.
And there was this "Onion News Network" segment from 2007... youtu.be/N5Rs8zdEHJw
We just haven't gotten there yet
I remember seeing one for the first time being ridden by a cop in an airport and thinking....Really? That's it? Not even a reach around?
Also worth noting the guy who invented the Segway died by driving a Segway over a cliff.
I actually worked at an Amazon subsidiary at the time and I remember the news being that Bezos had seem something that was going to change cities completely. That it would be one of the biggest inventions in human history (we schmucks at the bottom had no idea what it was)
My memory is that the hype all came from the elites before it was publicly revealed. The press repeated the breathless claims of a lot of big names before the reveal.
If anyone wants to hear about it told in a funny way I recommend listening to The Dollop podcast episode about it. Episode 565 - "Dean Kamen and It." They thought this thing was gonna replace cars.
Remember when it was CODENAME: GINGER?
Not hyperbole. That's pretty much exactly what I was assured. From a couple different people/directions.
Oh yes, the buzz about "It"... There was a bit in the Ghostbusters video game - made in 2009, but set in 1991 - where the portrait of Vigo the Carpathian "sees the evil of things to come", predicting the future. One of the lines is "'It' is a scooter."
I still want a damned Seg-Egg, fully knowing how awful thisnis, and working in the industry, lol
Ironically though, ebikes and escooters may actually revolutionize urban transit. What was needed was an evolution of existing technology, not a revolutionary one.
I have this recollection of IT having a weird intrusive animated placement on Amazon.com in the bar above the navbar - but I can't find any evidence that this actually happened
I’m firmly on team Segway it was the one robot that warned us about George W and tried to take action, the only other ally we have is the Hannover hard pretzel
My theory at the time was that the Segway filled the need for distraction after 9/11. It seemed in late September and October that the weather was never as good as the TV forecasts.
I was at a workshop where Dean Kamen told multiple Nobel laureates that they were basically idiots in their approach to energy efficiency, and that the Segway would be transformative.
They revealed it on 60 Minutes, and I remember the ads vividly. They made it sound like you were going to see a flying car
CODENAMED GINGER
I remember when bush faceplanted on one
I still remember how excited my brother was to get to just stand on a Segway at Innoventions in EPCOT in 2003. Two decades later, and Disney Parks are still the only place I’ve been where I’ve seen someone riding them (security guards, Paul Blart Mallcop-style)
Dean Kamen: Pioneer Overhype Man
A magician named Gob.
They rent them out in Cartmel, near the racecourse. There's a dozen or so tourists trundling down the country paths on them. Looks a bit surreal.
I live segways and would have one right now if I could afford it They were cool