This ad is from Best Buy’s Black Friday sale in 1997. Black Friday tech deals used to be absolute chaos—in the best way. Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, people lined up outside Best Buy and Circuit City at 4 a.m. chasing doorbusters like the $99 DVD player in 2001, or the first-gen iPod markdowns in 2003 when Apple dropped the 20GB model. The late ’80s and ’90s had their own hype—think $199 VCRs, Sega Genesis bundles, and the Nintendo 64 price cuts in ’97 after the release of games like GoldenEye 007. Every year, the deals weren’t just discounts—they were milestones in tech history, marking when gadgets became affordable enough to actually land in your living room.