HP's greenest desktop was sent to the landfill.

Back in 2008, Hewlett-Packard unveiled the dc7800 slim desktop. The idea behind the computer was that it would take less space and consume less power than standard desktops. The computer sported a lot of the same features of other HP desktops. What made the desktop stand out was the fact that customers could order it with a solid state drive, rather than a standard hard drive. Solid state drives consume about 1 watt. Standard drives consume 2, 4 or more watts. When it was released, the flash option was the only thing people talked about.

"This is not a mainstream product," said Kirk Godkin, HP's senior product manager for business PCs at the time. Godkin said then that he believed SSD in desktops won't be mainstream until at least 2010. Eventually HP will move to a 32GB and perhaps even a 64GB SSD, he said, but did not give a specific target date.

The company didn't wait that long. The 7800 was discontinued and the successor product, the 7900, doesn't have that option, according to the sales representative I spoke with earlier. (Disclosure: I completely forgot about this PC, but it came back to me while preparing for a talk at the Flash Memory Summit taking place in Santa Clara this week.)

Will it come back? Probably. Flash drives are declining rapidly in price. In 2007, it cost $920 more to get a 64GB flash drive in a Dell notebook. Now, it costs about $180 more to swap in a 128GB flash drive. Besides saving power, flash-based computers come out of sleep rapidly.

So who knows, maybe Godkin's prediction will prove right.