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The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
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."
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Windows ME
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
-Matt
The Apple laptop that boasted about its internal wirless card but was made of titanium and so there was no signal?
Microsoft Bob continues to take a beating that I think is unfair. (I wonder how many of the people who talk about it have ever seen it.) It was pretty useless, true, but it was also an attempt to be genuinely innovative, and deserves credit for failing while trying to do something really new.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
And it made cool clicking sounds after extended usage...
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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Soon MS bashing will be 3rd or 4th post on every thread...then where will Slashdot be?
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.
pretty myopic and self flattering of this age - I could pick up a 1950's copy of Popular Mechanics and find lots of stupendous techno-flops. One that comes to mind is a TV set with a built in 35mm slide viewer. You guys have no idea.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I was tired of the old amber screen too, but CGA was just not what I thought of when I thought of a "color monitor"
I mean look at this crap.
I grew up playing King's Quest and think he was just sunburned, or embarrased all the time.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I personally loved my PCjr. It was my first computer and I waited anxiously for months on preorder for it! The keyboard actually didn't bother me at all, since half the computers we had had at school were Sinclair 1000s (and a fancier Sinclair, which also had a strange keyboard, though not as awful as the flat laminated Sinclair 1000 style).
It also had more colors and a much better sound chip than the regular PC.
IBM replaced the chicklet keyboard for free within 6 months or so with a regular one. and dont forget they were wireless keyboards! Pretty cool for 1984!
Over all, my PCjr was a joy, and I loved it up until I got my Apple ][GS (which I loved, but a lot of others hated as well)
Random_Amber
I would say that the (seemingly) years of hype and vapor leading up to the release of such a so-so product is what clinched it's spot.
Kind of like your first sexual experience...oh, sorry, this is slashdot...well, let me just say - don't set your expectations too high.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I couldn't agree more. Already reading many comments on this article in other locations that are crying foul over AOL. Not that AOL was the best thing since sliced bread. But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs. Looking at AOL then, you see where the leap was made from online computing before 1989 and after. Color, pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email.
Strange, that's pretty similar to what we have now. If you read what they complain about, it is painfully obvious that the writer is either some 16 year old AOL basher without a clue or worse, an old elitist that wonders, "Didn't we all have private (D)Arpanet connections?"
Here's their complaints about AOL:
"How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum "PC-Link" in 1989, users have suffered through..."
1. awful software
2. inaccessible dial-up numbers
3. rapacious marketing
4. in-your-face advertising
5. questionable billing practices
6. inexcusably poor customer service
7. enough spam to last a lifetime
8. more expensive than its major competitors
"This lethal combination earned the world's biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders."
It goes on to say:
"AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. In the 90s you couldn't open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours.
Advertisement (This is an actual paste... sorry, PC world gave me IN-YOUR-FACE advertising.)
Now, there are some valid arguments. For instance, they are notorious for screwing up your billing and not cancelling accounts properly. On the other hand, this article is targeting the original AOL. In your face advertising? Nobody but geeks knew what the net was in the early 90s. In the 90s, you couldn't exactly download the AOL client (more evidence this guy is 16). But let's go back.
Awful software: What did you expect, it ran on Windows 3.1. It was probably the only useful thing a home user ever ran on Windows 3.1
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
Marketing: Back then, you had to convince people that they had a reason to even buy a computer, let alone get online with it.
Spam: We're placing the blame on AOL for this now?
Expensive: That's certainly true. I remember a point when they charged over $6 an hour or there abouts. Let's just say that you used your AOL time wisely (downloading all the porn you could within an hour), hehe. Yes, it would be considered highway robbery these days. Then again, so many out there are willing to pay $2 for a tv show (free to watch on your very large TV) to play on a itsy bitsy iPod screen. I'd rather pay $6 an hour for my Internet connection.
PCWorld probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars from AOL to carry their CDs for them. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
I8-D
The original Zip drives were really pretty nice. The SCSI and IDE 100 meg drives were relatively fast too (for the time). People remember those drives as being painfully slow because many people had the external versions that connected via the *parallel port* (shudder). They managed to get a lot of Zip drives pre-installed in to machines but then they came out with a Zip 250 meg drive and several other variations. Of course the newer media didn't work on the older drives, but the worst part was the old 100 meg disks worked slow as heck in the newer drives because it had to do something special to write to them properly. What I think really killed them eventually was that the Zip disks were very expensive and the prices never went down!
They really could have replaced the 1.44 floppy disk if they had tried hard enough. I still have my old blue iomega 100 SCSI zip drive chugging away but I don't use it as much any more now that USB flash drives are almost everywhere and can finally run on everything short of DOS.
Some of the items on the list, although we love to hate them, are things that really did help the tech world make strides forward. For example, say what you want about AOL but, if it weren't for them, I still probably wouldn't be able to send email to my mom. Zip disks? Yes, they had click-of-death but, at the time, a portable 100MB for $10? That was unreal. PointCast? PointCast was the first time where you could have your very own, customized scrolling ticker on your screen... just like the ones on the CNN screen... but it only had the stuff *you* wanted. When it first came out, it was a marvel. All of these items changed the way that people thought about what they could do with computers when they first came out.
Contrast that with some items on the list that were complete disasters from the moment they were launched: IBM PC Jr., CueCat, Microsoft Bob... THOSE belong on the list. The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). But, like I said, some of the ones on the list, I feel, aren't getting their due. We look at them now and see how worthless they are by today's standards (you can probably get any of these items on eBay for $5, now), but that ignores the impact they had when they were first released.
Perhaps the overhyping has forever biased me but the segway has to be the most absurd tech product.
2k for a bizarre scooter that was supposed to change my life forever? huh?
They dare? They DARE?!? They dare to disparage the Timex Datalink?!?!?
Heathens!
I wore the crap out of my Datalink until it finally died in a pool in Arkansas of H2O exposure. Show me another watch that could sync up phone lists, memos and TIME to a PC and under linux no less (yes sir!). Not too bulky and had all the needed features. I'm talking the blinkly light version here, not the USB.
Consider today's watchscape, the best that's out there are the "atomic" (*cough* radio sync) watches and for the most part none of them work quite as well or have the anywhere near the feature set of the Good Old Ironman Datalink.
The best part was holding your breath long enough for the watch to finish the transfer without crapping out. Good times, good times.
Anything is possible given time and money.
The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child's parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.
The machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only "shielding" between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children.
Naturally children loved this gadget and kids were getting months of radiation exposure every chance they could get! I know the list is all modern technology but this product is so magically horrid it should get honorary mention...
1. The IBM PC. It was slower than many CP/M available at the time that cost less. It uses a brain-dead "16" bit cpu called the 8088 that was used a night mare of an addressing system. The default operating system was this bad copy of CP/M from Microsoft. And it didn't even follow the standard for the gender of the printer port or the serial port! What made it a total nightmare was that it sold in HUGE numbers and created a standard that sucked and managed to kill off better machines.
2. The IBM AT. Just when you thought their couldn't be a CPU worse then the 8088 Intel creates the an addressing system that makes the 8088 look good. Then IBM creates new standard based in this nightmare did I mention that they created an even less standard format for the RS-232 comport? But wait there is more Microsoft creates a now OS that has a bad habit of crashing hard drives and prevent you from creating any hard drive partition bigger than 33 megabytes.
And the ever popular Disk-doubler! A great program from Microsoft that they included with MS-DOS 6. Not only did it contain code stolen from Stac but it also could lost vast amount of data on your drive!
There are so many others that should be on that list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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
I actually ran Pointcast on a spare laptop in the living room back in the day. I actually thought it was pretty useful.
Once in the middle of the night I got up and went out to the kitchen for a snack. Our cat was on the back of the couch staring at the Pointcast screensaver. She was transfixed. Everytime it would change, she would twitch a little. She loved to watch it while we were sleeping. I guess she liked the contrasting colors and movement.
I wrote a note to the Pointcast folks about this. They were quite amused. They sent me a T-shirt. I thought that was nice of them.
Anyone else notice that at one time or another PC Weak ran articles that gave good reviews to almost all of the things in the top 25???
There's a Firefox plugin that takes care of that.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?