Sony AIBO

Sony introduced the first consumer AIBO, the ERS-110, on May 11, 1999 — a gleaming silver robot puppy whose initial body design came from artist Hajime Sorayama. When sales opened on June 1, 1999, the run was deliberately tiny — 3,000 units for Japan at 250,000 yen, 2,000 for the US at $2,500 — and the Japanese allocation sold out over the internet in twenty minutes. For a machine that cost as much as a used car and mostly toddled, wagged, and occasionally obeyed, that stampede said everything about what AIBO represented: the robot companion science fiction had been promising for fifty years, finally in a box.

And AIBO earned the affection. It walked, chased its ball, responded to touch and voice, and developed from clumsy puppy behavior toward a distinct adult personality shaped by how you treated it. Successive generations refined the dog through the sleeker ERS-7 of 2003, while a wave of cheap imitators — most famously the $25 Poo-Chi — chased the same robo-pet dream at pocket-money prices. Owners didn't talk about their AIBOs like gadgets; they named them, photographed them, and grieved them.

That devotion made the ending genuinely sad. On January 26, 2006, a cost-cutting Sony announced it was discontinuing AIBO; support wound down over the following years, with help for the final models ending in 2013 and repair services ceasing in 2014, leaving beloved robot dogs to die of unfixable old age. Sony eventually repented — a new-generation aibo, the ERS-1000, launched in Japan in January 2018 — but for the people who queued online in 1999, the original silver puppy remains the moment the future briefly lived on the living-room carpet.