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The Top 21 Tech Flops
PetManimal writes "Whatever happened to Digital Audio Tape? Or Circuit City's DIVX program? Or IBM's PCjr. and the PS/1? Computerworld's list of 21 biggest tech flops is an amusing trip down the memory lane of tech failures. Some are obvious (Apple Newton), while others are obscure (Warner Communications' QUBE). Strangely, Y2K didn't make the list."
Next on the list... Zune.
Frank Zappa tells all.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I thought it was still used?
It was a REAL problem despite this revisionist attitude that some now have that it was nothing at all. You know why you get to think that? Because a lot of people spent a LOT of time fixing the problem so it wouldn't be a problem. What you see is a sign of success. Sheesh.
What next? The polio vaccine was a flop, too?
And the mods will prove it. ;-)
What's Y2K got to do with tech flops? While there's no way to know one way or another, it could well be that nothing major happened precisely because people made effort to remediate and test any issues prior to 1/1/2000.
Y2K isn't on the list because it was a bug not a flop. They're not the same thing.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
When I think flop, I think something embarrassing that no one bought or appreciated. The Dreamcast was a loser in terms of sales, but not a flop. The article itself says 10 million were sold. In terms of gaming fun I had with the system, it was a huge success.
The early DAT decks... I know... I own a Panasonic SV3700 which I paid close to $1800 for back in the day... had a "copy protection" scheme SCMS where you were limited copying (digital copy) using the SPDIF I/O at 44.1KHz. So... it basically killed the market for a cheap (mass produced) consumer model, so you had to pay outragous $$ for the Pro version. All studios mastered onto DAT, so you again were forced to buy one. You could use the pro I/O without the copy protection and there actually was a DIP switch on the SV3700 where you could defeat the SCMS. I think it was the only one who had that "feature".
DAT is dead... good.
Lisa was a step in the evolution from the Apple II line to the Macintosh.
The other things on the list are dead-ends. Lisa wasn't profitable, but it also wasn't a dead-end.
Y2k isn't on the list because it was a HUGE success for the consulting firms that flogged it. (That, and it was the COBOL programmer full employment act for a few years.)
Didn't Y2K turn out to be the lack of a tech flop?
Forget tech flops, what about tech GIGAFLOPS??
I heard PS3 was going to be about 100 gigaflops or something.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
Hey! That was my primary system back in the day. I don't see how it was a flop, it was pretty much like other 386s of the time. Many a BBS were dialed and game played. What was the problem with it?
Couldn't get Linux to recognize something in that system. I can't remember now but there was some proprietary bus or something not supported (and I doubt it was ever added after the fact either). It would refuse to find the hard drive, so I could only boot Linux from a floppy.
That couldn't be why it's supposedly a flop, though. News to me. =/
A flop to the writer is a product that had more hype than users. For example, he notes that DAT is used in pro arenas only and that OS/2 has a user base but one that has never reached the hype it had...
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
teenagers
i agree
It's a technology that's on its way to becoming a reality. As soon as RFID replaces bar codes, you're going to see smart applies everywhere. It won't fix someone putting the milk carton back in the fridge when it's empty, but it will still be very useful. Imagine pulling recipes just for the foods you currently have, printing out a shopping list straight from your fridge, etc. It *is* a good idea, it just won't work until RFID arrives.
Still the article was a fun read.
The first 16-bit PC that eventually went on to take down TI's personal computing division by losing too much money? Meanwhile, I see fridges in the store that can display TV and whatnot. Lame.
-mkb
Somehow, the submitter is confusing Y2K with a disappointing product introduction?
You know every time I hear something like "false alarm" when it comes to Y2K? I'm tempted to say that it should have never been fixed. A little pain seems to be required to drive the point home that you don't wait till the shit hits the fan before you do something about it. A lesson the submitter doesn't understand.
DAT might have flopped in the consumer sector (I blame CD for that), but it was the bee's knees for audio professionals, considering that it was the lowest cost and most convenient PCM format at the time. Prior to DAT, digital masters meant using a Sony 1630, PCM audio on a large videocassette. There were digital open-reel solutions, but these never caught on for mixdown and mastering.
As for the rest of this list, it seems to me that a lot of these entries (Newton, PC jr, VR, Qube) were just inadequate hardware/software implementations of valid concepts. Consider the Newton: ahead of its time, it just needed sufficient CPU/RAM/display tech to become the Palm/Blackberry/smartphone that it should have been. The IBM PC jr was unarguably a flop, but the concept of an affordable home PC lives on in the $299 Dell or $399 Mac Mini. VR was a whole lot of hype (and yes, I bought into it, seeing as I was a 3D animator back in the mid-'90s), but now look at WoW or Second Life. And Qube? One word: TiVo. I realize that Qube was meant to be a more interactive product/service, but the web co-opted the e-commerce aspect of the Qube. I think the only interactivity people want from their TV is to watch what they want when they want.
Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
...and was pretty much sunk by the middle of 1999, leaving some people with worthless equipment... As I recall, the DIVX players could also play regular DVDs. They just cost more than a regular DVD players because they had the modem and other components to facilitate DIVX service.Most of these product were OK technically (or at least not awful compared to some products out there). They did not flop necessarily due to technical flaws but due to marketing flaws (failure to read the market, or getting upstaged by some other product).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The PC junior wasn't a technical flop. Maybe a marketing one, but technically it was just an entry-level IBM personal computer, that ran PC software.
Or is the argument that the PC is a technical flop in general?
In 1992 Commodore, in its great wisdom released a repackaged A500 to compete with the 486 PC. This POS known as the Amiga 600 was the beginning of the end. They also released the failures known as the CDTV and the CD 32, but the A600, and a few month later the A1200 firmly established that CBM sucked. The 1992 A1200 had a downgraded version of the CPU Apple put in its 1987 Apple II.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Time Warners ill-fated attempt at interactive TV in the 80's. Limited 2-way communication via a set-top box in 1981. I remember Todd Rundgren doing an interactive interview in '80 in Columbus and using Qube to interact w/ the subscribers. He had a series of questions he was to pose to the audience and Time Warner nixed the idea and forced him to use their's. Stupid questions like "Do you own a personal computer? Press F1 for Yes, F2 for No". How f'n stupid... who even knew what one was in 1980?? The funniest part, most replied Yes! They thought their Qube box was a PC.
Quecat - major bomb. Shitty scanner too.
1. "Paperless office". I think word got around that this was as much Management Glamor. Of course you couldn't ban the Scribble-Note. What everyone meant was Paper-Reduced, and this HAS happened. When you're actually working on something, you're gonna have some paper floating around. (Anyone want to join me in a round of PrintReport, FurrowBrow, FixMistake ?) When everyone signs off and it becomes a done-deal, *then* you scan it, & store it on servers.
... *yet*. Just because the Adoption Curve is 35 years instead of 15 doesn't make it a flop. The Revenge of the Nerds movies were signs of their times. Today, we wail about Joe Average, but Joe Average *doesn't* ridicule computers anymore. 3 years from now when the eruption from the Microsoft Volcano dies down, we'll be able to concentrate a little more on *apps*, not OS's. (And 2010 is the next symbolic Arthur Clarke date, though his timeline was torched by many people.) In 2010, some elite gamers will have acquired some high end VR gaming hardware, and There It Will Be. It will take ANOTHER 5 years minimum (And getting past another OS crisis!) before Joe Average types Memos in Thin Air.
2. Virtual Reality. This hasn't happened
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Since I grew up in central Ohio during the 1970's, I think I can talk about the whole "Qube" experience. The remote was a big, honkin box with a 3 x 10 grid of buttons to change channels and 4 or 5 "response buttons" along the right hand side. Mostly these were only useful for playing poker with Flippo The Clown, Warner's big time celeb. Later we found out that if you mashed down all of those buttons on the side all at once, you could watch any of the pay per view movies for free.
Computer World should do its homework better.
That would be Microchannel.
It wasn't a flop - it made a lot of money for a lot of people (programmers and companies specializing in Y2K). Flops don't tend to do that and how would we measure the "success" or "failure" of Y2K? Lack of problems that developed afterward means failures?
Also lack of problems doesn't mean it was all hype. (I like to think that the raised alarm saved problems later on, but I have severe doubts about whether it was worth the worry or hype it garnered.)
Prove him wrong.
By the way, this article is so far off that I would actually consider it flamebait.
Seriously, for a machine intended as a user-friendly, entry-level computer, its form factor left much to be desired. It was squat, would pitch a fit if the mouse wasn't connected on boot (a first for consumer PCs at the time), and its front edges looked like a cartoon shark. Saw-toothed flanges halfway down the front of the main box, hard and sharp-looking corners, and a weirdly sock-bent monitor screamed "I'll bite you!" and "Don't try to pick me up!" It was like the Hyde to the Mac's Jekyll.
I work at a music store and I see people buy DAT tapes on a weekly basis... they're certainly not flying off the shelves, but they're not exactly sitting there collecting dust either.
Maybe DAT wasn't a huge worldwide phenomenon, but they certainly aren't a "flop"!
ìì!
They give a few reasons why they think DAT failed, but it seems to me that there is a big obvious one right in front that was overlooked -- sequential access. I think CD's were immediately attractive only partly because they were digital. The killer feature was random access.
Apple's Pippin certainly seems right for a technical flop list. A game machine based on the Macintosh; a platform well known for games. Much hype, under powered when delivered, quickly killed.
Also, although technically under the category net PC's, what about the AMD PIC (see here or here)? I briefly was involved in a project to develop media for the PIC. Remarkably, this low cost computer made its debut two years after the i-Opener failed. You would think they would learn.
We see about two of these "TOP TECH FLOPS" editorials and blog posts a month.
.com "bubble" burst several years ago.
WE KNOW. MS BOB sucked. Newton failed. We all are very much aware that the
Yet, these editorials keep drawing traffic time and time again. So, without further ado, visit my website for "THE MILLENNIUM'S 1,500 TOP TECH FLOPS!"
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The Newton paved the way for PDAs, and the Newton in certain ways compares more than favorably with existing PDAs today.
DAT has been a staple of industry professionals for ages. As an indie filmmaker, I've found cheap digital audio equipment which is supposed to be superior to be rather poor in comparison. I'd kill to have good DAT equipment.
eBook readers are perhaps a flop in that few will invest a device that does solely that, but eBooks as a whole gain in popularity every year.
The PCjr entered an area when IBM-based PCs had hardly become the norm, and many critics believed a personal computer in the home would never become a reality. It was a step in the right direction, and people forget that there were MANY alternatives back then. The fact that 99% of home computers are based on IBM standards today is not a flop.
Internet Currency? Last time I checked there are several "points" programs on the web where you can earn and use points that aren't currency themselves. This business model still operates today. Furthermore, the concept of a firm handling transactions across multiple borders for online currency paved the way for one of the most successful websites ever, Ebay/Paypal.
Just as the article states, Iridium is still in business.
Bob was a flop, and one I commonly mock. However I promise you, that the concept will be revisited and better marketed the second time around. Honestly, I imagine that Second Life will become, or inspire the next generation of Bob, allowing us all to make virtual spaces, which in turn will link to applications and activities within this virtual world.
The NetPC? I still know people who own Web TV, and the market might have continued if Microsoft hadn't bought them out. People forget that Net PC devices were a threat to people whose business depended on the PC model. People also still make homemade Net PCs out of things like XBoxes and such.
Push technology? The article fails to mention that while Desktop channels were obtrusive and filled with advertiser content, this concept is very successful today. RSS feeds, AJAX technology and the like are very much staples of today's web. The article also fails to mention that Push technology preceeded and eventually became streaming media as well, and was largely developed for and by the porn industry. You'd be surprised how much technology comes from the porn industry.
I could go on and on and on, but I have to head out the door.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
More in the category of "not living up to the hype" than "flop" is the Segway. "IT" (as it was known for more than a year, shrouded in secrecy for more than a year before its unveiling) was to be "revolutionary" and change all our lives. Did that happen? I'm still waiting...
I'd also like to nominate Windows Vista for the list, but even that might be a little premature.
How hard is it to link the the single page print version...m mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9012345
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
AC to avoid the whoring of karma.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
From TFA:
Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet.
That's not true. I'm posting this comment using a Windows Vista speech recognition software and Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
The Newton, while utlimately too large and expensive for widespread adoption, was certainly not a "flop" by any standards. Without the Newton tackling the quirks of handwriting recognition, and figuring out a GUI that works, there would be no Palm, and no PDA as we know it.
Yes... let out your anger... that's right... it will aaalll be ok soon.
Now take back the zune you bought..... and buy an ipod.
That's a good boy.
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
Quote: proving once again that in the warped universe of techno-hype, one plus one can equal zero.
In the techno universe, we do binary, and 1 plus 1 will always yield 0 with a 1 in the overflow bin.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"The NetPC? I still know people who own Web TV, and the market might have continued if Microsoft hadn't bought them out."
The main limitation on WebTV was the display. But as those improve WebTV will remain viable(HDTV). Mainly because a lot of people don't want to deal with the complexity and headache of a PC (that's why consoles do well)
"You'd be surprised how much technology comes from the porn industry."
In the past. Presently innovation is coming from elsewhere.
I'd say Windows ME is pretty high up there. While BOB was dead in the water from the get go, Windows ME just took a little while longer to die.
Yeah, I'm a little miffed about that. The PCjr was the first home computer my family had and we had a blast with it. Some of the points in the article are a bit unfair; the wireless keyboard wasn't the only option, we had a wired one with perfectly normal keys. Some of the software was on the bizarre cartridges but most came on perfectly normal 5.25" floppy disks (including the original King's Quest, originally written specifically for the PCjr). Sure, it didn't have a hard drive, but that wasn't very unusual at the time, and is perfectly understandable since it was intended as affordable system.
For a computer of the time it had unusually good video and audio capacity (okay, so it was basically 4 channels of PC speaker. Still, that was better than most). There was a ton of good software for it. It came with BASIC in the system ROM (me and my brother cut our teeth transcribing games from Family Computer magazine). If it weren't for the PCjr, I would be undoubtably be a different person today.
CmdrTaco's wedding night. That limp-wristed, limp-dicked fag took half a dozen viagra and still couldn't get it up.
I think the recent test flight of the new F22 Raptors as previously reported on Slashdot: Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight is all one needs to point out when discussing how successful the Y2K effort was.
It was as big a flop as DAT, only better. I suppose the incredibly cheap price of blank CD media can be held responsible for both these failures...
Please take it off the list before you make me cry.
Sincerely,
Every stupid Apple user (aka Steve Job's buttboys)
Y2K was not a bug. It was the fact that the software was used out of spec. The programs that would have had a problem with Y2k were never designed to be used past the year 2000. That was the point. Saying that Y2K was a bug is exactly the same as saying all of our software now suffers from the Y10K bug. The Y2K problem was usually created because the software lasted longer than expected. It's usually considered good when a product lasts longer than expected.
Now, you could argue that choosing a 2 digit year was a bad design decision, but the reality is that every product draws a line where they expect their product to fail, and decide that making the product even more robust just doesn't justify the cost.
What this article demonstrates most clearly is that the writer knows little about many of the items on the list. OS/2 was not without problems, but it got more things right than wrong, and saved my butt on a major project that was causing Win3.11 to crash in a heartbeat. DAT, as has been noted, was not a flop, but lost its shot at commercial (consumer) success because of the greed of the RIAA, and the stupidity of politicians. And so it goes. Many other comments have pointed out the errors in other topics. The real bottom line is that when you don't know the history, and don't do the research, you can write pretty silly stuff.
--- Bill
Surprised nobody's mentioned Windows Vista yet.
It's bound to be a bigger flop than Windows ME....
Some of the loudest hype has been for DRM, which is a major ongoing flop. It required US legislation (DMCA) just to artificially prolong the flop.
Tag story slashdot.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
This had to be one of the biggest flops in history. Essentially a LP record that played movies they started to degrade after the first few playings and were never that good to begin with. RCA lost something like 60 million on that turkey and today it's all but forgotten.
It got Bill Gates laid, and a wife. That, alone, was worth the cost of development.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
My first job out of school. Very cool place. Their polling system consisted of a stack of Data General Nova single board computers, each responsible for polling one supertrunk. They were supervised by a Data General Eclipse (the polling system), which had aggregate responsibility for the entire system.
There was a separate Eclipse, the "Studio System", which used a high speed interprocessor bus to move polling data to and from the polling system.
I wrote several of the studio system's technical scripts, which needed to be synchronized with the TV shows.
QUBE flopped as a technology due mostly to the fact that people are (and were in the late 70's) in the habit of being couch potatoes, rather than interacting through a rather stilted 2-way system.
QUBE gave two-way cable communications hardware people some pretty good practice in how to run signals both ways through a hierarchical network. Eventually, (with huge improvements, etc.) it led to today's cable modems.
A cute cultural story: The two-way boxes were designed by Pioneer Electronics (the stereo folks) in Japan. The Japanese engineers had absolutely no idea how quickly Americans would learn to hack the boxes to watch pay-per-view premium content without the box reporting that they had selected premium channels. It turns out that the box was designed to detect channel change events and track the changes, rather than reporting the channel that was currently selected for viewing. The result was that as soon as someone discovered how to disable the change detection logic (with a paper clip), they started watching premium content for free.
The business management folks had me write a program that statistically analyzed premium purchasing habits, noting (for example) when a given customer transitioned from several months of reasonable amount of premium content, to absolutely zero premium viewing. The program was called "zerobill". Naturally, its capabilities grew in various ways to track a whole range of statistics about viewing habits during the next few years. Eventually, zerobill became *the report* that every manager wanted to see, every morning without fail. I had some *exceptionally early* mornings caused by various bugs and vicissitudes in the database.
Phone rings...
Me: (knowing damn well what was coming next) Hello?
Night operator: "Daily batch died."
Me: "and..."
Night operator: "Not sure, it looks like an error."
Me: "Did it leave a suicide note, or was it just shot in the head?"
et cetera...
My best friend and I were not scheduled the evening of the Rundgren concert, and we had a *kickass* time at the concert, including a little while backstage. It was a great time and place to be a young software geek, mixing television and technology.
During the late 1980's, Radio Shack declared that they were creating the first writeable CD. Called THOR-CD, they were a couple years before CD-R of any kind, and there was a whirlwind of press. Years went by, no product ever arrived.
m l
Read more here: http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/thorcd88.ht
Design for Use, not Construction!
What, no CueCat?!
(Or even a nod to its sad predecessor, the Cauzin Softstrip?)
A few years later, Apple really got the Newton right, but nobody noticed -- everyone had had too much fun making jokes about the earlier models. I can't think of any other 7-year-old tech device that's still amazing & useful...
"Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years."
Look up "Paper trail". It's easier in this digital age to fake things than it is in the analog world.
Anybody believe that Sony has a pvp flagged lvl 30's chance in Stranglethorn Vale's of not making the flop of the century?
"within five years it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America" - Bill Gates 2001
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Love how they mention push tech and yet they have an RSS feed on their site.
DivX was a bad idea done poorly.
DivX the codec, now that's a different smoke...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I nominate the CueCat.
And the MiniDisc.
And any of Iomega's proprietary formats: Zip, Jaz, Clik! (aka PocketZip), REV, etc.
it generated both nick and mtv (which, hate them if you will are media juggernauts), as well as on-demand (the pay-per-view most americans get in their home).
that's pretty successful if you ask me...
The Dreamcast... was seriously injuried... but the soul still burns.
Nothing will ever be as big a flop as ME. I hear Bill Gates still wakes up in a cold sweat screaming "ME"! Remember the ads where Microsoft was actually boasting that XP didn't crash as much as ME? I doubt Microsoft would ever let another debacle like ME happen again. I think they learned their lesson there.
Well, although it would never appear in a list like this because it's just too obscure, if you're an audio geek, one of the biggest early-digital flops was the DBX Model 700. (Full disclosure: I wrote the linked WP article.)
It was similar to the Sony PCM F1 in function -- basically a box without any moving parts, that took an audio signal at one end, and put out a composite video signal at the other that you recorded using a VCR. But rather than using PCM recording, it used a system that's a lot more like SACD. It was a very high sample rate (~600 kHz) but with one-bit samples; each sample basically was a "shift up" or "shift down" relative to the last sample. There's a lot more to it than that, but in essence it was digital recording but without many of the downsides to early PCM: the need for "brickwall" filters to eliminate high frequencies, the hard clipping, etc. It was a digital recorder for people who had cut their teeth on analog tape, and it sounded really, really good.
Unfortunately it was much more complex and expensive than PCM, and the rise of CDs as a format was the nail in its coffin (it made a great mixdown format if you were going to vinyl, though, and they even had a special add-on for it that let it interface directly to a vinyl-cutting lathe, to compensate for the fact that you can't 'undercrank' a digital tape directly). But in terms of cool 80s audio technology, IMO it stands alone.
As a plus, it has the coolest switchable peak-reading LED meters on the front of it. I keep one in my rack just for that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now where's Vista? Ought to be top of the list, Windows ME should be second.
Dipping across the Atlantic, the Sinclair C5 electric car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 was not only a flop but a product of unrivalled ridicule. Unrivalled, except maybe for the Segue. Yes, I know some postal works, police and airport employees use them with gusto - but the city-transforming personal transportation vehicle of the future it is not.
Bob was, however by far the most innovative UI MS ever produced. It just innovated in a direction that nobody wanted to go!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The first thing that came to mind for me was the Sony MiniDisk. For a while in the late 90's all I remember is late-nite and weekend infomercials for the Sony MiniDisk. I waited forever for that thing to take off. It was apparently another attempt to succede the audio tape but I feel its a way better flop than DAT because I've actually seen DAT.
I bought one of the IBM Jrs in 1984. It was the first computer that I personally owned and for $1,000, IIRC, it was a bargain with a 14" color monitor. And yes, for that price it didn't have a hard drive, and was not expandable or customizable, but it ran Flight Simulator and Lotus 123 very well off 5 1/4" floppies thank you very much. In those heady years, after coming off of Apple IIs, it was a joy and wonder to say "I have an IBM computer in my home!".
When the SEC and various stock exchanges had to take a serious look at the Y2K bug, they also put some procedures in place, should the bug rear it's ugly head. As a result, the NYSE and other exchanges were prepared, in part, for 9/11. Some surviving dot-coms were forced into early retirement and a lot of other companies lost a loads of value but it could have been a whole lot worse had those procedural changes not been implemented.
It ran Word Perfect, 123, TurboC, MathCAD, a slew of various BBS programs and games. It's what I used for a computer in high school and college. It was cheap for an IBM compatible machine at the time. While most people bitch and moan about how terrible the 'chiclet' keyboard was, they forget that it didn't take IBM too long to ditch it and replace it with a decent one. IIRC, it was about the same size and feel as the "Happy Hacker" keyboards that used to advertise on /. a few years ago.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
This was the Next Big Thing in the early 80s, aimed at the niche currently occupied by flash memory - non-volatile, midway between RAM and disk in terms of speed and price. Companies like Texas Instruments and Intel sunk large quantities of money into R&D. Few products got to market and those that did faded very quickly. Basically hard drives just caught up in speed but at much lower price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
I do wonder if, had the technology been a few years earlier, whether it could have carved out a niche. If it were shipping in large volume, could the correspondingly high R&D spend have kept it competitive? In an alternate history, could we be using (orders of magnitude improved) bubble memory today instead of flash?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I am soooooo fucking tired of hearing people say that Y2K was a "flop" of some kind. Ya, the world didn't grind to a halt, but that's NOT because there wasn't a HUGE NUMBER of VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS. It's because a HUGE NUMBER OF MAN-HOURS WERE SPENT making sure the problems were fixed on time.
I personally tested systems that simply FUCKING BARFED when the date rolled over. Entire systems. Important systems. In some cases they actually had to be REPLACED because it wasn't possible to fix the problems.
So don't ridicule the hype that preceeded Y2K. Without the hype many PHB's would not have approved funding for the testing, fixing and replacements that ensured your sorry ass didn't get stuck in an elevator or a traffic jam or whatever.
Not the one that's around now, but the first one from back in 1994. The Internet was just starting to take off, and Microsoft wanted to kill it. The Microsoft Network was a non-TCP/IP non-Internet network that was supposed to be a Microsoft controlled version of the internet. I saw a presentation on it by some Microsoft manager back in 1994/1995 at some Washington Software Association event. They did a demonstration of an "MSN-brower" connecting to an "MSN-site" to view some "MSN-pages" and buy some toner cartridges. Supposedly it was real, but who knows.... Someone asked if Browser X (that would be Netscape) could use the Microsoft Network, and the answer was "No, only Microsoft will be able to create software for the Microsoft Network." I predicted it would be an utter failure, and it was. Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out a paper bag, much less out innovate everyone on the Internet. Microsoft's thinking was that there was nothing else one could want with the Internet but one store where you could buy toner cartidges.
The idea of an affordable home pc may live on but it was done before the PCJr and more successfully (Commodore 64, Apple II, etc.). In that sense the PCJr was still a flop.
That's the biggest flop of all... well I guess it did make money. Maybe making money is a flop, because I'd much rather use an Apple Lisa than AOL!
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Only the newer CF mini-recorders could obsolete MiniDisc. Great for recording audio for podcasts. Yeah, it's lossy and ATRAC and you can't really get digital data off the discs without major hassle (the analog hole is your friend) but they were great and fit in your pocket.
Now with CF media getting cheap, and CF mini-recorders that are all too happy to move audio data at USB2 speed to your computer, whether it's a Mac or a PC, it's almost time for me to retire my beloved little MD "Walkman."
Anyone want to buy some unused, still in the wrapper MD media?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Look, Mrs Gates... Your son can fight his own battles. He plays it pretty rough in debate too.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Are you kidding me? That Circuit City disaster was fantastic. I was able to pick up a really good DVD player really, really cheap because it had DIVX support and they were end-of-lifing the product due to lack of sales. It was like $50 at a time when DVD players were still $200 or so.
Although Iridium failed commercially, it's not quite fair to call it a flop. The military makes extensive use of Iridium phones. Sea-faring vessels, aircrew, ground forces, you name it. In many cases, Iridium phones are replacing medium- and long-range radio communications altogether. I've no idea what the phones or service cost. But for what civilian companies usually charge the government for well, anything, I'm sure it's more than enough to keep Iridium afloat for a good long time.
Also the external Iridium antennas look like dildos.
Just imagine: a virtual reality suit, with helmet and gloves and everything, pluged into Second Life environment. I admit, the fly effect will be hard to reproduce, but I still think that VR and MMORPG can be a huge succes, if the price for the equipment will be not higher than 400-500$. Who will need Wii anymore?
Plus:
1. many users 2. many items sold
3. PROFIT!!1!
4. cheaper equipment
5. GOTO 1
Bill Gates, was that you who modded me down?
This has to be one of the most poorly concieved lists I've ever seen. Most of the tech listed actually /revolutionised/ the PC world as we know it! OS/2 was HUGE in it's day! Hardly a flop! And alot of major financial institutions still rely on it. Hell, your nearest ATM probably still uses it! And I have plenty of customers using windows mobile who keep saying 'Boy I wish this was a Newton, those things just worked! This windows mobile is CRAP!'. And the dreamcast? How was it a flop? Because it didn't sell quite as many units as the psx did? I know heaps of people with dreamcasts and they're still using them. This list should be renamed 'The Top 21 Techs that revolutionised your world but your mum and dad don't talk about at the dinner table' because thats the general feeling I'm getting from reading this list. Clearly written by someone who either was not present for the tech's hayday (os/2, newton) or is simply discounting the tech because it's not visible in mainstream media. Tell paypal that internet currency is a flop. Tell your bank that OS/2 never took off. Tell your counterstrike and WoW addicted children that virtual reality fizzled out and died. Tell all your pissed off blackberry and windows mobile clients that the newton is how a pda should /not/ be done. This list is entirely baseless and inaccurate.
I can't believe that the CueCat hasn't been mentioned yet. It was such a complete flop on so many levels.
This comes full circle for me.
I did a little contract work (for bongo bucks, way back when) for a man who once worked with Tracy Kidder, who wrote "The Soul of a New Machine", which was about the R&D process behind the Data General Eclipse, used in the QUBE project, launched in Columbus, Ohio, where a COBOL programmer declined to subscribe to it.
I am that programmer's nephew.
"The less you know about home computers, the more you'll want the new IBM PS/1."
Classic.
KeS
The Apple Lisa was a very nice machine, with a multitasking operating system, 1MB of protected-mode memory, a hard disk, and some decent applications. You could get work done on a Lisa. It just cost too much.
The original Macintosh, with 128K of RAM, one floppy, no hard drive, no memory protection, and a single-tasking operating system, was really an expensive toy. I've actually used one, and it wasn't fun. Most of the time you either waited for the machine or were swapping diskettes.
Not until the Macintosh was built up to Lisa levels of hardware was it useful. Once it got 512K, a hard drive, and the LaserWriter, it was a useful machine for designers. But that was several years later. The state of the art in hardware just wasn't up to a useful GUI machine at an affordable price until about 1985-1986.
(Bear in mind that, well before the Mac launched, you could buy a Sun UNIX workstation with a 19-inch display and networking for about $20K. And Sun wasn't even the first; Apollo shipped even earlier. The problem was getting the cost down.)
Why don't you use a moderate language: you don't have a idea to explain?
:) Look my Video Divertenti
Is that why there's still a competative scene for marvel vs capcom 2 on the Dreamcast?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The shameless Y2K hype wasn't a flop, it was a major success. Yes, there were some problems too, but the hype machine went into overdrive and a whole horde of snake oil vendors used it to _invent_ extra dangers, and line their pockets at the expense of gullible idiots. I've seen such snake oil ranging from comically absurd (power cables or speakers sold as Y2K ready) to outright dangerous (miracle cure cards that would automagically make all your programs Y2K ready... never mind that the field in the database is still only 2 digits). And then there were the consultants, who happily invented dangers only they saw, and only they could protect you from, much like the shamans of old protecting the tribe from invisible evil spirits.
Let's also say another thing: the Y2K problem was fairly trivial to diagnose way before 2000 anyway. Just turn your date forwards and there you go, you can know whether your computer has a problem. Also most companies which stored dates at all, had to generate some kind of projections for the whole year, or store info about loans in their database, or whatever. E.g., everyone who took or gave a 5 year loan in 1995 already knew whether or not they have a Y2K problem there.
Most had patched it already, but then the idiot PHB went and bought some snake-oil from the nice salesman or consultant anyway. Just because the whole horde of con artists, and the media too, were relentlessly spewing absurd doomsday scenarios in which the sky is falling and even your power cable will stop working if you don't buy the magical snake oil.
Basically tons of money went on replacing perfectly good computers and perfectly good programs, not because they actually had a problem, but because some lying marketroid fed some doomsday story to an idiot CEO. Yes, there were some problems, no doubt, but what I'm saying is that a helluva lot of spending was on stuff that _didn't_.
The whole thing had an effect on the whole industry -- other than the snake oil vendors themselves, of course -- comparable to the Hiroshima bomb or the Great Depression. It siphoned so much money from companies, some which didn't even _have_ a problem, that it created the post-2000 IT spending crash and basically a destructive deflation. The fact that 7 years later we still have a scramble to move to the cheapest untrained monkeys, offshore if possible, and that "reducing costs" is the battle cry du jour even if it means shooting yourself in the foot to save on shoe costs, is just a continuation of that spending crash.
Even omitting the effects of the overspending in '99 itself (which a lot of companies couldn't really afford), the magic of basing each year's budget on the previous year's spending means we're _still_ seeing the ripples. Suddenly in 2000 there were no more computers to buy, no programs to upgrade, etc. That alone was the kiss of death for many honest vendors. (The con artists had already lined their pockets in '99 and moved to some other con scheme.) But then 2001 came along, and its budget was based on the "nothing more to buy" spending of 2000. Suddenly you had a budget of two beans and a peanut for 2001. And the budget of 2002 was based on that. And so on. Many are still struggling to get out of _that_ trap.
But, yeah, for the snake oil vendors and con artists, I must say, Y2K was a major success. Never before has a hype campaign sold so much useless and unneeded snake oil. Hats off, and all respect.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I has given you your Prezident.... [nuf said]
I've owned dozens of PC's over the years. Depending on how you count, I have seven to ten working machines now. The only 1980's era machine I have that still works is my PCjr. By today's standards its a dinosaur, but its still one of very machines ever made that you could spell coke on without shorting out the keyboard. I didn't get it for me. I got for my kids. My oldest, now a successful programmer, was around 12 at the time, and it was a great machine for him. It had a nice selection of computer games, a working programming environment that worked well for kids, and a five and a quarter inch disk drive (the only one I have that still works) that you could run programs from and load and save files from. Journalists labeled the PCjr a flop the first day they saw it, and the label stuck, but it was still one of the best selling machines, in unit volumes, of the 1980s. The machine was an obvious flop for journalists because it wasn't designed for them. They wanted a cheap machine they could write on, but the PCjr was designed for that. It was intended to be a cross between a computer and a video game console that would be attractive to children and families, and by that standard (it sold well into that marketplace) it was very successful. Sadly, the flop label is probably indelible at this point. But the flop label is mere perception. The reality is that it was a good machine for its intended market that sold extremely well, especially given the poor reviews it was given from day one.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Let's play the clean-up game on Slashdot too:
I suppose his mother also qualifies as a quarry Beaver, or a washing machine.
Digital Audio Tape wasn't a flop. Althou it never made it into consumer space, it was and still is used extensively in music production. It is very efficient storage, archival and transport media.
Today ofcourse everything is moved around on DVD's, through FTP or other "consumer grade" medias, because they are as bit-perfect-copies as anything. Back in the 90's it was the standard to move the tracks from reels to DAT's for transportation from recording studio to the mixing/mastering studio. And then from there to CD plant for press mastering.
DAT's also have the advantage of magnetic media. It doesn't deteriorate as fast as optical media. (I'm going off topic here but give me some slack.) For example, I never reuse my MiniDV video tapes. I just rip to harddrive what I expect to use in near future and stash the original to my safe box in a bank vault -- A humidity controlled, cool, dark place. This way, I expect to be able to access the originals for decades to come.
Bot Assisted Blogging
This is when ignorance writes newspapers. One of my colleagues was handling the command centre of a bank when the date change took place, and despite the many man hours they still had to drop emergency code into machines overnight (a literal nightmare - try doing dev/test/re-test/QA and upgrade all one after the other..
Insert
I worked for a consultancy firm which had (apparently) been in IT consultancy for years. Though at the time, 99% of its business was Y2K consultancy - basically, going to clients' offices and auditing their PCs for Year 2000 compliance.
Understand that at the time I wasn't long out of school and had zero real-world IT experience.
This consultancy had bought a proprietary software package which went on a floppy and could be operated by a monkey. The idea was you booted the PC from the floppy, the software checked the clock on the PC would happily support the year 2000 and we put a sticker on the front to confirm this.
In order to earn our money, we also installed a Windows '95 patch for y2k and ran a piece of software which audited what software was installed and wrote the results to another floppy. We'd then return these floppies to the office where some other piece of software would turn them into a report to go to the client.
In a team of 3 of us, we could probably do about 80-90 PCs each per day, assuming they were all easy to get to. In about a month or so of doing this, I think I saw about a dozen PCs which "apparently" had problems. I later found that IBM's original specifications for the PC accounted for the Y2K problem, so the chances of finding something with a hardware issue were pretty slim.
The more alert amongst you will have noticed that I haven't said anything about the real business-critical stuff. The software which runs on, say, a mainframe or midrange Unix system, is accessed via telnet (or, if you're lucky these days, SSH) and you won't learn a damn thing about by auditing client PCs. Remember this is late 1998, Windows was still just finding its feet in the server room and such applications were pretty common. There's a reason for I haven't mentioned it. We were under strict intstructions not to go near servers - apparently someone more qualified "would do them later", but I never saw any evidence of that. And seeing as we were charging by the day, you'd think they'd dedicate some time to that.
I have an upgraded PS/1 (6MB RAM in total, AWE32 soundcard, 3c509 NIC, and an extra ISA IDE controller which, unlike the native hard drive controller, is supported by BSD and Linux). It's still in use, and I run NetBSD 3.1 on it (dual boot with DOS 6.22). Everything except the keyboard works perfectly.
This 15 year old flop is able to run the latest version of a current operating system, in a time where a 3 year old computer is considered too old. Personally I think every coder should keep a machine like this (not necessarily a PS/1) in order to avoid thinking "it runs fast enough on my overclocked quad core Athlon64 so who could possibly complain about performance?"
I don't know about you but I certainly work in a paperless office. All communication is done by e-mail or phone. All documentation is on the intranet which I can access at the office or at home. I might occasionally print out a cryptic bit of code I can't get my head round but otherwise my printer is switched off.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
>Why don't you use a moderate language: you don't have a idea to explain?
WTF does this mean, please?
Digital Compact Cassette - same form factor as ye olde analogge cassettes so you could play them in a DCC player, but recorded digitally. Was supposed to be a consumer format, but never caught on as CDs dominated.
It wasn't all bad news though - the technology used to make the read/write heads found its way into beer making:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6121
mmmm beeeeeer.
"Perhaps worst of all, Bob's logo included a yellow smiley face for the "o" in the name. Bob eventually faded away, and even Microsoft executives agreed it had been a miserable failure." Do you know the french joke about Brigitte Bardot's new tatoo ?
The 'Greatest Artists' of the year are those who sell the most shit. Ergo and by definition and to the delight of the fanboys, Windows can never be considered a flop. Oh sure BoB and Clippy are 'flops' in the sense that Bill pushed them and we pushed back. But true to form, the haters crawl out of the slime to bash all things Apple whether or not they were good or bad but merely whether sheep and crustaceans bought a ton of it.
Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket are we STILL laughing at PCjr 23 years later? Most of you were still being conceived in the back of some nerd's mommy's car.
Y2K isn't a technology sound how it would make the list is beyond me.
I've still got my lovely BeBox happily purring away, but I would consider it definitely a viable member of the Flop list, alas ..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Heh. A cousin of mine had 'retired' from programming to stay at home and be a full time mother in 96. In 98 she was offered $100+/hr to go back to work fixing y2k bugs. Two years later, with the kids college funds fully funded, she pulled the kids out of day care and re-retired.
Best Slashdot Co
Unless something changes dramatically in the pricing model, I kind of expect to see Blue-Ray on this list one day. /side note: I worked for IBM's PC sales support when the PCjr came out and had one assigned to me for demos. The only thing cool about it was the wireless keyboard (but not the actual chicklet keyboard itself). The 45-pound transportable PC (like a heavy suitcase) was much cooler.
see the morons ? they buried their own product before it took off. one would think that the jerks feeding riaa would have taken a lesson from what these morons did.
Read radical news here
what about the following:?
- SONY Beta MAX tape
- SONY MiniDisk
- Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC)
- Atari Lynx
- SGI Intel based workstation running Windows
The Net PC will be back in a few years with google as your remote server.
The development platform for the original Mac was the Lisa so it's incorrect to say that the Mac came along and killed it.
Iridium makes for a nice, cheap, low-power source for industrial radiography. Cobalt lasts longer and has a bigger punch, but if you don't need to expose 3 feet of steel, iridium is far more cost effective.
Big business in NDT, but no where near the size of the military. Of course, our biggest customers are the military, followed by airlines and schools.
We'll see iridium around for a long time I think. And I love those silly looking antennas.
If so, please share with the slashdot community the companies that are past initial R&D on this, I've got some spare change I'd like to invest.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
When was the last time you saw someone carrying a PDA? :-)
I suspect that 10 years from now the PS3 will be on this list. It cost to much money and is losing out to the Wii.
I haven't read the article yet, so I don't know if its listed. Going to read it now.
It was supposed to replace floppys and become the new writable medium of choice. But then writeable cds came along at a much cheaper price. I was surprised that this wasn't listed as a flop.
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
The original Eclipse was a highly glorified Nova, both being 16-bit machines. The new machine that Tracy Kidder wrote about was actually the MV/8000 Eagle 32 bit system.
:-) ... give me a few months to afford it, I've been laid-off for several years) but when I compare my little Linux workstation to those *immense beasts*, I get back some of that old feeling that I used to have in my youth.
We (meaning the management at Warner-Amex Cable Communccations, Inc, A.K.A. WACCI) hired several D.G. systems guys around 1980/1981 to help grow the network, which was growing to include Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and a few other cities that I don't remember. We decided to run AOS on a few of the Eclipse C300's (upgraded with COBOL-supporting character instructions through microcode). We were introduced to AOS by some *very* cool D.G. guys from Massachusetts. At the ripe old age of 23, I was *enthralled* with AOS. We received some of the earliest MV/8000 Eagle systems that D.G. produced, and ran AOS/VS (AOS "virtual system") on them. In our view, these machines kicked Major Ass.
AOS and AOS/VS were architected to present a full (virtual) R/DOS machine environment to each of their processes, so all the organizations using INFOS, IDEA, etc. (D.G.'s "database" and online multiterminal system) could move forward into an AOS (16-bit) and AOS/VS (32-bit) environment with minimal hassle. So, for example, the tasks in a classical foreground/background Nova/Eclipse RDOS system were treated as tasks contained with the many processes running in the new AOS and AOS/VS systems.
The result was that AOS/VS gave us multithreaded technology in 1981. And we used it to great benefit to keep our online systems running as quickly as possible. (I was able to write an INFOS-table caching subsystem that doubled the online capacity of each MV/8000 system, in about 1000 lines of PL/I).
The architecture of AOS and AOS/VS were derived from MULTICS, and in my opinion were very successful in achieving their goals. It would be 10 years before the UNIX world would catch up, when Sun Microsystems brought in their lightweight process technology. (I don't know whether other developers had threads going, it's merely that my experience was with Sun.)
Those machines were comparative monsters for us, with 4 Mbyte RAM, 700 Mbyte disk, and processors based on AMD bit-slice technology. (Anyone remember the AMD 29xx bit-slice processor building blocks? 4 bits of ALU per chip, supported by carry lookahead; with creative support from the diskette-loaded microcode, these machines were *wonderful* to work with.)
All this stuff reminds me that this is the same AMD that eventually built the Athlon X64 in my 3-year-old inexpensive workstation. It has 2 Gbytes of RAM, 500 gbytes of disk, running Linux. Not dual-core (yet
...didn't flop. It was repurposed and renamed MMORPG. The huge revelation was that people (today, at least) don't want to work in virtual spaces, they want to play in them. As far as tomorrow goes, who knows?
So, instead of Gibson's cyberspace, we have WoW, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, etc, etc, etc.
My memory must be faulty.
...and Clippy, and the stupid search dog... will Microsoft fucking GROW UP already?
DAT
I distinctly remember that the problem with home DAT was that the music industry dictated a rediculously low sampling rate (22khz, 1/2 CD IIRC) that made digital tape sound worse than cassette. And cassette's problem wasn't that it sounded bad, but that it needed rediculously expensive equipment to sound good.
DIVX
IIRC (and I must not as my memory doesn't match the writer's memory) the DIVX DVDs cost seven to ten bucks, while a DVD rental was/is two or three. Plus they sold them as your buying something, and it seemed stupid to "buy" a movie that you could only watch for 2 days that cost three times what a rental was.
Dot bombs
No, it is NOT hard not to "not see them as one entity". That's just stupid. "Dot bombs" aren't "a" tech failure, they were multiple BUSINESS failures.
E Books
"...are still being developed." Perhaps reports of their death are, to misquote Clemons, "greatly exagerated?" It's a little early to judge these dead; if someone does them right they could work. DRM isn't the way, though.
Microsoft Bob
The paperless office
The Christian Science Monitor is wrong. They were talking about it in the middle 1980s, it was coming "any day now", much like pot legalization a decade earlier.
Smart appliances
The article and the press at the time always gave the internet fridge (which was a tech failure) as THE example, but I have plenty of "smart" gadgets. My TV shuts itself off after a preset time I tell it; my thermostat warms the house before I get up; my car "knows" when to turn on the headlights and locks the doors when you go faster than 15mph; there are vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that run themselves! The list of "smart" gadgets that AREN'T flops is endless and getting longer. But the "smart refrigerator" is and was a stupid idea.
Virtual reality
"Or maybe virtual reality worlds were less real and compelling than our own imaginations" Two words: second life. Two more: Sim City. Need a few more pairs?
Speech recognition
I can dial my daughter on my Razr by saying her name, and there are voicemail syetems that use it. Speech recognition didn't flop, electronic dictation did.
TFA's author seems to be a big tech failure IYAM. And the biggest tech failure of all? The "Star Wars" missle defense system, billion$ poured down a rat hole.
-mcgrew
DAT had great promise and if it was put in the regular development cycle we'd have them in our cars to this day. Starting with Sheet Music way back when, every consumer friendly innovation was seen to gore somebody's ox and take money from somebody. And as with every single consumer electronic device to come out, it was fought against and successfully destroyed until it had so much DRM and crap on it that it was useless. Kind of like the Blue Ray and HD DVD systems now. I never did get a DAT player, I wanted one but the mortal danger of stopping someone being able to make a clearer bootleg tape of a Grateful Dead concert was more important.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
1&1 is inept at best, crooked at worst. I signed on with them when they were doing their 2-year free hosting promotion. Used their name servers, registered my domain name through them (paying for this service), and hosted my website there. It was a site that died a quick and forgettable death, and I stopped performing any maintenance on it about eight or nine months after putting it up.
Imagine my surprise when, eleven months after signing on with them, I got a creditor nastygram railing at me about my unpaid hosting bills. Getting that off my credit report was a cast iron bitch. Then, when I (oddly) decided that I didn't want them as my registrar, trying to force them to release my domain name was another epic struggle.
Notably, the guy I lived with at the time who also signed up with them after we heard about the promotion went through exactly the same fight I did to clear his credit report and recover his domain name. Two data points aren't exactly conclusive, but there are enough hosting companies out there that I have no reason to use or recommend 1&1, and enough reason to warn other people off of them.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
What kind of tech flop list doesn't include good old Itanic?
Maybe next time we can have a list of all the meaningless lists that keep showing up on Slashdot. These "list" stories are the journalistic equivalent of Twitter: Stimulation without substance.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
True story: Last night I decided to hook up an old Betamax (does that deserve to be on the list too? Too soon?) and popped in a tape of the Bears-Patriots Superbowl game. And the first commercial, as if on queue, was an IBM ad for some educational program called "Writing to Read" that showed kids using the software on PCjrs. It got me thinking that the PCjr was just badly used...with the cartridges and the floppy, it could have been a great educational tool or vertical-market appliance where the software was on the cart, and you could put in a floppy (5.25!) for your data or whatever. No hard disk issues, no re-installation of the machine went belly-up, and presumably immune to jokers trying to mess with it.
The most telling part of the commercial, though, was at the end, where the announcer said that if you wanted more information, please write to the address below. In this Internet age, you get so used to having a URL slapped on everything, when you see a commercial, even though you *know* it's 6 years before the web was even invented, it's still a shock.
Newton wasn't ahead of its time.
Newton was mostly very badly designed crap.
"Ahead of its time" usually means "people weren't ready for it".
Whereas technically what killed the Newton was :
- ridiculously huge and heavy
- outrageously expensive
- bad battery life
- ergonomic aspects like :
* handwriting recognition is something hard, specially given the CPU power available at that form factor
* a handheld device isn't a desktop computer. user expect quick and short task oriented usage. Not firing up MS-Office and waiting it to boot.
This are the exact key point that made successful both Palm and Psion :
they both made device that were smaller and more pocketable, could run for a long time on AA batteries, had at least some low entry price models in the range, used simplier input methods (keyboard, or easy to recognize/fast to draw 1-stroke graffiti) and fast response time (push the date button, look for what you need on the screen, turn it back off).
And this also what is alienating me with Windows-based pocket PC :
a PDA shouldn't cost you as much a laptop, and a Windows OS has nothing to do on a PDA.
the only thing that could have save newtons is if apple decided to build smaller, more pocketable unit with better battery life, and did ditch the input method for something faster and more accurate.
Basically, they should have built a palm.
For the other products I agree with you, they were nice product, that just lacked the publicity needed to launch them into the market, or got crushed by competition with bigger war chests (OS2 vs. WinNT, DreamCast vs. PS2).
Or some other products just persisted in niche market (DAT, VR, DreamCast motheroards in Sega Naomi arcade cabinets)
But with the Newton, the situation is just different : Apple just did it wrong. They weren't crushed by any competition : there wasn't any in the begining. They just produced some cool-looking gadget without thinking if the gadget would actually be practical once produced. The Palm inventor tells a story how he purposedly built mockups in 1:1 scale just to see if they could actually be pocketable.
Fortunately, Apple did his homework trying to make an usable device when creating the iPod, its wheel has been seen as a good improvement when compared to interfaces of concurrent models of that time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
We can count:
- NeXT
- BeBOX
The reasons that Y2K could be considered a joke is that, the urban legends that were repported by news outlets at that time were that, once 2000 arrived, the end of world would happen, with planes crashing, nuclear centrals blowing up and such.
Whereas, most of the sensitive code tends to either not be calendar-sensitive, or use some more stable representation of time (unix epoch, to give an exemple) because there are way to much problems with date-as-string format (like day time savings create both holes and duplicate entries).
Plane didn't crash because a plane reactor doesn't need a calendar to fly (only kersone) and on ground, an analog radar image can also be processed visually be the operator if the computer fails for some obscure reason.
Nuclear centrals didn't blow because their time-dependent routine use robust time format.
The code affected by the bug is legacy code which date back several decades. Which already tended to be rare (and not some much the case in critical applications). Or usually crappy, badly written software. The kind that ends up on the Daily WTF. This is very common in corporation. Often didn't get patched anyway (because CEOs were occupied stock-piling food provision in case of global disaster ?) and thus ensured public embarassement (like date being displayed as 19100-01-01). But sledom was in control of critical stuff. Without patching, more company may have had difficulties and maybe even go bankrupt. But those companies will nonetheless still die when the dot-com bubble bursted or when the web2.0 buble will burst. With stories ending up on website for bringing laughs and lessons to fellow programmers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why did the Paperless Office make the list? I honestly believe that the reason we haven't seen it is more because it hasn't happened yet, not because it won't happen. The transition to paperless is happening, but it takes a change in the way people think to accept it.
Consider this; I am now 34... that means that my generation were the first to have a computer at home that was realistic and usable. I was on the tail end of that group that first used email to communicate, and now I use IM for many of my person-to-person communications.
What does all this have to do with the paperless office? Well, consider that I'm 34. Given average time in college these days, that means my peers of the same age have been in the workplace for an average of 11 years. However, people of my peer group are also the "tweens"... those who are bridging the gap between the technological "old days" and the "technorati". Most people at most corporations today are also older than me; the baby boom was long over by the time I was born... so most of the people who make decisions, review documents and so forth are from a generation who are comfortable with paper and relatively uncomfortable with the idea of digital media. As a result, stuff gets printed out.
However, even I am starting to see a transition and shift. In dealing with my age-peers and those younger than me starting up in corporate life... fewer and fewer of these people are using paper. They don't receive physical mail, the use email (my physical mail box gathers dust most of the time, too). They don't typically use the phone for quick answers... I get IM much more frequently than I get a phone call. When dealing with them I print nothing.
I recently upgraded my laptop to Windows Vista as part of the test group here at the company I work at. I ran Vista for two months, dealing with my peers, my colleagues and just generally getting my work done. Only yesterday for the first time did I actually connect to a printer to print something off... and even that was for a meeting with older staff members. Most of my peers and colleagues carry smart devices, PDAs or smartphones on which the write notes, keep documents they need to refer to and so forth.
The paperless office didn't die... and it didn't fail. It takes time to make a huge change like that, and the technology to make it happen didn't really exist until recently. To say in the '60s that the paperless office would be upon us by 2000 was optimistic... but that doesn't mean to say it's not going to happen at all. I personally believe it's happening all around us, and people like myself and my current peers who will one day be in charge are the ones driving this change.
I wouldn't be surprised to see in another 10 years more of my peers in higher management positions, and a lot less paper in the boardroom.
I knew DIVX wouldn't fly from the first time I heard the pitch.
You want me to buy hardware that lets me play these DVDesque discs, which will stop working after two days? I couldn't believe that anyone would buy into this scheme when the alternatives were:
1) Rent movies from a video store that work on your existing hardware (most likely VCR at the time)
2) Invest in a DVD Player since everyone knew that was the next thing (okay everyone except a few diehard LaserDisc fans) and buy the movie
People said that DIVX was comparable in price to movie rentals, but it wasn't. I remember looking at it and thinking that it was a little more expensive even if you ignored the need to buy new hardware.
Most importantly, though, it just felt wrong to me. Buying hardware that was designed to allow you to watch a movie for two days and then disable the disc just felt invasive to me. It felt like I was buying something (since I didn't have to return anything), but that the item I was buying was intentionally made defective.
Commodore Plus/4 of 1984.
/. article on the most intelligent games the other day and didn't it seem like Galactic Civilizations won? GC and GC2: originally native OS/2 -- although the OS/2 community seems to have so alienated Brad Wardell he'll hardly admit that himself these days.
I must have been one of the few who purchased one retail in about the three months they were released before Jack Trammell left and it was yanked. I only saw Lisa's sold in the surplus junk catalogs of the time like C.O.M.B. once. but it seemed there were enough Plus/4's and programs to sell surplus for YEARS. That alone should be a factor to get them in the top 21. I believe a bunch of them were purchased by Belgium or the Netherlands to give away to the deaf.
The first, and as far as I remember only, 64K computer to include a complete office suite of integrated word processing, spreadsheet, database and graphing on ROM! Of course, it was so buggy you had to run the patched floppy anyway. And it was so weak you would have wanted to buy the individual program cartridges of real programs for anything serious. But the real deal breaker was that they moved the video API so virtually no game or serious Commodore 64 program was compatible with it. Yes, they put out a computer that was in competition with and incompatible with their own other computer which happened to be the most popular computer in the world at the time.
The fact that it also included a built-in assembler/dissassembler was sort of cool because I could spend time trying to hack C64 programs to run on the Plus/4 and learned a lot. But not exactly a consumer selling point.
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On another front, there is always OS/2 to bash but wasn't there a
OS/2 Warp came out almost a year before Win95, was far cooler, and although NT 4.0s NTFS certainly tromped HPFS I would argue that OS/2 was a lovely user experience and I was running it with DSL, a pre-1.0 Mozilla and happily streaming mp3s in the background into 2001.
Paperless Office: I already wrote a comment on this http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=229549&cid =18620943
Basically in summary, I think the paperless office is still coming. It's not there yet... it just takes time and takes people who are more comfortable with a keyboard and screen than with a pen and paper. I am probably one of the first generation of people in the workplace who are in this position, and more often than not the only reason I use paper is to work with senior management (who tend to be older).
As my generation ages, I feel that paperless will become more and more prevalent. Today's devices and computing capability in combination with digital signature technologies make paper irrelevant.
As I look around my cube, I see paper. However, I note with raised eyebrow that none of the paper in question has my handwriting on it... nor was it printed by me. Most of it is stuff from my management, post-it-notes stuck on my monitor by colleagues (mostly trying to get me to call them back) and printed materials from vendors. All my notes are taken on an HTC TyTN and sync'ed to my Outlook. Since I type them, I can copy and paste those notes into documents if I need to... I can drag them over to my other screen so I can have reference material up while I write a document in Word on my main screen. I then convert to PDF, attach to an email or IM and send it to my colleagues. I don't use paper unless I have to. I'd say 99% of my communications and work with colleagues and peers is electronic... the only time I have to use paper is when I have to work with senior management.
Like VR (I agree technology has yet to catch up to the promise) I believe the paperless office will come... and it's coming. The newest additions to the workforce are from a generation who never knew a household without a computer in it. That generation and the one before it (mine) will become the leaders of industry within a few short years... then we're going to start seeing a shift from "comfortable old paper" to something electronic. The form may have to change to be more "paper-like" in order to ease the transition for some even from my generation, but I seriously believe it will happen.
And for reference... I have run a small business at home for the last 10 years... I haven't owned a printer in 4 of those years.
What about the original Microsoft Access?
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No, it was nothing to do with databases, it was a serial communication package in the days of the modem. However, it flopped so badly, they eventually re-used the name to bury all traces of the failure.
It's the second entry at http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?query=microsoft+acces
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Electricity! I am not a crackpot!
0x7279727972797279
Yup.
Newton wasn't so much a 'flop', as it was starting to gain ground just as Steve Jobs came back and killed it.
DAT definitely *NOT* a flop. Digital Compact Cassette, yes. DAT, no. (DCC was the same shape as standard analog audiocassettes, and DCC players could play standard analog tapes. But it had the misfortune of coming out at the same time as MiniDisc, which was vastly superior. Unfortunately, confusion, followed by digital audio players such as the iPod helped keep MiniDisc from really taking off, either. Although MD wasn't a 'flop', either, as it has mostly taken over DATs position!)
DIVX: Definite flop.
Dot Coms: Well, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, many are still around, and doing quite well, so lumping them all together is unfair. But, yes, certainly MANY dot coms were flops.
E-Books haven't taken off yet. They are about where the Newton was when it was killed. They *COULD* take off, or they could flop. Only time will tell.
PCjr is a tough one. It wasn't *MEANT* to be a full featured computer. I knew quite a few people who had them, and we even had a couple at school. I find their complaint about lack of hard drive funny, since in 1984, almost no home computers had hard drives. (They compare it to the Apple II and C64, both of which were HD-less. Even the more expensive Macintosh didn't get an INTERNAL hard drive until 1987.)
Internet currency: Flop-o-rama. A silly idea from the outset.
Iridium is still alive, it just hasn't been as successful as was predicted. I wouldn't call that a flop, though.
Bob. Enough said. (Although many years after Bob's demise was already a done deal, I had a chance to play with a Bob-loaded computer, and thought it had potential. It was just WAAAAY too unstable.) Although the animated characters lived on through Windows XP as 'assistants'.
Net PC. Not so much a flop as a single company pushing for something that never happened.
Paperless office. BWAHAHAHAHA!!!! Intel was one of the big forces behind the 'paperless office', and I worked for them back in '99-2000. Our workgroup laser printer was constantly spitting out paper documents, because none of us could stand sifting through PDFs on our computer screens. One of the companies making a big push for it, and we were downing redwoods like they were candy. (Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration...)
Push: As the article itself mentions, push is still being used, it's just not as obvious as was originally though. (i.e. now it's just a 'behind the scenes' technology.)
Smart appliances: I dunno, my parents went to buy a new refrigerator last week, and there were multiple models with built in computers in the doors at the showroom. I've seen washing machines similarly equipped.
VR: As a mass-market thing, definitely a flop. Still used in certain industries, though.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's all hype and no substance.
I was working for sony music during the DAT revolution, and i can tell you about some of the backroom conversations held at there sales conferences.
Sony have always had an issue, they are one of the worlds largest copyright holders, and produce technology that circumvents copy protection.
This is most eveident by there refusal to produce an MP3 player, uptill very recently.
Basically at a conference with much fever pitched excitement dat was announced, and albums scheduled to be launched on this new digital format ( 48Khz , higher than CD ).
Then one year latter at the same conference they just dropped it.
The DAT player remained the staple for pro-audio studios for some time after..
CD's only happened when sony released that Philips would have enough clout to get some market share, and sony wanted a peice.
Of course at this stage CD-recordables were just a dream, where as DAT was re-recordable of the bat.
DAT was not a flop , but a sacrificial lamb, and a taste of things to come.
**ENTER RIAA**
-- email me @ 30,000 ft
My first "real" job was working for a government agency back in 1988 doing desktop and network support. There I got to use the following (all of which became obsolete or were pushed aside by other technologies)
- Epson Equity III+ 386-based computers (yes, Epson actually used to make PCs)
- IBM PS/2 486s with micro-channel architecture
- Novell Netware 3.12
- OS/2
- Tektronix wax transfer color printers ("toner" was in the form of special little wax crayons"
- Token ring network (w/ IBM hermaphroditic connectors)
- Lotus 123
- WordPerfect 4.2
While some of these weren't "flops" per se, they all did fall by the wayside eventually. However, even with this inauspicious start, I did learn a lot from these flops that has served me well ever since.
VR is here. It's called the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS.
GPL Deconstructed
I owned one of those machines. They actually did give a good picture, as good as the laser disks
(now would you consider laser video disks a flop today?) The only problem was that the disks were fragile and prone to skip after many playings. Also you had to replace the stylus in the machine after a while (I didn't have mine long enough to have to do this... the format went bust first). The disks sold for a fraction of what laser disks and vhs tapes went for (Kmart and Walmart hadn't yet discovered home video).
So I owned TWO failed video formats, CED and Laserdisk. (Anybody know how to fix a broken Sony laserdisk player with a stuck disk tray so I can copy the rest of my collection to DVD-R ?)
The C 16, 116 (same with rubber keys) and Plus/4 (w/ "faster" 1551 floppy drive?) were dumped for cheap in grocery stores here so I and many other kids eventually got to have their own little computers. Apparently the platform rose to similar necessity-born popularity over in Hungary where it was widely used in schools.
German company Kingsoft sold useful adds like an improved BASIC/screen editor and an 80 characters cartridge...
The Plus/4 wasn't so bad for the quasi-unambitious school kid. BASIC 3.5 had SOUND, CIRCLE, BOX, DO, LOOP and other "advanced" features that made it a more instantly gratifying learning platform....
Later on, Hungarian hackers built a SID-based soundcard... C 64 games were ported over and multimedia demos with colourful and/or vector graphics written. Quite intriguing if you never thought these things were possible. Though really it was largely the very low price that lead to some sort of mini-boom over here...
What happened to DAT (Digital Audio Tape) It has become a commonly used device for professional level audio recording. It neve caught on with consumers because they liked CDs better and consumers by definition don't make recordings. I think now that we have computers hard drives may have beaten out DAT but for a long time and maybe even still todat DAT is a common standard
While I've yet to have a poor experience with them, I updated my signature accordingly.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
and particularly 8 track tapes with quad. I think that it lasted in a 6 month time frame in 1973.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Oh I don't know? A proprietary network was a big success. It was called AOL. You may not like it, but it was a success, used by many people as a jumping point to the internet.
17% of 17,725 polled think Bob is the worst tech flop ever, beating out dot-bombs at 13% as of 12:30 MST today. I wonder how many people here have actually tried Bob? I did. Blech.
It was a bad instance of a bad interpretation of some very good research into user interfaces by Brenda Laurel. AFAIK, her research has never been put into production successfully. But then, the whole idea of analyzing computer-human interaction in terms of Aristotelian Poetics is a little over most PHB's heads.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'd say 99% of my communications and work with colleagues and peers is electronic... the only time I have to use paper is when I have to work with senior management.
Exactly, as percentage of exchange of information the "paperless" office is already here. It just so happens that the actual amount of paper we print is still pretty high in absolute terms. In relative terms it rounds down to zero: we moved from a world in which the majority of interoffice communication was on paper to one in which well below 1% is paper-based.
p.s. and no, these are not made up statistics, I actually researched them up.
I was being optimistic. Hoping that since MS has produced their big Hurrah, the Wow Starts Now, and ends about 2010 with Vienna SP1.
... something.
Apple will have delivered at least 2 more solid copies of OS X not counting this year's, Linux communities will have 3.5 years to do
Intel will have mainline Quad chips next year, AMD is due the year after that.
OS, Hardware, _____
I'm hoping by that point we can officially turn the corner of IT maturity, and let Apps have their day. 2010 is the symbolic timeline, not a business-school deadline. Use Winter Solstice 2012 if that makes you happier.
For stretchable values of Near-Future, VR is coming at the ultra-bleeding edge. I don't expect the "affordable versions" in ANY reasonable time.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'd say the fact that they use an "affiliate" program to get people to spam links for them is a good enough reason not to use them. The poster of comment you replied to probably doesn't care if people get ripped off, he just wanted his commission.
Troll? This post is one of the funniest things I've read on /.
Flamebait, sure... but calling it Troll is just lacking any sense of humor...
The A600 was indeed referred to as the A300 by some people, but they're actually separate models designed by the same guy. I have no idea what the difference was, but David Hayne (a Commodore engineer) touched upon it on a newsgroup. Something about a shift of management closing down projects left and right while starting up new ones.
I vaguely remember hearing that there were *projects* named A300 and A600 respectively, but that the project named A600 was *not* the same as the machine actually released under the A600 name (i.e. the rebadged A300 project).
This may be bollocks however; I can't remember where I heard it now, and my memory is a little hazy.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
How on earth did the Western Digital Pascal Microengine not make the list?!?
Where's the real bombs like the segway?
Or maybe the half billion dollars spent to create a video phonograph during the middle of the vcr craze to make a similarly priced play only machine with inferior audio and video? It even made the case books in marketing class for mba students by 1990.