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The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i've-used-1-2-4-7-8-15-and-20 dept.

Khammurabi writes "PC World compiled a list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. From the article: 'At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"' Number one on the list? AOL."

5 of 497 comments (clear)

  1. Zip Drive? by gilesjuk · · Score: 3, Informative

    I had a zip drive and at the time it filled a large gap between the floppy and CD rewriteable (which was very costly).

    It was good in my opinion, it just never developed fast enough in terms of capacity.

    1. Re:Zip Drive? by Onan · · Score: 5, Informative
      I also used and loved zip drives for a while, but their fatal flaw was what came to be affectionately known as the "click of death"; the head becoming so far misaligned that it would slide off the edge of the disk with a loud repetitive clicking sound.

      And if that was just the way old drives failed, that wouldn't have been such a big deal. The problem was the that click of death was, quite literally, contagious: the drives used tracks on disks to recalibrate their head placement.

      This meant that one bad drive would write disks with misaligned tracks, which could then be put into a previously-healthy drive, causing it to misalign its heads to the bad tracks, at which point it would write bad tracks to other disks, which when put into other drives would misalign their heads...

      You get the idea.

  2. Re:Bad tech? Nah... by jomegat · · Score: 5, Informative

    I always look for the "Printer Friendly" link when I run into an article like that. It generally renders the whole article as one continuous chunk, but it doesn't print it. That's a tip kids. Write it down.

    --

    In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.

  3. Ever hear of CompuServe? GEnie? by spun · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was online with pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email in 1981, on both CompuServe and GEnie. AOL invented nothing. You have no idea what you are talking about.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  4. Re:Bad tech? Nah... by lunatik17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a Firefox plugin that takes care of that.

    --

    Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?