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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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I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
-Matt
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.
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?
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...
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.
There's a Firefox plugin that takes care of that.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?