The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands In Tech

harrymcc writes "Polaroid, Netscape, CompuServe, Westinghouse, Heathkit — these were once among the most respected names in the technology business. They're still around, but what's happened to them is just plain sad. I took a look at the tragic fates of a dozen mighty brands that have, in one way or another, fallen on hard times."

Comments

Here's Another

[hyades1]

Bell & Howell. They were respected manufacturers of projectors, binoculars and the like. Got bought out and turned into an even cheesier version of K-Tel.

Re:Here's Another

[hyades1]

Oops, my bad. TFA listed B & H.

Re:Here's Another

[StreetStealth]

Or how about Hyades1. Once the recipient of such moderations as "+5. Insightful" and "+5, Informative" the brand is now associated with failing to RTFA.

Re:Here's Another

[cayenne8]

Too bad about Heathkit. They used to make some pretty good tube amplifiers. Heck, you can still find some good deals on decent ones already assembled on eBay...

I wish they still put those out, I'd like to put a few together...stereos the glow are cool.

:)

Re:Here's Another

[darkpixel2k]

Or how about Hyades1. Once the recipient of such moderations as "+5. Insightful" and "+5, Informative" the brand is now associated with failing to RTFA.

Or how about darkpixel2k? The brand is associated with cheap and inferior knockoffs of existing jokes.

Re:Here's Another

[kent_eh]

Got bought out and turned into an even cheesier version of K-Tel.

I think that's the common theme in all companies who go from being kings of their niche to a bad memory on some year-end list

Re:Here's Another

[Z00L00K]

The most tarnished brand today must be SCO, even if they at the peak wasn't too remarkable.

Re:Here's Another

[hyades1]

And if I had the resources of a multi-million dollar corporation behind me, perhaps you might have a point. As it is...well, the best I can say is that I was ahead of you in correcting myself...just seconds after the original post, and I should have been aware that snark is what usually comes from fat people who call anybody under 200 pounds anorexic.

Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Who trusts these bozos anymore?

Re:Microsoft

[nsayer]

Who ever did?

Re:Microsoft

[jcr]

There was a time when Microsoft made some excellent hardware products. the Z80 softcard for the Apple II, for example. Their software was never better than mediocre, though.

-jcr

Re:Microsoft

[IntlHarvester]

Pretty sure Microsoft just put their brandname on the Softcard. You could buy Apple ][ Z-80 boards from many manufacturers, but the CP/M software was sold by Microsoft.

Re:Microsoft

[Runaway1956]

I was wondering why Microsoft didn't make the list. Tarnished? You bet! Of course, TFA is a subjective piece from start to finish. It's all about how the author perceives things to be.

Re:Microsoft

[nsayer]

In fact, the PCPI Applicard did the same basic job, but did it with a far superior architecture, and far superior product specifications. Pretty much typical of the average Microsoft product.

I actually overclocked my Applicard. I upgraded it to a 10 MHz Z-80H part, upgraded the RAM to faster parts and replaced the crystal and oscillator chip. The result was a system that ran Turbo Pascal programs faster than the Compaq PCs in the school computer lab at the time.

The really nice part about the Applicard was that the host system was still running. It buffered keystrokes and print jobs and stuff in the background. It also assured you that you could abort/reset the Z-80 if it ever ran amok. The Softcard, by contrast, raised the INH line, freezing the 6502 while the Z-80 was running.

Meanwhile, the best a Softcard could do was 2 MHz because they tied it to the 6502 system timing.

Re:Microsoft

[nsayer]

the CP/M software was sold by Microsoft

Huh? Resold, perhaps, but CP/M was a product of Digital Research.

Re:Microsoft

[IntlHarvester]

Right. On the Apple II it was called "Microsoft CP/M".

HP didn't make the list?

[Ihlosi]

Odd. They lost the HP way a long time ago.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Jeng]

Or if not HP, then at least Compaq.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[SleepingWaterBear]

Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one. HP at least used to have a reputation as the best maker of printers - they still make good printers, but now I mostly think of them as the makers of the worst computers.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[FooAtWFU]

Maybe they did, but they're still around selling of printers (and ink) and cameras and (OEM-rebranded) networking equipment and servers and the like. It's hard to argue with $122 billion in market cap.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[hairyfeet]

Hell yes! If anybody deserved to be on the list it was Compaq. Did everybody just forget the "fun" that was Compaq RAM? For those kiddies too young to remember. Compaq, in an epic attack of douchebag behavior, decided they needed to "lock" in customers so that they would come to them and ONLY them for RAM, which of course they bent you over and treated you like the latest bimbo in a Seymore Butts movie when you came to purchase it.

You see, they had the boards rigged so they would run just a little bit undervolted or overvolted on the RAM, so if you tried to put in "normal" RAM it would cause weird errors, throw BSODs, or just fry. Fun, huh? And woe be unto you if you were a PC repairman at the time, because Compaq RAM often wouldn't work in...other Compaqs! That's right, because some ram ran under and some ran over you couldn't even use Compaq RAM in another Compaq unless it was rigged the same way! Gee, isn't that nice of them?

And that of course don't count the substandard parts, or building boards with only PCI slots when everyone else had AGP (hell I wouldn't be surprised in this age of PCIe that Compaq still sold models with only PCI) or shitty caps, lousy sound chips that sounded like a speaker at a drive-in, etc. At the shop I was working at at the time we had a mound of PCs that were scrap, and guess what a good 7 out of 10 were? Compaq. The other three were usually little old ladies that were foolish enough to have bought a Packard Smell.

So yeah Compaq should have been in the top 5 at least. A truly craptastic brand of PC that deserves to be right up there with Packard Smells and IBM Deathstars on any "giant can o' suck" PC list.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[schon]

Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know anything about Compaq besides what they see in department stores.

Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line. They were elegantly-engineered tanks that ran pretty much forever. Opening one up revealed a thing of beauty - being able to swap out expansion cards and hard drives without need of a screwdriver even to open the case, without being flimsy.

The Presario was junk, but do you judge all Fords based solely on the Pinto, all Chevys based solely on the Vega? Compaq made rock-solid business desktops and servers.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Bassman59]

Compaq's power supplies cost an order of magnitude more than anyone else's, also.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Gerald]

My memory of Deskpros is that they drew blood every time I opened one up. Sure, you could open the case "without need of a screwdriver" but it meant turning metal thumbscrews that were shaped suspiciously like, and were as sharp as, bits for a wood router. The insides were all razor-sharp, stamped metal patiently waiting to get near your wrist or a finger.

The overall impression was that Compaq hated their customers and wanted them to suffer.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[dissy]

Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one. HP at least used to have a reputation as the best maker of printers - they still make good printers, but now I mostly think of them as the makers of the worst computers.

You do realize of course that the very computer you are using to bash Compaq would not be in existence if it wasn't for Compaq, right?

Nor would the computer of the person that modded you insightful :P

They were the ones that clean room reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS that every computer from the 80s until just a couple years ago makes use of. Even the past couple years, MOST "PC compatible" systems sold today still contain that IBM PC BIOS.

Compaq created and sold the first 100% IBM PC compatible computers, and that was one of the driving forces that turned the PC hobby into the PC industry it is today.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[0100010001010011]

Don't forget the custom BIOS.

I got a 'new' computer dumpster diving once. It was a Compaq. The thing wouldn't see more than 1 IDE drive per bus and had a ton of other limitations. Thankfully I found the original BIOS and flashed it and had no problems since.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Locke2005]

They lost sight of "the HP way" about the same time they put Carly in charge. Note to HP buying up other companies to convert yourself to a service company and compete with IBM is just a waste of money if you can't get those new divisions to stop fighting with each other and actually work together towards a common goal.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[aynoknman]

"The overall impression was that Compaq hated their customers and wanted them to suffer."
Yeah, but the quality was excellent!

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[WindBourne]

And IBM, GE, and others are joining them.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[PopeRatzo]

"The overall impression was that Compaq hated their customers and wanted them to suffer."
Yeah, but the quality was excellent!

remember DEC had some x86 systems that were similar. Great quality, but proprietary as hell and tough to work on the hardware. Faster than other desktops of the same category.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[ChrisMaple]

Even the past couple years, MOST "PC compatible" systems sold today still contain that IBM PC BIOS.

That's going to come as a surprise to Phoenix Technologies and American Megatrends, among others.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[PopeRatzo]

You do realize of course that the very computer you are using to bash Compaq would not be in existence if it wasn't for Compaq, right?

But the point of this list was formerly great brand names that have been tarnished.

Compaq qualifies, I think.

You do realize of course that the very computer you are using to bash Compaq would not be in existence if it wasn't for Compaq, right?

Nor would the computer of the person that modded you insightful :P

Unless they're both using iMacs.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[IntlHarvester]

Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line. They were elegantly-engineered tanks that ran pretty much forever.

True. However, by the Pentium-II era this was over, and the Deskpros were just like any other junk.

Compaq's servers were also top-notch for x86 kit. When HP bought Compaq out, they discontinued their own line of servers and replaced them with Compaq's.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Anonymous Coward]

HP made a lot more good stuff than just good printers. They made electronic measuring and calibration equipment for years. O-scopes, multimeters, signature analyzers, CDMA/PCS/TDMA and other cellular network testers, RF communications calibration equipment etc.. I got out of the calibration and comm repair business back in the mid 90's so I don't know the current level of HP's involvement in this area but I believe it was all sold off to Agilent.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[FreonTrip]

Not really true. Their consumer-grade hardware was never much better than middle of the road (and they were infamous for using proprietary parts that you could only buy or replace directly from Compaq), but their workstations and servers were as reliable and well-built as anything else on the market. My friends and I used to joke that they generally hired for the workstation and server design branches, and punished misdoings and underperformance by demoting said designers to the home market.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[haruchai]

If you care to nominate HP, I'll second the motion. We've come to despise them for both their services and
their products. And, they have a couple of account managers who can only be described as oily. Unfortunately,
they're assigned to our account and we can't seem to get rid of them.

And I've never heard the word "can't" used so often by techheads - considering that Hewlett and Packard essentially
founded the original garage startup. They must both be rolling in their graves.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[haruchai]

You might be the one who's surprised - there are ( at least as recently as 7 years ago ) ways to trigger BIOS errors that
would show in the original font / size of the IBM PC BIOS.
That grandfathered set of code is buried deep but remnants of it are still lurking - it's most likely to be found in
systems that still have ISA support.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[metlin]

My thoughts exactly. I remember opening Compaqs to explore what was inside, and getting really bad cuts from the sharp things everywhere.

On another note, what about Hughes?

Under Howard Hughes, the company was doing fantastic. They did some great stuff, and came up with some pretty awesome inventions.

And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.

Another company, of course, is Bell Labs.

Through nothing short of government greed and interference, the fantastic company that gave us transistors, lasers, information theory, radio astronomy, Unix and C was broken up, and eventually destroyed everything that they stood for.

Today, AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, and baby-Bells are nothing short of a joke.

There is no innovation to speak of, nothing approaching the scale of Bell Labs in any case. It was a sad, sad day.

Personally, I feel that had Hughes and Bell Labs survived today, we may have had more technological advances than we do today.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Bunny Guy]

I have to disagree - The Deskpro line and their servers were junk too. There was a brief shining moment when they rose to acceptable, but it was all to short, and *expensive*!

I had to support our customers that *insisted* on using these systems in a 24/7 environment. What lowered the score for me was that *everything* was custom! Even the bloody Power Supply was "Custom" compaq only. Oh No, off the shelf ram wouldn't do, won't work - gotta have Compaqs special buffering, or voltage, etc... The geometry of the motherboards wasn't even standard!

And of course, none of our globally distributed customers wanted to keep a cold spare on site... Enough, they were non-compatible C**P.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Dun Malg]

And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.

Hughes doesn't do anything anymore. Hughes no longer exists. My father worked for Hughes Aircraft from college graduation to retirement. The decline of Hughes Aircraft Co. had little to do with Howard going nuts. Hughes was still going full bore in the defense industry when HH died in '76. They continued to succeed until 1985, when the seeds of their destruction were sown. That's when the Feds ruled that Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit research foundation which was essentially the "heir" to the HH fortune and owned Hughes Aircraft, had to divest themselves of the hugely profitable subsidiary to keep its non-profit status. That's when General Motors bought them and merged them with Delco Electronics to form the GM-Hughes Electronics division. At this point, Hughes was making everything from radar systems, to missiles, to satellites, to communications systems.

At any rate, GM being run by a bunch of fools and clowns, it was inevitable that the party would end. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the defense industry pretty hard, and GM acquired General Dynamics' missile division and rolled it into Hughes. The inevitable decline was delayed by the fact that Hughes launched a profitable commercial business in '94, a satellite television business called "DirecTV"--- perhaps you've heard of it. None of this helped in the long run, though. GM was no better at operating a business sensibly then than it is now. Eventually the realized they were out of their league, and sold off the Hughes Aircraft portion of Hughes Electronics to Raytheo. The DirecTV division was sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Hughes Space and Communications division was sold to Boeing.

My father worked the last 3 years of his career as a Raytheon employee because of this. Raytheon is a company run by shitbag assholes. For decades Hughes was forced by the DoD to "second source" critical components from Raytheon. My father had years worth of stories about how the shit they'd manufacture was sloppy and not made to specs, and how it caused them interminable problems with Raytheon parts failing. When they acquired Hughes, they basically turned it into "more Raytheon". Employees were treated like shit, benefits cut to nothing, and retirees who were previously allowed to buy health insurance as part of the Hughes group plan were told to "suck it". Perhaps the world was no longer a place where a company like Hughes could exist. Perhaps only "McRaytheon" type companies can make money nowadays. All I know is that Raytheon tolerates a lot more incompetence than Hughes did, and as a result of them buying Hughes, they are now the only manufacturer of missiles in the US, and it's all done to "Raytheon qwality". Just as well, I guess. Not much air combat anymore.

So no, it really was GM that put Hughes on the chopping block, and Raytheon that finally swung the axe. The problem may have started with HH not having a will, but a bunch of Oldsmobile salesmen in $200 suits are what really killed them.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[jimmydevice]

Also a little company called Control C software that developed a BIOS for the Mitsubishi 386 in 1984.
Clean room dev interview: Have you ever touched an IBM PC? No. Have you ever seen the IBM technical specs? No.
You're hired!

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[afabbro]

The Presario was junk, but do you judge all Fords based solely on the Pinto, all Chevys based solely on the Vega? Compaq made rock-solid business desktops and servers.

Yes. That's how brands work.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[An ominous Cow art]

I lusted briefly for a Rainbow in 1984 or so, but it was way out of my price range.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Orion Blastar]

This was true of most PC Clones in the 1980's.

I worked at a few computer shops and trained technicians. One of them was used to working with IBM PC systems at Forsythe and I warned him that the generic PC clones are built different with sharp edges inside of the case that can slice through fingers and your arms if you weren't careful. So I took my time to work on them and prevented accidents. But the rookie who worked on IBM PC systems sliced open his hand on a Chinese made PC clone system built from parts within 15 minutes on the job and refused to listen to what I told him about safety. He filed workman's comp and they blamed me for it and eventually fired me later, even if I did warn him and told him to be careful around the sharp parts inside of the cases. I even gave him a pair of work gloves to use to avoid slicing open his hand, but he refused claiming he was a tough guy and didn't need them.

Today most modern systems are buffered so they aren't as sharp, because of accidents like that and lawsuits against PC makers and PC shops that sold them. But that was back in the days of IC chips and RAM in chips instead of SIMMs or DIMMS. Everything was harder back then, and easier now.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[hughperkins]

You know, I used to create things I thought were cool, and think I was performing some essential task for society.

Then I took a break, and looked around, and realized that when I didn't do some specific task, other people would do it instead, and they'd often do it better than me: better designed, better documented, better marketed, more elegant, more beautiful.

Who's to say that if Compaq hadn't done that, either someone else wouldn't have done the exact same thing, or someone else wouldn't have done something similar, *but better*?

There's a lot of crappy stuff in bioses (chs and all that stuff), and in x86 architecture in general. As for any other architecture of course. Still, the point is: maybe if Compaq hadn't cloned the IBM bios, someone else would have made some other architecture into the commodity architecture of choice for the next twenty years, and maybe it would have been better in some subtle way?

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound just like your father.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[tapanitarvainen]

I got out of the calibration and comm repair business back in the mid 90's so I don't know the current level of HP's involvement in this area but I believe it was all sold off to Agilent.

Not sold to Agilent, rather HP was split in two and the part making instruments &c was named Agilent. See here for the official version.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid they may have been "reliable", but they were reliable at sucking, hard. Their uses of out-of-date BIOS and chipsets in their top-of-the-line models meant that you couldn't install PATA hard drivers larger than 128 Gig without buying an add-on controller card for a ridiculously long time: their systems were power limited, not by the power supply, but by the ventilation to cool components. And they were often under-equipped in the capacity to _install_ RAM. Who cares if the hardware is "rock solid", which in my experience it was not, if it's half the capacity and twice the price of a pizza box that cost less? Buy two pizza boxes and set them to failover!

Now, _DEC_ hardware could survive Armageddon, both in performance and in surviving mistreatment. I was very sad when Compaq bought that manufacturing line from DEC.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[jonadab]

> Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line

Oh, grrrrr... Don't even get me *started* on the Deskpro line.

Where I work we used to have some of them, when I first started, because some cretinous loser had selected them before I came on board. Gah.

Drivers for the hardware? Yeah, good luck. You see, in that era, every PC came with one or more removable disks containing the drivers -- every PC except for the Compaq Deskpro, that is. The OEM install included the right drivers pre-installed, but if you needed to reinstall for any reason whatsoever, you were screwed. Oh, you say, no problem, just go to the manufacturer's website and download the drivers. Yeah, you *could* do that... maybe... if you knew which ones you needed, which you had no way to know, because Compaq never bothered to update the model number when they changed which components they were putting in the things. Haha. And in some cases you'd download all of the available drivers for your model, every single one, try them all, and *none* of them would work, because your particular iteration of components wasn't very long-lived and they never bothered to get the drivers put up on the site. What fun! Did I mention that all these drivers had to be downloaded as "Softpaqs", which weren't labeled according to their contents, and that in many cases several different Softpaqs (including, in some instances, ones that you needed to support different components in the same computer) would have the same file name, but different sizes and contents? Such joy!

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[PhasmatisApparatus]

"You do realize of course that the very computer you are using to bash Compaq would not be in existence if it wasn't for Compaq, right?" Yes, we'd probably be using something superior to x86. The IBM compatibles survived because they... were compatible. If Compaq hadn't reverse-engineered the PC, someone else would have, or someone would have reverse-engineered Macintosh, or something entirely different.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[metlin]

Wow, I had no idea. I've heard stories re: some of what you mentioned above - GM and Raytheon kicking the dead remains of HH - however, I had not realized that they were the root cause, as opposed to the straw.

I'd always heard that the degeneration of HH had a major role to play in what happened to Hughes, mostly because his personality was what helped Hughes propel ahead in those days.

And I can totally believe what you say about Raytheon - I used to work at Los Alamos, and similar stories abound. The only half-decent player in that space was Lockheed Martin, and even they weren't necessarily the most reliable. Either way, it's a sad story. Thanks for sharing it.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[wwphx]

Heh. Remember QEMM386? Stupid Compaqs split their upper bios into two parts, making it a stone cold bitch to get QEMM to properly map it.

Compaqs were pure PITBs. I thought their servers were OK but never had to admin them, so take my opinion for what it's worth.

I also had no love for HP computers. The ones I worked with were totally non-standard. As far as I was concerned, when HP and Compaq merged, it was two lousy brands combining to make a monumentally lousy brand. And thus far, I don't think I've been proven wrong.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Donkey_Hotey]

Unless they're both using iMacs.

He said computers .

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[hairyfeet]

I have to agree. I am looking at two PCs that I'm probably gonna have to shitcan even though 99.99% of the PC is good. Why? Seriously fucked up PSU designs, that's why. The compaq is a SFF that has a PSU shaped like a wedge of cheese, I swear, and the HP Pavilion, which is a serious knuckle buster to start with, is a normal looking mini tower on the outside with more than enough room for a standard PSU. The Problem? Opening it up the PSU is about 40% of the normal length. I swear it is the size of a paperback book and they put a nice steel bar in there so there is no way in hell without a blowtorch to put a normal PSU in! Nice huh?

As someone who has worked PC repair since the days of Win3.x, I would rank in order of suck, Packard Smell, HP, and Compaq. The only reason I rank HP worse than Compaq as I have found even their designs that look normal on the outside aren't. Poor ventilation, drive cages that will overheat the HDD, PSUs that won't work in anything else or are replaceable, etc. The Pavilion line has to be one of the shittiest lines I've ever had to work on, bar none. Truly a royal PITA from word go. Oh and their BIOS really suck as well, with pretty much NO options and even the most basic features missing. True landfill fodder if ever I saw one.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[MrResistor]

But they're still doing alright as a company, and they're my first choice for laptops and printers. I won't deny that they've fallen from their once lofty position, but they haven't gone to anywhere near the depths of some.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[smoyer]

HEY!

I loved my Vega - though I replaced it's wimpy straight-4 with a Monza V-6 and made extensive modifications to the rest of the car. Actually, it seemed like it was never quite done but perhaps we all just have a soft spot for our first car ... never mind;)

P.S. At least it wouldn't explode if hit from behind!

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember that. Around the time Carly Fiorina took over, HP was a manufacturer of high-end workstations. Like DEC making the 64-bit Alpha, as well as Alta Vista, HP's brand exuded a research culture.

Next thing you know, HP is known for dark grey PC clones that were ubiquitous (kudos!) and severely underpowered. I guess we can congratulate Carly for beating Dell at their own game? At least for a while. That sounds like Boeing taking on Kia Motors for marketshare in plastic dashboards and cupholders.

Reading her wiki, it sounds like she may have been given a shitty job. The decision to spin off Agilent had been made before she got on board. "Fiorina proceeded to break up HP and merge the part she kept with the PC maker Compaq." The media made a lot of fanfare about her arrival, but I don't know what they expected her to do if they already decided to get rid of the parts of the company that had long-term value.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[toddestan]

Unless they're both using iMacs.

Perhaps if it was an old PPC iMac. Yes, I know the Intel Macs don't have a BIOS, but I seriously doubt they would be running an x86 chip either if it wasn't for Compaq.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[toddestan]

Some of the HP Vectras aren't too bad. Standard ATX parts. The cases were roomy, tool-less, quiet and won't cut your hands open unlike the Compaqs. I have some around, they are about 10 years old now. I do have some gripes though: The towers have three 5.25" bays, but the bottom one is blocked by the motherboard so nothing will fit in it. The P3 1Ghz is limited to 512MB of ram. It has 2 slots, you can put in two 256's or a single 512MB. A 512MB + anything else won't post. Bastards. The P3 600Mhz also had a really bad case of bad caps - I actually repaired that computer as it is useful enough as a router that I didn't want to toss it. The P4 1.5Ghz lacks onboard networking too - granted I have plenty of PCI NICs but how many workstation PCs in 2001 didn't have onboard networking?

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[clone53421]

They were the ones that clean room reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS that every computer from the 80s until just a couple years ago makes use of. Even the past couple years, MOST "PC compatible" systems sold today still contain that IBM PC BIOS.

I think the whole point was to not use the IBM PC BIOS. ;p

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[clone53421]

As a side note, the reason the Macintosh BIOS wasn’t reverse-engineered was because it was so much more complex than the IBM PC BIOS.

In fact you can get emulators for the classic Mac hardware systems, but you still need a copy of the original Mac ROM BIOS to run the Mac OS on them. Nobody reverse-engineered the BIOS.

HP

[joeflies]

When you say HP, the first words that comes to mind is innovation and great engineering. However you look at the past 10 years and HP has done surprisingly little in innovation or great engineering, and has not been creating market changing technology. They've gotten stuck building pcs and selling printer ink because that's the safe way to make money.

I don't know whether it was the compaq acquisition or the carly regime that made HP soft,. Maybe the HP name hasn't fallen and it's not tarnished as much as some of the other names on the list, but the company behind the brand isn't what it used to be.

Re:HP

[tibman]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

Re:HP

[east coast]

Agreed but why use their software in the first place? I normally just go for the bare drivers and keep the rest of their crap off a system.

The one thing I can say is that it seems that HP is slowly crawling back out of the hole on SOHO printers. Nothing in the laser arena seemed to be as bad as the HP 1100/1200 printers of the late 90s/early 00s. They seem to have gotten back to some of the basics that made the HP 4 series a great little printer.

Re:HP

[Itninja]

Have you seen their recent blade server technology? While their support is awful, the hardware itself (namely the C-class blades) is pretty impressive.

Re:HP

[TheRealFixer]

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina. She effectively took HP out of the hands of the engineers who made the company great, and put it squarely into the hands the shareholders who were concerned only with short-term stock price during the dotcom bubble. She spurred a massive shift in culture that killed off the innovation that they were famous for, obliterated morale throughout the company, and generally made it an undesirable place to work. The Compaq acquisition was just one aspect of her failure.

Re:HP

[MightyMartian]

I liked the HP server line, and when I was shopping around last spring for a new server, even got a couple of quotes, but at the end of the day, they just weren't willing to price match Dell. I felt bad, because, support-wise, Dell has gone to shit, too. I also got quotes on some low-end HP workstations (22 workstations) to upgrade some old Dells, and the only way I could get them to compare to similar Vostros was to dump DVD burning and buy smaller LCD monitors. It's like they didn't give a fuck at all. The reseller, a guy who I like a great deal and would have loved to give the purchase to, literally apologized for HP not playing ball.

Re:HP

[cinnamon colbert]

The 1st thing that comes to my mind is electronic test equipment (VOMs, signal generators) where HP stands for High Priced

Re:HP

[davester666]

Really?

You're agreeing they've got better hardware and service than Dell, but unless they also only charge what Dell charges, you won't buy their stuff?

So, the value you place on better hardware and service is...$0?

Re:HP

[TheRealFixer]

Interestingly, most all of their advances in server technology are directly descended from Compaq.

IMO, keeping the ProLiant line was the one single smart thing that HP did after the Compaq acquisition.

Re:HP

[Guy Harris]

The 1st thing that comes to my mind is electronic test equipment (VOMs, signal generators) where HP stands for High Priced

Actually, it now stands for "Agilent".

Re:HP

[japhering]

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina. She effectively took HP out of the hands of the engineers who made the company great, and put it squarely into the hands the shareholders who were concerned only with short-term stock price during the dotcom bubble. She spurred a massive shift in culture that killed off the innovation that they were famous for, obliterated morale throughout the company, and generally made it an undesirable place to work. The Compaq acquisition was just one aspect of her failure.

sarcasm on

Isn't that the function of Great CEOs... first drive the company into the ground will getting multi-million dollar bonus for cost reductions and stock value, then sell it to some hedge fund at a profit of 2 or 3x the share price for all share holders, which always includes the hedge fund paying the execs to exercise their options on 10s of millions of shares, thus increasing, yet again, shareholder value. Ah..the bright side of capitalism

sarcasm off

Seriously, so many at the Executive level haven't got a clue about what their company does and to make up for it simply rely on what the bean counters are telling them.

Re:HP

[bigbigbison]

HP got rid of a lot of that when they spun off Agilent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent

Re:HP

[MightyMartian]

I didn't say it was better. I pretty much got an equivalent server, and the workstations came with an actual DVD burner, so not only did I save money, but on the technical end, I broke even or got better.

Re:HP

[phorm]

Nevermind HP. How about Xerox. A lot of computing history originated in Xerox Parc, but nowadays you don't hear much from them. Heck, more places I know don't even by photocopiers from them.

A huge source of innovation now essentially peddles middling printers and copier machines...

Re:HP

[Tromeo]

The first things that come to my mind are:

1) RPN calculators (I miss them so)
2) scientific instruments (GC, GC/MS, etc)
3) HP/UX

They don't make the calculators anymore and spun the scientific gear off into Agilent before the dot com bust. HP/UX is still kicking but getting less relevant every year.

Re:HP

[GPLDAN]

Two Words: Carly Fiornia


I hope she becomes Gov of California. She'll probably try and merge with Hawaii and then half the state will fall into the ocean.

Re:HP

[Volante3192]

If only I could find bare drivers for a photosmart 2710...

Re:HP

[darkpixel2k]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...

Re:HP

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ with your assertion.

See this article from 2008. Last time I checked, that was in the last 10 years, and I would qualify that as great engineering. You are probably to young to remember when the transistor first revolutionized tech; but my guess is that this research will have a similar impact over the next 10 years.

Re:HP

[WaywardGeek]

She wasn't the only one. I joined HP in 1988, and the job was horible. Donuts on Friday disapeared the week I arrived. the "HP Way" was being scuttled. I could only take it a year and a half, and then I moved on to more intresting work. The problem was that David Packard had retired from the board and no longer guided the company. It got so bad, he came out of retirement a couple years later to put HP back on track. When he passed away, there was no way to replace him. Stockholders always lean towards the likes of Carly Florina, for the reasons already described - short-term profits. It takes an genius evangelist with nearly unlimited power to keep a company great. Take a look at what's happening at Microsoft since Bill stepped back, and how the stock market follows Steve Job's health.

Anyway, I veiw all those famous brands mentioned in TFA quite differently. What they have in common is that they have faded, but that's all. Heathkit is a brand spoken even today in awe of what they did for America. Polorooid revolutionized film based photography, and faded into obscurity when their strong leadership faded. Westinghouse faded through conglomeration. What do they make now? Coffee or nuclear reactors? Netscape killed themselves, through incredible stupid and evil strategy - make the Internet so complicated that only Microsoft and Netscape could offer functional browsers... someone should be shot.

I reject the idea that a company the dies with it's market has failed. Sun Microsystems is the most amazing workstation vendor in history. They gave the world technologies that will benefit the world for generations. Just because my cell phone has more power than a 1990-vintage workstation doesn't make Sun less great. These are brands to be celebrated for what they did in their industry, not to be morned when their industry passes into history.

Re:HP

[Anonymous Coward]

And toner that costs half as much as the printer itself, designed to run out soon, and often.

Re:HP

[temojen]

Actually, the first things I think of are runaway printer drivers, Failed HDDs, Bloatware, and cases so thin that a parallel cable can tork a PCI riser out of it's socket.

Re:HP

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a Windows user, you'd think that you would be used to compromise :p

Re:HP

[Phroggy]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...

Um, customers do love 2MB printer drivers; it's the 300MB printer drivers that are a bit tough to swallow.

Re:HP

[ChrisMaple]

Polaroid had one trick, instant-print film and cameras. As far as I can tell, it was never really very strong financially, stumbling to make the next advancement in its technology to rescue it from impending doom. Quality never met conventional processing, and additional copies meant weeks of delay. Cheap 1-hour processing weakened its market substantially, and digital cameras sealed its fate. I don't think any management could have saved Polaroid. Look at Kodak, which had a huge industrial base to work from and has heavily and desperately invested in digital technology: it is struggling to remain a viable corporation.

Re:HP

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Sun was arrogant. They're hardware was great if you liked the color purple. Just like Henry Ford- "You can have any car you want, as long as it's black." Their servers were great because you were essentially buying a MAC. Try running SunOS on commodity hardware. Go beyond your ssh and telnet session and you life turns to shit pretty damn quick.

HP is/was not in the same situation as Sun. They had the most stable commodity hardware and the best support available. Don't even get me started about Sun's "support". Today they a pot smoking outsourced jagoffs. All Sun's datacenters are gone except for one in Texas. And they deserve it.

In the end, HP were gutted with Fiorina which was no fault of their own. Their engineers and supervisors were decapitated. Sun was simply too arrogant all the way around to adapt to the reality of reality. Fat, expensive, and stupid was how they went through life- and shocker- they failed.

Re:HP

[gyrogeerloose]

Nevermind HP. How about Xerox[...]

A huge source of innovation now essentially peddles middling printers and copier machines...

Xerox is doing a lot more than peddling middling printers and copiers. They're making big bucks manufacturing super-high-end, super-fast laser printers aimed at the print-on-demand industry. Really nice equipment that typically comes with a PostScript RIP and a price that would buy you a house in many markets. And will easily fill a room in said house, too.

Still, I know what you mean. The glory days of Xerox PARC are gone, and that's too bad. They gave us the GUI computer OS, among other things

Re:HP

[Anonymous Coward]

My best ever printer to this day (and it's our office workhorse) is the HP Laserjet 6MP. Bought it new in the day. Trickier to get it to run these days (Using Asantetalk to convert the Appletalk to ethernet), but a flawless printer. I've only ever had to buy cartridges for it (rarely). Had to have printed countless thousands of pages at this point.
I don't see any product on the market today from anyone that is as good with the quality of workmanship & design.

Re:HP

[Alan426]

Which is far better than huge, bloated printer drivers that constantly *need* updating (cough ... Canon!).

Re:HP

[tibman]

I am, yes. There are 4 windows machines on the net (2x XP, 3x Win7) and Two linux machines (Gentoo and Ubuntu). There is also a Tablet (experiment) with Puppy linux.

The printer is an HP Deskjet 6840 w/ Wireless. I've got a project underway to turn one of the linux boxes into an LDAP + IDS + Router type thing. Maybe it could handle all the printing as well? that would be fantastic.

Re:HP

[vaporland]

the second is inkjet cartridges that show "empty" when they are still full, and cannot be reloaded...

Re:HP

[darkpixel2k]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...

Um, customers do love 2MB printer drivers; it's the 300MB printer drivers that are a bit tough to swallow.

I guess my wording wasn't too clear. That's exactly what I meant--a 2 MB print driver that gets packaged with a ton of other crap.

Re:HP

[yuhong]

"Stockholders always lean towards the likes of Carly Florina, for the reasons already described - short-term profits." Yea, I remember reading about the HP proxy fight back around 2001, and it is old news by now. The problem is how to finally fix it properly.

Re:HP

[AK Marc]

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina.

I think she makes a great scape goat. Just like Michael Brown for New Orleans, she did the job she was hired for. She was one in a line of business leaders of a tech company, until it was no longer a tech company. She may have been better at that job, that that was what she was *supposed* to do. Just like Michael Brown was not any good at federal emergency management. Lots of others made mistakes too, but he was the one that was trapped in the middle. The Board of Directors tanked HP. They set the tone. They hired Carly, knowing what she'd do. Just like DHS was in charge of FEMA, and if FEMA dropped the ball DHS should have stepped in, and never did. Brown was sacrificed so that no one could ever speak ill of DHS, since they are supposedly the ones that keep us safe. And no one talks about the board being the ones that set the tone before and after Carly.

Re:HP

[yuhong]

Ah, the problems of shareholder value and agency theory... I once had a slashdot submission on this that was rejected.

Re:HP

[jdigriz]

I like my 37" 1080p Westinghouse LCD

Re:HP

[PixetaledPikachu]

Have you seen their recent blade server technology? While their support is awful, the hardware itself (namely the C-class blades) is pretty impressive.

Amen to that. We deploy clusters of BL460c G1s that runs very smooth. I like how the design that let you remove hard drives without having to dismantle the servers. That is one of the reason why I choose the C-class over IBM's HS blade servers. the iLO2 is also far superior that it's IBM counterpart. However, if you're going to run lots of HP servers on your data center, having an extended maintenance contract is essential. When one of my HP BL20p crapped out, it takes 2 weeks for HP to get replacement part for the board.

Re:HP

[je ne sais quoi]

In your list, don't forget the final chapter for a "successful" CEO, which is to run for political office. I think she will have a hard time running against Barbara Boxer, but I think she'd make the perfect senator in the mold of such esteemed senators as Joe Lieberman, Jim Inhofe, Ted Stevens or Sam Brownback who have been responsible for building and maintaining our great society. I'm sure she'll run the government like a business which worked so well for our last president Bush when responding to natural disasters and the like. (Yes, I am being sarcastic).

Re:HP

[eharvill]

I think they've done pretty well with their c7000 blade systems in recent years.

Re:HP

[Antique Geekmeister]

It's difficult to guess if the Linux setups have the resources to handle the print spools, which can get quite bulky when the printer gets stuck. And getting the Windows drivers set up to be installed automatically from a Samba print server is a bit tricky. But it's certainly feasible.

If I may recommend, do not use Gentoo for this. Having to recompile and adjust, rather than having pre-defined packages to work with, is a nightmare for such basic services as Samba printing. And CUPS printing configuration can be rather tricky for inexperienced admins, especially if they want to do things that are remotely tricky. But Samba and CUPS are far more robust printing services than Windows print servers.

Re:HP

[Degrees]

It gets worse. Xerox wants a consulting division, so they are planning to buy Affiliated Computer Services. If Dell and HP can buy consulting companies, why shouldn't Xerox?

Problem is, ACS is in the bottom 25 of worst places to work. (Entry #21). The former head of ACS left due to a back-dating-stock-options scandal, and as a part of his golden parachute, the ACS Board gave him a $1 million per year salary allowance for security services. He needs $1 million per year in bodyguards, and the Board gave it to him. Oh yeah, they are a class act with the utmost integrity.

And Xerox wants to marry them.

In my opinion, if you have Xerox stock, sell it. Sell it now.

Re:HP

[mrmeval]

She's the moron that wanted to infect HP with Compaq's excrement. She deserved the boot for being an idiot. She is however smarter than any Cali polytick but it just means she has better bloodflow.

Re:HP

[MrResistor]

Kodak has also been working with Technicolor on film scanning technology (almost all movies today have digital effects, and most are still shot on film). Film's days are numbered, and they know it, but at least they're smart enough to try and squeeze some profits out of the transition and maybe carve themselves out a position in the future.

If Poloroid was as smart, they would have jumped on the digital bandwagon as soon as it appeared. I've seen Poloroid branded SD cards, but I haven't heard of them as a camera manufacturer recently. I don't see how they'll survive in the long term rebranding PNY cards.

Re:HP

[Noose For A Neck]

Polaroid was responsible for designing and building the camera that went into the U-2 spy plane back in the mid 1950s. They certainly did more than cheap little instant-develop cameras.

Re:HP

[clone53421]

If Poloroid was as smart, they would have jumped on the digital bandwagon as soon as it appeared. I've seen Poloroid branded SD cards, but I haven't heard of them as a camera manufacturer recently. I don't see how they'll survive in the long term rebranding PNY cards.

Problem is, they had cornered the market in cheap, simple, instant-print cameras, but there is just no analogue in the digital world. The entire digital market consisted of the same features that Polaroid had built their success on.

There were 3 advantages to a Polaroid photo: cheap, easy, and fast.

There are 3 advantages to a digital picture: cheaper, easier, and faster.

The only remaining advantage a Polaroid has over digital is that you get a physical copy of the picture, and that’s just not enough to make it competitive.

You might think to combine the concepts: A digital camera that can preview a picture instantly without costing you a penny, and print it out immediately if you do want a physical copy. However, a photo print is still cheapest and simplest to produce using light and photo-sensitive chemicals compared to using an ink-jet printer. While such a digital camera could be built, it would cost far too much to remain competitive.

Re:HP

[MrResistor]

No, you totally misinterpreted what I was saying: Poloroid should have started making digital cameras. Not some hybrid camera/printer or whatever, just normal digital cameras. Even if they had to rebrand someone else's, that would have at least kept them in the game long enough to get their own designs going, if they had any intentions of doing so.

I'm well aware of all the reasons digital is eating Poloroid's lunch, I didn't want a Poloroid long before there was a digital alternative.

Re:HP

[clone53421]

No, you totally misinterpreted what I was saying: Poloroid should have started making digital cameras.

I didn’t. I understood you. I was just pointing out that Polaroid had a stranglehold on the optical camera market, whereas the digital market put everyone on the same playing field.

Even if Polaroid started making digital cameras, there’s no reason to expect them to do any better than anyone else in the digital camera market. They have no advantage in it.

Re:HP

[MrResistor]

It's true that they have no advantage, but I'd argue that they do have greater name recognition among the general public over companies like Olympus or Nikon. It's too late for them now, but 10 years ago they could have leveraged that into a reasonable share of the market, maybe even as the dominant name in the low end.

AOL

[Aeros]

Wow AOL sure did screw up alot of good products. Sad

Re:AOL

[ColdWetDog]

Wow AOL sure did screw up alot of good products. Sad

But coasters! We got lots of coasters (or aerodynamically challenged frisbees) out of the deal. Worth something.

Re:AOL

[zach_the_lizard]

But coasters! We got lots of coasters (or aerodynamically challenged frisbees) out of the deal. Worth something.

I think they may have sent out floppies first, so at least you got a free floppy before.

Re:AOL

[wjsteele]

Hmmm... I'm trying to figure out ONE single good product they had to begin with.

Bill

Re:AOL

[innocent_white_lamb]

I used to do backups of my Fidonet BBS on floppies using Fastback Plus. As I recall it took about 150 floppy disks (and an entire evening), and about 80% of the disks I used were the "free" AOL ones. (Most of the rest were Elephant; I bought several cases at an auction sale when a computer store went out of business so I had lots. Remember "NEVER FORGET" on the box?)

Re:AOL

[shadowbearer]

  I still have one of those floppies, and it still reads, more or less (only a few thousand bad bytes on it). it's the one with the "all new 3.0" on the front.

  I toy with selling it on Ebay at times... but I like it too much where it is, taped to my bulletin board next to my workstations :)

  Nostalgia!

SB

Re:AOL

[MBCook]

I'm glad they're mostly gone. They wouldn't move past their little cabal when the web started exploding. Then they tried to force you to use their terribly awful browser, hobbling the internet for developers for quite a while.

Many people, my parents included, still use AOL for mail. It's free now, but it's still horrible. If you've read a message and don't keep it as new or save it, it will delete it for you after a short while. Google gives out gigs of mail and AOL is still deleting 3kb messages you read.

Then, their is their worst sin of all. They bought and killed The ImagiNation Network . That was an amazing service at the time, especially multiplayer RedBaron. They could have turned that into a real property with their size. Instead they killed it.

The only thing they did of popularity these days is AIM, and I think that may have been a simple size thing. Sure ICQ was popular first, but AOL was what got millions of people to instant messages and made it friendly (as opposed to being person 19305359).

If they didn't have all the ads on AIM, they probably would have died a couple of years ago.

AltaVista?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not faded yet. At least there I don't get those annoying sorry pages (yet) I get from Google.

Packard Bell for the WIN!

[jameskojiro]

I have never seen such a craptastic computer maker than Packard Bell.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Itninja]

Oh yeah....their PCs were horrid. But since my very first computer (as an adult) was a Packard Bell I still get a misty when I think of it.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Anonymous Coward]

my very first computer (as an adult) was a Packard Bell I still get a misty when I think of it.

I've always been more of an Officer Jenny guy.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Bel Riose]

As a matter of fact I'm writing this reply on a three year old Packard Bell notebook. As far as I can tell they aren't that bad.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[innocent_white_lamb]

Packard Bell is the only computer that I can honestly say I once used a hammer and cold chisel to fix.
 
A client wanted to install a CD drive in his PB and while the plastic case had an extra drive slot, the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me. The drive worked fine once it was installed, but I remember hoping the computer's owner didn't come in while I was beating that plate off. His reaction would probably not have been positive.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[dwillden]

Oh but their tech support reps were guru's. Of course they had to be to deal with the many problems a Packard Hell could have. My fav that I had to try to trouble-shoot, while working tech support at AOL, is still the combo sound card and modem that had a conflict with itself.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[shadowbearer]

  Some years back I used to work for a place where we (re)built a lot of low end machines that we bought in van-lots for our "financially disadvantaged" customers, paired them with equally cheap monitors, sold them for a couple hundred bucks apiece. This was back around '00 when you still couldn't buy a web-capable computer for less than $500 or so new, we sold a lot of them.

  As I recall PB's hardware really wasn't all that bad - at least it worked - it was the drivers and software loads that gave us the most problems. We rebuilt hundreds of their Pentium machines, found the best drivers we could (or ran their vid drivers VGA if that was all the monitor would do) - and with a fresh, "tuned-down" windows load on them, they were acceptable surfing/email boxes, for cheap. IIRC the biggest problem we had was either with the video card drivers or with the modems - fortunately we had a lot of excess hardware modems that worked perfectly well.

  I haven't lived/worked in that area for a long time now, but I recall that probably half of the service calls I had in the few months before I left was working on those same boxes, mostly virus infections (including AOL *g*)

  Nostalgia...

SB

 

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[tenton]

Packaged Hell, as we used to call them. You too can own your own little hell; how they could cram so much pain into such a small package defied belief.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[petermgreen]

the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me.
The plates are there to keep RF noise from leaving the PC case and causing the machine to fail CE/FCC testing. Making them snap-out is much cheaper than clips or screws and there is little need to ever put them back (people rarely reduce the number of drives in a machine and if they do they generally don't want to put the machine through FCC/CE testing afterwards)

Usually they don't require a chisel to remove though, maybe thier welder was set up wrong.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Somegeek]

You must be in Europe? Packard Bell stopped selling computers in the US around 2000 due to their horrible quality reputation in North America.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[kaini]

Oh but their tech support reps were guru's. Of course they had to be to deal with the many problems a Packard Hell could have. My fav that I had to try to trouble-shoot, while working tech support at AOL, is still the combo sound card and modem that had a conflict with itself.

oooh, i had that one. when it played a sound the modem would intermittently hang up. great fun when you're trying to stream audio over a sub-56k dialup connection. never managed to sort it out.

Napster was respected when?

[east coast]

Let's be honest here; Napster brought nothing new to the table. They were just known on the same level that Balloon Boy's parents are known. Hadn't it been for being sued into oblivion they would hardly be a footnote in technology.

I also shiver to think that the writer still considers Commodore the same company as they one that died in the 90s. It's the same company by name only. It's not like it did a massive transformation into oblivion like Westinghouse or Polaroid.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Jeng]

I know people who purchased computers and internet access just so they could download mp3's off Napster.

Napster probably sold more broadband than the Road-Runner.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[east coast]

This article is about technology giants, not marketing and commercial giants. That's more my point. If it were about marketing and commercial giants that went to crap it would enclude such names as K-Mart... A once vast empire that went to crap because of some little old man named Sam who scooted around the countryside in an old beat up pickup truck selling second rate goods at deep discounts.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[mcgrew]

Napster was important because it was the first P2P program. The post-lawsuit napster company wasn't important, but it brought file sharing to the masses and scared the record lables as badly as the VCR scared the movie industry.

Were you asleep then or something?

Re:Napster was respected when?

[SoundGuyNoise]

Without Napster giving it away for free, Apple band-wagoning and creating iTunes, selling for $1 a pop.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[HTH NE1]

Napster was important because it was the first P2P program. The post-lawsuit Napster company wasn't important, but it brought file sharing to the masses and scared the record labels as badly as the VCR scared the movie industry.

Scared them like the Boston Strangler scared the woman at home alone.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Anonymous Coward]

The writer doesn't consider Commodore the same company as the one that died in the 90s. That is the entire reason Commodore is on the list. I know, I know, the gall that I would expect you to read the article before you pass judgment on the author. Worse still, you presumably looked at the article or you wouldn't have known to single out Commodore as a failing of the author.

The author explicitly states that today's Commodore is nothing more than a name-for-hire, just like today's Polaroid and numerous others.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[reub2000]

This article is about brands, not technology or innovation. The fact that name napster was once synonymous with p2p makes it a pretty significant brand.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Deadstick]

The original Commodore....

-Marketed a disk drive that had a hundred percent failure rate, couldn't be stacked because of overheating, and was the slowest floppy drive ever built.
-Marketed a computer that accessed that drive by sending BASIC statements, in ASCII, down a serial bus.
-Advertised that the drive was user-programmable and refused to release programming information for it.
-Marketed a computer whose ROM kernel routines didn't work, so programmers had to take up scarce RAM with their own routines to do stuff like moving the cursor.
-Couldn't even spell "kernel". They called it the "Kernal".

And they went downhill?

rj

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Tobor the Eighth Man]

Napster absolutely revolutionized the way mp3s were used. Prior to Napster, most mp3s were shared directly through websites or through FTP sites. Most people didn't have the patience for it. Napster made it possible to find absolutely any song, ever. It was one of the first steps to the all-info-accessible-find-anything internet we've got today. People nowadays don't remember that ten years ago, it was tough as hell to find particular things on the internet.

It's like video clips before youtube. Now you can find any popular moment from pretty much any popular show, event, whatever in seconds. Before youtube (and sites like it), you'd be sorting through page after page of google listings hoping to find what you were looking for.

Anyone who doubts the importance of napster isn't old enough to remember the internet before it came about.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Donkey_Hotey]

Anyone who doubts the importance of napster isn't old enough to remember the internet before it came about.

Funny, we always considered Napster to be the AOL of file-sharing, catering to the lowest common denominator.

Telcordia

[Anonymous Coward]

they are trying really hard to get on this list

Similarities

[StreetStealth]

A common current among these formerly great brands is the hiring out of the nameplate. When anyone can pay to slap a Westinghouse, Bell & Howell, or Polaroid name on their product, both licensor and licensee tend to lose credibility.

Re:Similarities

[Anonymous Coward]

A common current among these formerly great brands is the hiring out of the nameplate. When anyone can pay to slap a Westinghouse, Bell & Howell, or Polaroid name on their product, both licensor and licensee tend to lose credibility.

The licensee doesn't care; they're probably some no-name manufacturer, distributor or importer of otherwise run-of-the-mill (if not downright crap) equipment who want to shift as much producct by association with a formerly reputable name as possible. They have no investment in the long term future of the name- it's not theirs, and they can always hire another whored-out brand next time.

And if the owners' business model revolves around licensing the name out (rather than associating it with any specific business of their own), then they know the score, and likely know- and don't care- that it has no long-term future.

Neither party cares about the long term credibility of the brand.

Re:Similarities

[Deadstick]

You don't even have to be formerly great. There is a company paying money to call itself CompUSA, fer chrissake.

rj

This is the title

[DreamsAreOkToo]

Is it sad, or is it what the company deserved? How many other companies deserve this same fate but are being propped up because "They're too big to fail"?

Re:This is the title

[Nerdfest]

How about IBM. They should have died years ago, but can still rely on the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" fanboys. At least they still do some cutting edge R&D though, which is more than I can say for most tech companies.

Re:This is the title

[D Ninja]

That's sort of what I was thinking. Why is it sad of what happened to these companies. Sure - they were once good companies that did some very great things in industry. But, they didn't keep up with the industry, didn't prevail against competitors, etc, so they fell. That's how business and capitalism works. Maybe my response is harsh, but I most definitely don't feel sad or sorry for any of those businesses.

Re:This is the title

[cheesybagel]

The IBM POWER 6 and POWER 7 processors are masterpieces on their own right. Expensive? Yes. But also remember that the top 3 shipping games consoles all use their processors (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).

As you said they still do some nifty R&D as well. The folks they have in the 'consulting' business I have met so far are top notch as well.

Their consumer products... what consumer products? They sold all those divisions off so they could keep margins up.

Re:This is the title

[OrangeCatholic]

>How about IBM. They should have died years ago,

IBM is trading at $130.

Diebold?

[phantomfive]

Any such list that doesn't include Diebold is lacking. Once a well respected manufacturer of safes, vaults, and eventually ATM machines, they now are known for creating voting machines that can't count, and in some cases have shown evidence of maliciousness in subverting the democratic process. At worst they are guilty of treason, at best they are guilty of selling useless and harmful junk. At least Microsoft at their worst is entertaining (Bob, Clippy); Diebold is disgusting.

Re:Diebold?

[Volante3192]

They're only known for making crappy voting machines on this site.

If some news outlet actually did a hard hitting expose on them, maybe, MAYBE, they'd fall from grace.

Re:Diebold?

[phantomfive]

You are right, most people don't know about Diebold, but then, on the other hand, there is a reason they changed the name of their voting machine division.

Re:Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

If some news outlet actually did a hard hitting expose on them, maybe, MAYBE, they'd fall from grace.

I'm not sure about a news outlet, but someone has made a documentary.

Re:Diebold?

[Chris Mattern]

At worst they are guilty of treason,

Jeez, we went around this particular block on the last Diebold story. Treason is strictly (and narrowly) defined in the constitution itself and no act Diebold has been accused of even comes close to matching that definition. You have to either be making war on the US or giving aid and comfort to those who are.

Re:Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any such list that doesn't include Diebold is lacking. Once a well respected manufacturer of safes, vaults, and eventually ATM machines, they now are known for creating voting machines that can't count, and in some cases have shown evidence of maliciousness in subverting the democratic process. At worst they are guilty of treason, at best they are guilty of selling useless and harmful junk. At least Microsoft at their worst is entertaining (Bob, Clippy); Diebold is disgusting.

You have no clue what your talking about.

Re:Diebold?

[Rufus211]

Actually the fact they make crappy voting machines is fairly well known. Diebold is (trying to) sell off their voting division because it's been such a nightmare. From some random local news outlet's report:

The deal, announced before the markets opened Thursday, effectively closes the chapter on a sore spot in Diebold's storied 150-year history.

"The elections business has been a PR nightmare and a huge distraction for management," said analyst Gil Luria, vice president of research for Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. in Los Angeles.

Yeah there hasn't been a front-page article in USA Today or anything like that. However anyone that knows about Diebold (aka not most of the general public) certainly know how much they've screwed up.

Re:Diebold?

[CodeBuster]

If some news outlet actually did a hard hitting expose on them, maybe, MAYBE, they'd fall from grace.

If you asked random people off the street what they thought about Diebold the responses would probably be along the lines of "Diebold?", "Who are they?" or "Never heard of them". Diebold is way too far below the public radar to attract a hard hitting expose from any major news organization.

Re:Diebold?

[afabbro]

they now are known for creating voting machines that can't count, and in some cases have shown evidence of maliciousness in subverting the democratic process. At worst they are guilty of treason,

Do you need a towel to wipe that foam off your chin? For someone who evidently has never read the constitution (and its definition of treason), you sure are getting your bowels in an uproar over software bugs.

Re:Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

The regime that controlled this country during 2001-2009 and plunged us into utter chaos was most definitely treasonous. If Diebold's voting machines were rigged to ensure that said regime rose to and remained in power, they're guilty of treason. Don't be a Bush/Cheney apologist.

Re:Diebold?

[troll8901]

AOnce a well respected manufacturer of safes, vaults, and eventually ATM machines, they now are known for creating voting machines that can't count, and in some cases have shown evidence of maliciousness in subverting the democratic process.

I remember reading the Diebold article (which I agree can never be trusted), that:

• Diebold never made voting machines. Instead, they purchased Global Election Systems in 2002.
• Diebold has recently sold Premier Election Solutions to Election Systems & Software.

I still feel sorry for Stephen Heller, who I believe did the right thing, and got punished for it.

Re:Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

"At least Microsoft at their worst is entertaining (Bob, Clippy);"

I doubt anyone would consider "Clippy" the worst of Microsoft. Far many more options. What about all the security issues?

Re:Diebold?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. And I'd like to point out to various AM radio quacks that "aid and comfort" means things like sheltering their soldiers in your home, or giving them arms and medical supplies, not just saying things about them that aren't as nasty as the AM radio quacks demand.
  It certainly isn't "questioning the reasons for war."

Re:Diebold?

[phantomfive]

Strangely enough, we are not lawyers, nor are we in a law discussion, nor is treason the way it is defined in the constitution legally binding on every conversation. Conspiring to destroy the democratic process is enough of a betrayal for me to call it treason, by any reasonably dictionary (assuming that's what they did).

Do you only use legal speech in all your conversations? That must be horribly boring.

Re:Diebold?

[Chris Mattern]

If Diebold's voting machines were rigged to ensure that said regime rose to and remained in power, they're guilty of treason. Don't be a Bush/Cheney apologist.

If you ridiculously exaggerate the sins of your political opponents, you're only undermining your own arguments. Don't be a moron.

Re:Diebold?

[DarkEmpath]

Once a well respected manufacturer of safes, vaults, and eventually ATM machines

ATM machines? You really just said ATM machines? Seriously, GTFO out!

Old modems

[Junior J. Junior III]

3Com/USRobotics should be on this list.

Re:Old modems

[Jeng]

But hey, at least in the future they'll produce some bad ass psychotic robots.

Re:Old modems

[Just Some Guy]

Are those really tarnished brands, though? Or just ones that fell by the wayside? I haven't seen their gear in years, but the last I did see was pretty decent.

Re:Old modems

[Xiaran]

Also Borland. Many programmer out there like me cut their teeth using Borland Pascal/C/C++.... then we went thru a brief optimism with Delphi... then the insane Inprise name change... then a long spiral into insignificance. RIP Borland.

Re:Old modems

[Anonymous Coward]

Delphi still exists and is now at version D2010. It is still one of the quickest ways to write and deploy Win32 apps.

Re:Old modems

[Anonymous Coward]

then we went thru a brief optimism with Delphi...

...to which Borland replied, "I don't think so, Tim."

Oh wait, that's the wrong Borland. My bad.

Re:Old modems

[TheRealFixer]

Well, their brand was pretty tarnished in the enterprise market when they just decided to abandon their (fairly popular) product lines because they didn't want to have to try and compete with Cisco.

Re:Old modems

[thetoadwarrior]

I wouldn't really say they're tarnished. They're still around and while their stock prices have seen better days, they're not at their worst point and on the rise so it's certainly in better shape than most everyone on that list.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=COMS#chart7:symbol=coms;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Re:Old modems

[shadowbearer]

  Yes!

  I bought Borland's Turbo Pascal when it came out, and built my first game with it. It was orders of magnitude better than any other programming language software - especially for pascal - that you could buy for the IBM PC at the time. Just the code editor ALONE was worth the 80 bucks or so I think I spent on it. It defined - and still does in some ways - my understanding of what professionally written software was all about.

  (I remember some time later showing it to my Pascal instructor at college, and he agreed that it was helluva lot better than the pascal software we worked with there - so much so that he tried to get the college to buy from Borland, but they were already tied in to a contract so it never happened. )

SB

 

Re:Old modems

[petermgreen]

Delphi is nice but they messed arround with enterprisy features without doing the basics like a converting the VCL to unicode (iirc they did this eventually with 2010 but they had already fallen by then).

They briefly tried to go back to the old model with some free and low-cost versions for non-enterprise users under the old "turbo" brand but those seem to have dissapeared again now :(

Re:Old modems

[drinkypoo]

I just have an issue mostly with AT&T being on the list, but only for the justification. Their brand is instantly recognizable... as Evil. I don't know much of anyone who doesn't think their continued existence is anything but unconscionable. The author is quite wrong about Polaroid digital cameras, they do have a distinguishing mark: the mark of crap. Polaroid cameras have crap hardware and crap software, and are to be avoided at all costs. Packard-Bell, of course, is one of the most deserving names on that sucker... but who can argue with C= or SCO?

Re:Old modems

[mrmeval]

Radio Shack should be on it. They gutted their hobbyists section and became a toy store. Now with the rise of the techno-artists they have a meager selection of parts with no logic behind them and 35 dollar laser pointers.

Radio Shack

[mdsolar]

Junk products and won't honor extended warranties they sell.

Re:Radio Shack

[clone53421]

Good one.

In the day, Radio Shack was where you went to get your electronic supplies... resistors, transistors, LEDs, capacitors, etc.

Nobody buys them anymore. Radio Shack turned into a seller of overpriced calculators and cellphones.

Re:Radio Shack

[Jeng]

Radio Shack buys some of the worst product lines out there.

Went there for a phone recharger since I figure that they are now primarily a cell phone re-seller. They couldn't just sell me a phone car charger, they had instead a phone car charger system. You buy the base charger for about the cost of a regular recharger, then on top of that you then buy the specific adapter for the phone that again costs nearly the same amount as a cheapo car charger on its own.

The management of Radio Shack is on Crack.

The only thing I buy from Radio Shack now is odd ball batteries.

Re:Radio Shack

[MightyMartian]

Tandy/Radio Shack is a really sad story. From the late '70s and into the mid-80s they produced a helluva lot of computers, including the Model 100, which was pretty much the first real notebook computer (compare it to the Osbornes, where you literally packed around a monster with a CRT screen). The first *nix machine I ever worked on was a Tandy 6000 with a Motorola 68000 chip, a Z80 I/O copressor, 1mb of RAM, two 20mb hard drives and a five port RS232 card. For the time, the machine kicked some serious ass, and we were using it into the mid-1990s for the multiuser accounting software, using dumb terminals. They, like Commodore, made bad decisions, like sticking with an 8bit CPU for the CoCo3 instead of moving into the 16bit world (except with their PC clones).

Last but not least, Radio Shack made some of the best beginners programming manuals out there. I learned BASIC on a 20k MC-10 (the CoCo cousin that ran a 6803 and had a chiclet keyboard), and even wrote a PacMan-like game using semigraphics mode.

Re:Radio Shack

[tautog]

Funny Radio Shack story - stopped into the local store a few years ago to pick up some random connectors, etc. Before offering to help me find what I needed, was offered a cell phone and then informed that they have to special order everything on my list. I asked them what they DO offer and was basically told cell phones and a few cables.

My response: "So you're essentially a more expensive and less useful version of Best Buy?".

The guy gave me a foul look and I turned on my heel and left.

For the record, I worked at Radio Shack for a year or so way back when. You were required to take and pass training courses (on basic electrical theory and how to identify and match components such as resistors, capactors, etc) and failure to do so meant termination.

I refuse to even enter their stores anymore.

Re:Radio Shack

[Thud457]

You know they've run out of ideas and swirling around the drain when they think it's a good idea to change the name they've been using for 50 years.

Now they want to be called "The Shack".

Re:Radio Shack

[kbielefe]

I have to agree, pretty sad. I still wander in once or twice a year. Last time I went in I told them I was looking for some solder wick. The salesman went and looked, then told me they didn't have any. I looked myself anyway, and sure enough he was looking straight at it, but it was labeled desoldering braid. I still remember as a kid when I could go in for something like an LED and they would recommend a current limiting resistor. Now, I go in for solder wick and they recommend a new cell phone to go with it, and they couldn't tell a transistor from a resistor if their life depended on it.

Re:Radio Shack

[clone53421]

Yeah... I had one of the Tandy PC-7 pocket computers (a re-branded copy of the Casio fx-5200P).

I wrote programs for that thing... I still remember trying to eke out the most of its limited display and memory (1.5k should be enough for anybody!). It had a single array for its variables, which could be referenced through the variable names A-Z, or by base names followed by array offsets, e.g. B[2] is the 2nd slot beyond B (i.e. the same as D).

Each variable could hold either a number or a maximum of 7-character string value (if you put a $ after the variable name). It also had a special string variable that held something like 26 characters. You could adjust the size of the program/variable allocations... less than 26 variables and Z, Y, X, etc. disappeared; more than 26, and you could only access some of them through Z[n] or similar.

By leaving out spaces that weren’t necessarily required by the BASIC interpreter, you could also save a precious few bytes of space, I discovered... 10PRINT"A"; is two bytes smaller than 10 PRINT "A";.

Re:Radio Shack

[Tumbleweed]

In the day, Radio Shack was where you went to get your electronic supplies... resistors, transistors, LEDs, capacitors, etc.

I've a NIB CoCo3 and a NIB Tandy Model 102 here, waiting to be played with. Don't forget the days of 8-bit glory, kids!

Re:Radio Shack

[MightyMartian]

Now, I go in for solder wick and they recommend a new cell phone to go with it, and they couldn't tell a transistor from a resistor if their life depended on it.

The last time I went into Radio Shack, the couldn't tell the difference between a cellphone and a resistor. I'm telling you, my local store was populated by some of the dumbest people who ever lived.

Re:Radio Shack

[YrWrstNtmr]

Funny Radio Shack story - stopped into the local store a few years ago to pick up some random connectors, etc. Before offering to help me find what I needed, was offered a cell phone and then informed that they have to special order everything on my list. I asked them what they DO offer and was basically told cell phones and a few cables.

Similar. A few years ago (03/04) I bought a gumstick size vid camera. It came with a 110v wallwart. Wanting to use it mobile/helmetcam, I set about to build a battery pack for it. Camcorder in the backpack, gumstick feeding into it.

At RadioShack, I showed the guy both ends..."I need to mate X + Y".
'We don't have anything like that'
"yes you do, this is RadioShack!"

He walked off looking confused. I rooted around in the bins for a few minutes, and found the connector I needed.

As I paid the $2.50, he asked me if I needed a new cellphone and associated plan. [facepalm]

Re:Radio Shack

[clone53421]

I had a Tandy PC-7, which vanished from a computer lab while I was in college... it would have almost been funny, if it hadn’t been so much like an old friend to me, because it was well into the era of the TI-89 already when that happened. Whoever took it likely ended up throwing it away.

Re:Radio Shack

[Trepidity]

Between The Shack and The Hut, it looks like 21st-century corporate America isn't willing to wait around for new Hoovervilles: they're going to build the shantytown themselves!

Now someone just has to think of a good product line for The Hovel...

Re:Radio Shack

[thetoadwarrior]

I think really they should go with Radio Cack.

Re:Radio Shack

[Anonymous Coward]

(compare it to the Osbornes, where you literally packed around a monster with a CRT screen)

No, that's an unfair comparison. The Model 100 was two years newer when two years meant a helluva lot. Also the Ossy came with ALL the top end business software, and for the price of that business software. It was a complete desktop business computer that you could take on an airplane, and operate from your car. That was, very briefly, friggin incredible.

The later 100 was an excellent and highly-trimmed book-size unit with basic but very good applications. It was no replacement for a desktop, but oh-my-god it was an excellent portable until the Web came on. It even ran on bloody AA batteries for like a week. It was a great, classic machine, without peer, no argument -- just it was not the same sort of thing or time as the Ossy.

(Wish I kept the 100. I finally gave it away because it was still useful. My Ossy sits in the closet for when I need to scare kids off the lawn.)

Re:Radio Shack

[Locke2005]

Sounds remarkably similar to "G.I. Joe's" spending a lot of money to rebrand themselves as "Joe's" about a year before going bankrupt and closing all stores. Oh wait, I guess they are now an online-only store. Good luck competing with Amazon, guys!

Re:Radio Shack

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Lance Armstrong is working for them.

Re:Radio Shack

[TheGratefulNet]

ever since they canceled the battery club card, things went downhill. fast.

Re:Radio Shack

[shadowbearer]

  They (the corporation, see my other post on this subject) don't want to hire competent people who know what they are doing.

  They want to hire sales drones they can pay a pittance.

  This has been true since I started shopping Radio Shack's back in the late 70s. Even if the manager wants to hire decent people, the corporation won't let them. It's a rare instance when a local manager manages to slip a competent person thru the hiring process.

SB

Re:Radio Shack

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently this has been misreported, and they're not changing the names of the actual stores to "The Shack", merely using it as a tag line in advertising.

They've been gone from the UK (where they were known as Tandy for legal reasons) for more than a decade now. They sold their stores to the Carphone Warehouse, although to be honest they had already moved away from being the parts-based store people once knew them for by then (much like in the US now).

Re:Radio Shack

[TheGratefulNet]

Now they want to be called "The Shack".

ie, the candy shack. they sell candy now. ugh.

Re:Radio Shack

[Concerned Onlooker]

Well, for those of you not old enough to remember, Radio Shack is actually better than it was about 8-9 years ago. You couldn't buy an 89 cent connector without having to give your phone number and zip code. And the sales people weren't helpful so much as they were like gnats buzzing about.

Now the sales people have learned to back off and you don't have to go through some ridiculous data exchange just to buy a resistor. And speaking of which, Radio Shack is OK in my book simply for the fact that they are pretty much the sole remaining store in my area (Los Angeles)--aside from making a major trek to Fry's--that actually carries a few electronics components. It's very handy when you are in the middle of a project and you you can't wait to mail order a 10K resistor.

Re:Radio Shack

[sfm]

I'm reminded of the radio Shack slogan:

You've got questions, we've got blank stares

Re:Radio Shack

[jonwil]

Its not just about the money, they dont want to hire anyone that actually KNOWS something about the stuff they sell because someone like that will be a lot less likely to push and more likely to, ya, know, actually sell people what they WANT (items that probably make RS a lot less profit than the cellphone crap)

Re:Radio Shack

[spiffmastercow]

They should rebrand as the love shack, and sell porn.. That's a market that will never have a recession.

Re:Radio Shack

[Dun Malg]

Ugh. I used to love Radio Shack. Need an opto-isolator and a 100K linear taper pot? Bam! hey had 'em.

Now, it's "you got questions, we got cellphones!"

Re:Radio Shack

[SharpFang]

Yes, I'm interested.

Please, open it. I wanted to see the connectors.

The screws too. I want to see the motherboard. How am I going to drive an RC plane with this thing if it doesn't have at least RS-232 on board? What you mean lose warranty? So can you install a RS-232 connector on it so that I don't lose warranty installing it? ...cell phones open up a huge field for annoying deserving, clueless sellers.

Re:Radio Shack

[Boogaroo]

I'd give you that if it weren't for the ridiculous prices they have on the rest of the items in the store.

Last time I needed a mini-stereo to Video/Stereo RCA cable, they wanted $27.99. Granted, Best Buy wanted $29.99 and Circuit City only had the Monster branded one for $59.99...
BUT IT'S JUST A $3 CABLE!

I wanted it right away and would have paid maybe $10, but instead I went home and went on ebay and got it for $2.50 plus $3 shipping.

I'm perfectly willing to pay a markup, but not a 1000% markup.

Re:Radio Shack

[BeaverCleaver]

Australian/New Zealand readers can relate this to Dick Smith Electronics. Used to sell individual components, and always have at least one nerd on duty who at least knew what they were. Now they're just trying to emulate harvey norman and JB hifi selling TVs and stereos, but with a smaller selection, higher prices, and dumber staff. Component sales have also completely disappeared - at least Radio Shack can still sell a few overpriced resistors, which although expensive is a lot quicker than mail order.

Yes, I'm a former employee of Dick Smith Electronics. It's a damn shame what's happened to them, and seems to me an insane business move to move out of your niche into an already saturated market.

Re:Radio Shack

[hughperkins]

To be fair, this can be partially seen as a reflection of market demands.

In China, there are many electronics buildings, with several floors of tiny family-run stores selling resistors, capacitors, op-amps, and so on.

The floors are structured like this:
- ground floor, mobile phones, and more mobile phones. This is where most people go
- second floor, computer accessories: portable hard drives and so on
- third floor: electronics: resistors, capacitors and so on

Why sell a thousand resistors for a couple of dollars, making a margin of what 10 cents? ... when you can sell a mobile phone and plan for several hundred dollars, with a markup of half that?

Re:Radio Shack

[AaronLawrence]

Fortunately, Jaycar is picking up the slack and taking all that business off them nicely. Dick Smith themselves don't seem to care and even once told me to go to Jaycar instead.

Re:Radio Shack

[Walter White]

Good one.

In the day, Radio Shack was where you went to get your electronic supplies... resistors, transistors, LEDs, capacitors, etc.

Nobody buys them anymore. Radio Shack turned into a seller of overpriced calculators and cellphones.

This nobody needed some 1N5404 diodes to fix the charging system on a 1975 Wheel Horse tractor and found them at Radio Shack. They still have some of that stuff.

Re:Radio Shack

[tautog]

The store where I worked (1994-5) was in a rural community (we sold a LOT of high gain TV antennas and CB radios, etc), so we didn't push the ID thing too hard. Usually, we asked IF we could have it and if refused, would bypass the entry.

But, we had a ton of repeat customers, so we knew them and didn't even have to ask their names. Most liked that we knew them in that small town sort of way.

The flipside to being in the boonies is that you had some real cretins from the deep hills. I seem to remember a couple of them ended up being banished because they were so difficult to deal with.

Re:Radio Shack

[OrangeCatholic]

>They, like Commodore, made bad decisions, like sticking with an 8bit CPU for the CoCo3 instead of moving into the 16bit world (except with their PC clones).

How about the fact that Tandy's weren't PC-compatible? I mean, everybody knew the hardware was identical to PC hardware, but it wasn't guaranteed to work. Game boxes listed "IBM" and "Tandy" compatibility separately. Wiki says the keyboard and parallel ports were proprietary. Not all dos versions worked.

It seems the PC sphere is littered with the carcasses of companies that tried to make their hardware proprietary. Tandy, Compaq. IBM succeeded despite their PC business. Same with Apple. Not to mention SGI, Sun, DEC, and every other workstation manufacturer. BeBox and Amiga, nice try. RISC...hey, lets take something that conforms to Moore's law, and make it even cheaper! That's useful...

It's one bright light in an otherwise dismal world, PC architecture is still cheap and agreed-upon.

Where would 3d gaming be without...

[rjejr]

3dfx?

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[MBGMorden]

Indeed. I remember back when if you didn't have a Voodoo card then you don't really have a 3d accelerator. You might have a little toy that could run some demos they included in the box, but not really play games. Then the Nvidia Riva128 came out and it was "Ok". "Almost as good". Nobody seriously into gaming were running them but they were a good makeshift solution.

My how the tables have turned in a little over a decade.

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[Tumbleweed]

Indeed. I remember back when if you didn't have a Voodoo card then you don't really have a 3d accelerator.

Number 9, Matrox, etc. The glory years, where we actually had a choice of more than 2 vendors. *sigh*

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[Bassman59]

Indeed. I remember back when if you didn't have a Voodoo card then you don't really have a 3d accelerator.

Number 9, Matrox, etc. The glory years, where we actually had a choice of more than 2 vendors. *sigh*

While Matrox still plays in the video-card arena, their real strengths are in frame grabbers (analog in, Camera Link in, etc) and software support for them. Somewhat pricey but the stuff works well and their support is pretty good.

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[daoine_sidhe]

YES, great reference...I still have my trusty Voodoo 5 5500. And people think SLI is a new thing....

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[FreonTrip]

Just thinking about it makes me misty-eyed...

S3: The Virge ruined what was previously a very solid reputation. Unable to create decent drivers for subsequent cards (and finally, terminally poisoned by the Savage2000), they were eaten by VIA and eke out an existence creating integrated video chipsets and the occasional low-volume discrete part.

3dfx: From top of the heap to bankrupt and eaten by nVidia in three short years. A valuable cautionary tale in how not to manage ongoing R&D.

Matrox: Respectable and very chic, up to the G400 Max. Fell off the radar for nearly four years, debuted the Parhelia to muted response, now focus on frame grabbers and professional / CAD cards. Last I checked their OpenGL driver still left something to be desired.

There were so many others: Oak Technologies, SiS (bahahahahaha), Trident (see previous parentheticals), Tseng Labs...

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[_merlin]

Oak Technologies is alive and well. They just got out of video cards when they realised they couldn't compete, and decided to concentrate on their core business - PostScript engines. My big colour laser has an Oak Technologies PostScript runtime card that works very nicely.

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[spiffmastercow]

Then the GeForce came out. I almost had to sue an online retailer because it took him 2 months to send my damn video card after he had already cashed the check.

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[jabelli]

#9 was great, I was sorry when they went bust like most of the others. I had a #9 in my old Dell, and was having some problem with either Windows or some game. #9 support told me it was a BIOS problem, and sent me a new BIOS for the video card. No, they didn't email me a flash update (I can't remember if I even had email yet at the time), they mailed me a big fat EPROM stuck in a piece of carbon anti-static foam inside a padded envelope at no charge. That's customer service.

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[Anonymous Coward]

While 3dfx *offers prayer* isn't around anymore, they never really tarnished their reputation. Perhaps the market was too fast and nVidia bought them up before they could, but they should not be placed on this list. They would go on a list of great companies killed by good intentions.

Radio Shack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Radio Shack probably should have been on there somewhere too...Way back when, they weren't too bad of a place to get some electronics stuff, back in the Heathkit days... Oh well...

Re:Radio Shack?

[HTH NE1]

Radio Shack doesn't qualify since it hasn't died as a company before whoring its trademark name out to substandard products.

DiVX would qualify if the new product wasn't so much better than the disposable cheap DVDs it was created under. It is a counter-example to Napster.

AIDS laxatives doesn't qualify because its name was co-opted for a disease, not volunteered.

The brand Circuit City is now owned by Systemax Inc. Whether they'll defile the name is yet to be seen.

Re:Radio Shack?

[Dun Malg]

AIDS laxatives doesn't qualify because its name was co-opted for a disease, not volunteered.

1) It was Ayds
2) it was an appetite suppressant, not a laxative

Re:Radio Shack?

[Deadstick]

That was back in the days when they were putting the real electronics stores out of business. Serves 'em right.

rj

Re:Radio Shack?

[AK Marc]

DiVX would qualify if the new product wasn't so much better than the disposable cheap DVDs it was created under.

DivX ;) (the CODEC company) is unrelated to DIVX the failed player attempt. There were no shared employees, no passage of IP rights (including the name, which was stolen and an obvious trademark infringement). They are only the same brand to people that don't know any better, like thinking that the Apple music company (form the Beatles) is the same as Apple computer. They are unrelated, but you can buy music from either (and Apple the music company should have won their trademark infringement case, but that's beside the point).

The brand Circuit City is now owned by Systemax Inc. Whether they'll defile the name is yet to be seen.

I don't think it's possible. They could buy the brand Satan City and couldn't have any worse of a brand to start with. You can't defile that which defiled itself.

IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Trepidity]

It used to stand unambiguously for large-format filming (49 x 70 mm per frame), projected on large screens (around 53 x 72 ft). There were some variations, like the projection on a concave screen of OmniMAX (now IMAX Dome), but the general brand made sense. IMAX meant high-resolution film, projected on large screens.

But for presumably commercial reasons related to a deal with theatre chain AMC, a large portion of theatres currently advertising "IMAX" films are actually projecting "IMAX Digital", a not-very-closely-related digital projection format. Film v. digital in theory I don't care much about, but the entire brand of IMAX=big is dispensed with with IMAX Digital's much smaller 28x58-ft screens. The digital projectors (dual 2K resolution projectors) also don't seem to be of sufficient resolution to match the quality of a 49x70mm film projector. As a result, it's not clear IMAX means a lot as a brand anymore, since any given theatre might well have a mostly normal sized screen and a not particularly high-resolution projector.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[omnichad]

It's funny that you mention the IMAX brand, but didn't mention their biggest screw-up. DVD's. I mean, what were they thinking? Something with barely double the resolution of VHS and less than a quarter of the resolution of standard film.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Anonymous Coward]

The complaint isn't with new technology, it's with the reuse of an established brand on an inferior product.

To use your example, this would be equivalent to re-branding DVD's as Blu-Ray discs. If you purchased a Blu-Ray disc, and it had a DVD-quality film on it, would that tarnish your impression of Blu-Ray?

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[iluvcapra]

If we're going to get into the film brands, no conversation is complete without a mention of Lucasfilm THX. Originally conceived as a quality-control system for movie sound, and having very strict technical requirements in the theater; George fired the inventor in the 90s and now they just slap the plaque on any theater that can write the check for the $100,000 licensing fee, and the THX name is stuck on cellphones and car stereos. Puke.

And don't get me started on Dolby.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Jeremy Erwin]

You could get IMAX films on VHS.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[MobyDisk]

Actually, I suspect this will happen a lot. I know many DVDs are really VHS upscaled. This was/is most common in Anime. I always find it _really_ weird when I see anime DVDs encoded in interlaced mode. Interlacing makes no sense on something that was drawn or digitally generated.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[tenton]

You don't know what you think you know.

Interlaced DVDs have nothing really to do with VHS. They're not upscaled VHS tapes by any stretch. The used to make some of the DVDs might be interlaced, but almost never are those masters VHS tapes (I say almost never because maybe there's an example of it happening at some point; I'm sure as hell not aware of it). At worst, Betacam tape (not the consumer BetaMax), more likely D2 tape. Well, these days, I'd like to hope it's DigiBeta or some other component format being sent.

The interlacing can come from multiple sources, it's usually from the editing process (via interlaced studio equipment). Sometimes these things were introduced by the Japanese company, sometimes they're introduced by the localization company.

And there's no point in making a BD with DVD level resolution on it; one can just make a DVD, which will play in a BD player (and not cutoff your market).

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Dun Malg]

DVD's. I mean, what were they thinking? Something with barely double the resolution of VHS and less than a quarter of the resolution of standard film.

DVD resolution is purely a function of the technology available. DVDs hard a hard capacity limit, which when combined with being stuck with MPEG2 as the best compression available, limited them to what they used. It's not like they decided 1/4 the resolution of film was "good enough". That was the best they could do.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the info, I was wondering about this. I went to a cinema for the first time in years the other day to see Avatar, mainly because it was 3D and supposed to be awesome. When I got the cineplex joint they had normal and IMAX theaters running. I think I went to an IMAX when I was a kid and I remember it being a huge dome and the screen is "all around you" feeling, and the seats were layed back like lounges.

So at Avatar I thought sweet, do the IMAX version and when I walked in I looked around and actually walked out again thinking I had the wrong door and went back to the concierge dude and checked which cimema I was supposed to be in. Turns out it was correct. The IMAX was bullshit, the screen was basically the same size as a normal theater, maybe a bit bigger but that was it. I fail to see what the difference is with IMAX, is there any other benefit?

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[omnichad]

The question is why did they do it at all? It hurts the name and brand of IMAX. They've built up this huge image (pun intended) of amazing 70mm film footage. Home release just tarnishes that. Only Blu-ray comes sort of close to being a good candidate for home release. But even that doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Anonymous Coward]

This was/is most common in Anime. I always find it _really_ weird when I see anime DVDs encoded in interlaced mode.

Funimation is now selling Blu-Ray discs that are nothing more than poorly-upscaled DVD sources pressed onto BD discs.

Yeah, so you can pay $50 for a BD copy of Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu, or just buy the DVD set for half that, play it in a nice DVD player (like the PS3), and have it look even better. No wonder anime distributors are dying.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you can't rely on thx or dolby certification, then how else do you know that the speakers you are buying are quality?

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[MobyDisk]

Interlaced DVDs have nothing really to do with VHS.

I never said they did. I was making two separate points.

You don't know what you think you know.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll remember that.

Tarnished

[CopaceticOpus]

A tarnished brand would be a once-great brand whose public image has faltered. Only some of these brands fit that description. Others (Commodore, Polaroid) still are held in high regard, though they have ceased to be profitable companies.

Brands that should have made the list: Hewlett-Packard, Monster Cables, AOL, Sony. Sony is the opposite of a brand like Polaroid, in that their public image has taken some hits, but they are still doing strong business. Microsoft would have qualified as tarnished two years ago, but they've made quite a comeback.

Re:Tarnished

[cinnamon colbert]

if u think polaroid ok, u not from boston the shafting of the employees that occured in the 90s by the imperial ceo was one of the great untold monstrositys of the decade

Re:Tarnished

[tenton]

Polaroid? Maybe you haven't seen the whoring out of their brand name; I recall CD burners and silly electronics brandished with their name.

Take a closer look at that list, they're all pretty much companies that aren't the original company anymore, at least when it comes to the use of their brand.

Re:Tarnished

[afabbro]

if u think polaroid ok, u not from boston the shafting of the employees that occured in the 90s by the imperial ceo was one of the great untold monstrositys of the decade

u not speak English.

Re:Tarnished

[Anonymous Coward]

well, if I had wanted to, I could have written grammatically correct sentences, with subjects and verbs and objects.
but it is so much fun to bring out the grammar haridans

Sony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rootkits on audio CDs? Seriously...

Re:Sony?

[Nerdfest]

There are still legions of 30+ year olds that think Sony means quality, as well as large number of PlayStation Fanboys that either don't know about Sony's anti-consume practices, or don't care. The good news is that they seem to be improving.

Re:Sony?

[Thud457]

Sony's kind of schizophrenic.

They still can build some pretty nice hardware.

And their media division keeps paranoidly figuring out ways to make it useless so you won't use it to steal their shit.

Here's another one not on the list...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot might I propose?

You have to rise to fall

[SuperKendall]

The article is about names that were once beloved, that have falled from grace.

From day 1 I challenge you to find anyone who "loved" Packard-Bell.

Re:You have to rise to fall

[iluvcapra]

I for one was surprised to hear they made radios in the Elder Times. I was completely unaware.

Re:You have to rise to fall

[Anonymous Coward]

Packard-Bell was a respected brand for much of the 20th century. It wasn't until the Japanese took over consumer electronics and the company name was sold to an offshore investor who made crappy computers that the name fell from grace.

Re:You have to rise to fall

[dwillden]

Go to Europe, they are quite respected there, or so I've been told.

Re:You have to rise to fall

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one was surprised to hear they made radios in the Elder Times. I was completely unaware.

"They" were apparently a totally different company whose name the newer- and otherwise unrelated- computer manufacturer bought. Though if you read the article, they tried to trade off their "history" anyway.

Personally, I'm sure that the primary motivation behind them purchasing that name was its similarity to that of Hewlett Packard and the Bell telephone companies. It's easy to mock, but *I* thought they had something do do with the former at one stage (assuming it was some sort of joint venture a la Fujitsu Siemens).

Re:You have to rise to fall

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Europe, they are quite respected there, or so I've been told.

They're not so much respected here as being just another brand without the godawful associations they apparently have in the US.

Re:You have to rise to fall

[Somegeek]

The radios were made by an older, different company. The latter computer company purchased the rights to the Packard Bell name to try to cash in on the existing goodwill that the name had as an old American manufacturer of electronics.

Where's AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL used to be respected back in the early 1990's by more people than you'd think.

In 1993 if you asked a typical AOL user "Do you have Internet access?" they'd say "No, but I have AOL, you should get that too, it's really cool."

I'd just shake my head and walk away.

And even years later, AOL was still respected by a lot of people, I remember back in 2000 or so people would have conversations such as:

Ann: "Why don't you get cable?"

Jenny: "Are you nuts?! You can't beat AOL, I still have 2000 free minutes on my AOL dialup, LOL!"

reverse effect?

[cashman73]

What about the reverse effect of this? What I mean by that, are brands that went from being very poor, bottom dwelling no name brands to being something somewhat respected? Like DIVX, which went from being a much hated, big brotherish "movie rental" company, to a company that makes a widely used video player and format for internet video today. Granted, the **AA still doesn't give them much credit, but consumers seem to like it,. . .

Re:reverse effect?

[karnal]

Those are two totally seperate entities. If I recall, Divx the format was around before DIVX the scheme to rent you physical product.

Re:reverse effect?

[omnichad]

DIVX is not even the same company as who created DivX. How they weren't sued to oblivion, I have no idea.

Re:reverse effect?

[jmcbain]

Like any young kid, you are confusing DIVX (Digital Video Express self-destructing video discs) from Circuit City with "DivX :-)" the codec and codec company. They are completely unrelated. In fact, the "DivX ;-)" name has a winky emoticon to signify that it's mocking the DIVX name. I see a lot of you twenty-somethings online these days. Whenever an old-timer like me (and I'm in my 30s) says that DIVX sucked, you folks immediately spout "but but but DivX plays fine on my computer." Impressive.

Re:reverse effect?

[Thing 1]

Recall fail: "The winking emoticon in the early "DivX ;-)" codec name was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the failed DIVX system.[2]"

From wikipedia.

Re:reverse effect?

[cashman73]

You mean, that they're completely unrelated in a similar sense to the products that Westinghouse is now lending its brand name to that are also completely unrelated (RTFA)?

Re:reverse effect?

[cashman73]

They probably weren't sued into oblivion because the original DIVX trademark was simply abandoned; trademarks are only valid as long as the owner defends it. Plus, Circuit City had other things to worry about, like it's core business going to the sh*tter,...

Re:reverse effect?

[jmcbain]

NO. I am mean that DIVX and DivX ;-) are completely unrelated. The latter is a separate company (based on a codec) and is actually making intentional mockery of the former. Go read the wikipedia articles that I included. Your example of Westinghouse is fallacious; at the very least, the name Westinghouse today is ostensibly related to the Westinghouse of old with the entire name kept intact and in good faith. To extend the DIVX and DivX ;-) situation to Westinghouse, it would be like the difference between an older brand Westinghouse and a new brand "W3st1nghaus L:0L". See what I did there? I put in some lolcode for you kids to understand.

Re:reverse effect?

[HTH NE1]

DIVX is not even the same company as who created DivX.

Neither is the Westinghouse that made my 47" HD Monitor and the candelabra bulbs I bought yesterday the same company it was before it bought-and-became CBS.

How they weren't sued to oblivion, I have no idea.

Which one? Oh, right: either one.

Anyway, the rules are: was a big name and successful, died, then whored out their trademarked name recognition for unrelated and usually substandard products. Digital VIdeo eXpress was never successful and existed only inside the doors of Circuit City; the codec is.

Re:reverse effect?

[omnichad]

The difference is that the DIVX name wasn't licensed out. It was just taken by another group after the name was abandoned.

Re:reverse effect?

[itsenrique]

thats not the same brand dude. the DivX codec was a play on the name DIVX.

Re:reverse effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah everyone outside of the US is a 20 something. Or do you mean that everyone who hasn't read Wiki is a 20 something? You definitely don't seem like your just being an ass trying to show off that you either knew one of the few stores in the world that had it or have read the Wiki.

Re:reverse effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a week away from being 23.

I remember DIVX sucking. I remember DivX ;-) being a godsend (among pirates, anyways).

Then I remember DivX dropping the ;-) and going commercial. It became yet another logo to stick on your dvd player, but offered nothing that you couldn't get elsewhere. Even at the time, VP6 was giving better results, to say nothing of x264 or even WMV9.

They also killed their high quality video streaming website, which was the only remaining thing that excelled with the DivX name.

I would say they deserve a footnote of a mention as a tarnished brand, but the brand was only ever truly strong with pirates. The general masses never really knew what DivX was and they never really cared.

To be Fair...

[clinko]

How about Slashdot?

I know, we're the converted, but think about how Gizmodo and Engadget have changed how "Tech News" is reported.

Slashdot used to be the ONLY good place to get tech news. I remember telling someone "Slashdot is like the 'What's New' of Popular Mechanics, but free!"

I wouldn't even mention slashdot now. I'm not leaving, but I don't see any reason to convert others...

Re:To be Fair...

[dkleinsc]

I respectfully disagree, for several key reasons:
1. There are still some geek celebrities that pop in here from time to time. If we're talking Star Trek, it's not totally uncommon for CleverNickName to show up. Bruce Perens will not infrequently make an appearance on issues he knows about (or when the article is about something he did). And so forth.

2. There are still some comments that are insightful / interesting / informative that are modded as such. It ain't universal, but it's there. And plus, some of the funny comments really are funny.

3. There's a lot less spam-type articles. Roland and * * Beatles Beatles are both not showing up anymore. There's still the occasional slashvertisement, but they're less common than they used to be.

It's not, and hasn't been for a really long time, just about reporting technology news.

Re:To be Fair...

[scatterfingers]

You read the discussions on this site (who cares about news, really? and have they ever?) and you can't think of anything to recommend Slashdot? Look, I know this site used to be way cooler back when everything was way cooler, but Slashdot is doing just fine, thanks, and if you want to have a really, really good discussion about anything (including the good old days when Heathkit was the shit and we were all building our own shortwave radios) this is the place to go. Where else? Engaget? Gizmodo? Not even close. Not even in the same universe.

Re:To be Fair...

[selven]

This is not a news site. This is a discussion site. And that's the way I like it.

Re:To be Fair...

[Aladrin]

Gizmodo and Engadget have way, way, way too much crap posted. Not that Slashdot doesn't post crap, but the 'signal to noise ratio' is a lot better here.

Re:To be Fair...

[E IS mC(Square)]

WTF? Not that I hold /. as epitome of geek site, but are you seriously saying crap like engadget and apple-sucking gizmodo are better? I don't want to into details, but why don't you get the fuck off to those sites, like, NOW?

Re:To be Fair...

[mindbrane]

I took a 4 year leave from /. (you're welcome) and came back (there's little you can do about it) after having taken a look at most of the prominent alternatives. There are two outstanding reasons I returned to Slashdot. First /. is a decent tech site that has a bias toward open source. I first came here in the late 90's to learn about Linux. Secondly the fine print still reads the same: All comments are owned by the poster. Slashdot remains a place where I can see the tech world through an Open Source lens, freely post my opinions and retain ownership and responsibility for said comments. And I appreciate /. such as it is.

Re:To be Fair...

[Idbar]

I was thinking about writing this as AC, but I guess I have karma to burn.

I respectfully disagree, gizmodo is overwhelming, so it is Engadget. Slashdot has one feature I like the most, the commenting system with mod points.

However, if this "special treatment" to Apple products and some other mixed propaganda/advertisement continues, people will end up leaving. I hope not, because I've been having lots of fun here, reading comments.
As a foreigner in the US, I believe this site has still some valuable roots, but the little changes oriented heavily towards advertisement makes me think that they have become a little biased to report.

Dear Slashdot, I know that you're very US centric. But please give some credit to the community that supports and enjoys reading this website, and don't forget about us.

Re:To be Fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

What would go a long way towards Slashdot retaining it's usefulness is if they'd refrain from re-posting these list articles. How is "The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands In Tech" any more substantive than "50 Ways To Please Your Man"? It's not. These list posts are useless linkbait for blogs, and it's sad that what was a promising new medium (Remember reading about how blogs were going to change the world? Notice how no one says that anymore?) tries so hard now to emulate the junky checkout-line fodder that magazines became. Hell, it's all published by the same companies now anyway.

Those articles don't need to be here, and the "they should add COMPANY X to the list! Because this one time..." comments don't need to be here either.

I know...don't like it, don't read it. I didn't. But I felt compelled to say that we're witnessing the passing of a decent forum. It's not the end of the world, but I am sad to see it go. (They've probably got more readers now than ever, but financial success is not what I'm referring to.)

The reason why I stay anonymous these days is not cowardice, it's apathy. Meh.

Re:To be Fair...

[DerekLyons]

Indeed. Slashdot has changed from largely tech reporting (not just IT, but space, science, etc. etc.), to more and more political reporting (not just national politics, but IT politics) and outright religious reporting (Linux, Apple, Google).
 
Columbine, 9/11, and Groklaw changed Slashdot irrevocably.

Re:To be Fair...

[0xdeadbeef]

No, Reddit and Digg have killed Slashdot. What's the point of using editors as gatekeepers when they refuse to edit?

Re:To be Fair...

[Lehk228]

slashdot has gotten better over the years.

do you know how long it's been since i came across one of the old demographics surveys that used to get posted. Though i never quite understood the imporance of knowing if i was homosexual or african american, and the pollsters always used such crude language.

Re:To be Fair...

[CharlieG]

Back when, the religious posts were not as ingrained - you would actually see reasoned discussions of the pros/cons of Microsoft Technology, but that's been gone a LONG long time (Look at my user ID - and it's not my original one - I lost the password to that one)

Re:To be Fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much the dumbest comment I have seen in a while. All the sheeple get caught in engadget/gizmodo not even realizing youre reading a fucking blog. If you asked around where I work who actually relies o n gizmodo for technical advice you would hear crickets

Re:To be Fair...

[ChrisMaple]

You missed the news. Roland isn't showing up anywhere any more.

Re:To be Fair...

[DerekLyons]

My UID is higher than yours, but it still goes back a long ways... :) But you're right, on many topics (not just IT/Tech 'religion'), reasoned discussion has long since been replace by dogma and group think.

Re:To be Fair...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

I'm not so sure...I seem to recall that he somehow had an article published here a day or so after the announcement of his death (too lazy to look it up though). Also, I'm sure his articles will get duped at least a few dozen times in the next five years.

Re:To be Fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is too funny. 'What's New' is in Popular Science not Popular Mechanics.

Re:To be Fair...

[SharpFang]

Primarily, Slashdot profile has vastly shifted towards Law&Freedom in the tech world. Way less raw tech news, way fewer articles on new devices, new tech, new software and so on. Instead, it has a lot of articles on "Your Rights Online", censorship, politics affecting the net, the war of RIAA vs pirates, freedom of speech and violations against it and so on. It is an excellent news source if this is what interests you, and I visit slashdot precisely for these stories. Devices? Gizmodo and Engadget. DIY - MAKE Blog (though it's not quite as ambitious and a bit too commercialized for my liking.) Kotaku for games too. I'd like to find a good site on news in the software field too, and something with good science news - for now Slashdot fulfills these two roles adequately but not optimally.

Re:To be Fair...

[orin]

@wilw has posted to Slashdot 4 times since late 2007. http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName/comments Didn't post in any of the new Star Trek movie threads. Probably no longer a regular. Certainly posts more regularly to places like Fark.com than here.

Re:To be Fair...

[linhares]

Slashdot is coming back in full force now that they are implementing a farmville app and the new "poke" feature.

Re:To be Fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

>reasoned discussion has long since been replace by dogma and group think.

Compared to other sites, where you can get insta-banned for cursing, Slashdot has a fatherly level of maturity by comparison.

Show me another website that tolerates the absolute worst of the worst kinds of verbal abuse that this site does.

Re:Harry McCracken Week Continues!!

[gregarican]

Looking at his pic I think he looks like he's put something over on us. Perhaps all of the recent articles on here, eh?

No Novell?

[Salo2112]

No Novell? They used to own the LAN, and now they feed off MS scraps....

Re:No Novell?

[Wyatt Earp]

Novell should me on the list, in 2000 they still had a good chunk of the LAN, sure down from say 1995, but a chunk, now where are they?

SGI should be on the list as well.

Some substitutions

[swordgeek]

Napster doesn't belong on that list, because at its height, it was never a great or proud company--just an early one.

Packard-Bell has been a joke for so long that hardly anyone young enough to care remembers when they weren't.

Netscape doesn't really exist. They acknowledge that, but still put it on the list. Same for Netscape, and (sorta) Compuserve.

There are some others I would add to the list, though: Silicon Graphics and Atari deserve top honours. Also, hugely powerful and profitable though it may be, Electronic Arts almost defines "tarnished brand," considering their origins. Also, how about Radio Shack? Can you even get parts there anymore?

Now if we jump into the audio world, there are more than anyone can count. Advent, Sansui, Nakamichi, Hafler, Scott, etc..

Re:Some substitutions

[Dutch Gun]

Good call, I was going to mention Atari. They essentially brought the first generation of videogames to the mass market, and then plummeted into obscurity when the videogame market crashed in the 80s. Incidentally, if you ever see a game with "Atari" on the label, know that it has nothing to do with the original company in any way. The name was the only thing they sold.

I'll throw out another one related to gaming, although it certainly wouldn't belong in the top lists anywhere: Sierra On-line. They made a bunch of magnificent games, such as the King's Quest series - some of the earliest PC games I played. The stories from a long-time developer working there were pretty astounding (in a horrible way), so it was no big surprise to me when they finally closed shop.

Re:Some substitutions

[Hurricane78]

Well, Napster was one of (!) the first. And despite it not even being the biggest by far, it was the one that got the most media coverage.
I remember using Scour Exchange back then. It was a wayy bigger network. So in my book, SX is the one to remember.
But hey, you can’t argue, that Napster fell from even that little grace, when they became a Bertelsmann pay-service with DRM.

Re:Some substitutions

[Tumbleweed]

Atari, Sierra On-Line

And another from the Golden Age of computing: Commodore, who, with the Amiga, had by far the biggest technological lead of any company in computing history in its time (except for IBM from a previous time (mainframe era), and then a later time (OS/2)), and blew it due to legendary incompetence. I mean, Atari really blew it with the ST line, but nowhere NEAR as badly as Commodore with Amiga.

Still, Atari blew it pretty badly with their 8-bit line before them, but they didn't have as big a tech lead with their 8-bit line as Commodore with the Amiga. I never knew until much later that the same guy who was mainly responsible for the brilliance of the Atari 800 was also the mastermind behind the Amiga (Jay Miner, RIP). *sigh* What could've been...

And then OS/2! *sniff* Alas, poor WPS...

Re:Some substitutions

[dwillden]

Did you even glance at TFA (I know, nobody RTFA), Commodore and Amiga are both addressed in it as the first company name dealt with.

Re:Some substitutions

[Tumbleweed]

Did you even glance at TFA (I know, nobody RTFA), Commodore and Amiga are both addressed in it as the first company name dealt with.

I was talking specifically about the Amiga, which TFA specifically did not address (the author talks about being confused about the current state of the Amiga, which is ridiculous - it's dead).

Re:Some substitutions

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if we jump into the audio world

No kidding. No highs, no lows, must be...

Re:Some substitutions

[Nemyst]

Speaking of Sierra, how about Lucasarts? They went from the likes of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango to crappy Star Wars tie-ins...

As for EA, I'd argue it would've been a fit contender some years ago, but they've improved their image and products a lot in the last few years. I think that deserves some recognition.

There are a few mores that I feel could've made the list, namely IBM (they're still around and strong in certain areas, but they were KINGS of computing back then) or Xerox (again, they were great innovators and now are just one business in a sector). I'd also argue that ATT made another large mistake: Bell Labs. This place was a centre of innovation and ingenuity, but do you really hear about them often nowadays?

Re:Some substitutions

[jonwil]

Bell Labs was able to do what they did because of the cross-subsidy system that AT&T had. AT&T Long Lines (long distance arm) charged a lot more than their costs and used the revenue to fund the high service standards at the local Bell companies and to fund the R&D at Bell Labs. Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of AT&T) also used profits from their products to fund Bell Labs.

The cross-subsidy setup was one of the big reasons why the government wanted to break up AT&T so much (another was heavy pressure and lobbying from companies like MCI and Sprint that wanted to get into long distance telecommunications)

totally wrong re sam walmart

[cinnamon colbert]

sam walmart was , love or hate em, a genius he figured out a much cheaper way to store and distribute goods to his stores; th other guys like kmart and sears wouldnt or coulndt copy him the results was that walmart had lower costs, so they could sell for less that they treat their employess like S*** is just a sideline

How about Tektronix?

[Chemisor]

Is Tektronix still making anything? It used to be THE brand for oscilloscopes, but I haven't heard anything about them since the 7000 series.

Re:How about Tektronix?

[Black Cardinal]

Like the other big test & measurement companies, they've lost a lot of their luster, but they still make good oscilloscopes. I bought an MSO 4054 from them two years ago, and have been pretty happy with it. Of course, it's more of a "disposable" scope than the classic analog scopes were.

Re:How about Tektronix?

[compro01]

Yeah, they still make stuff, most of the equipment in my college's electronics labs is Techtronix, though the quality seems to be going downhill since they started outsourcing the manufacturing.

Re:How about Tektronix?

[Bassman59]

Is Tektronix still making anything? It used to be THE brand for oscilloscopes, but I haven't heard anything about them since the 7000 series.

Absolutely, Tektronix is still in business. Though they were bought by Fluke a couple of years ago, they seem unaffected by that. There's still a 3-way race between Tek, Agilent and LeCroy in high-end 'scopes, but the good Tek stuff is still good.

I have a brand new DPO3054 sitting on my desk :)

Re:How about Tektronix?

[ChrisMaple]

Look at the Tektronix website, www.tek.com. Their products are expensive, and in my opinion all modern oscilloscopes are unjustifiably expensive. Modern semiconductor technology should make a 4 channel 100 MHz digital sampling oscilloscope available for under $1000 -- far under $1000. Somebody lacks vision or isn't trying hard enough.

Re:How about Tektronix?

[jabelli]

It's a matter of scale. The ones they make now would be that $1000 dream scope if they sold 10 million units a year, but they don't. There isn't a big enough market for that, and they last forever. At work, we have 3 tek scopes in just the engineering dept. The portable one has been around the world multiple times and just needs a new battery every 10 years and its yearly calibration, and the big old 2 channel crt digital and 4 channel LCD one just get their yearly calibration, and just work. The 2-chan one has a dead floppy drive, but I wrote software so you can just hang an iPAQ off the serial port and capture as many screens as you want.

digital

[tengu1sd]

Digital Equipment Corp, DEC, digital These folks started making test equipment, rivaled IBM when the PDP and VAX systems roamed the data centers. Their customer support was a pleasure to deal with. The only time a DEC field service engineer ever told me they didn't have a part in town, he told me it was coming in on a 2:00 pm flight and he'd be at my door by 3:00. A series of management by accountants slowly dissolved the company into take over bait. Despite making quality products they faded away. The low bidder trumps all.

Re:digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital Equipment Corp, DEC, digital These folks started making test equipment, rivaled IBM when the PDP and VAX systems roamed the data centers. Their customer support was a pleasure to deal with. The only time a DEC field service engineer ever told me they didn't have a part in town, he told me it was coming in on a 2:00 pm flight and he'd be at my door by 3:00. A series of management by accountants slowly dissolved the company into take over bait. Despite making quality products they faded away. The low bidder trumps all.

Ever accidentally or intentionally, pull the console cable on a PDP? It would immediately crash the machine. Great machine otherwise.

Re:digital

[BitterOak]

Don't forget DEC also had one of the first 64 bit CPUs to be widely used. And their filesystem AdvFS did just about everything ZFS does approximately 12 years earlier!

And the first time I ever used a computer as a kid was playing Dungeon on a VAX. I was using a DECWriter hardcopy terminal and I kept the printouts for a very long time. Looked for them recently when cleaning the house, but alas, they seem to be gone.

I couldn't believe it when they were bought out by Compaq. I just couldn't believe it.

Re:digital

[Anonymous Coward]

A series of management by accountants slowly dissolved the company into take over bait.

Don't know about that, I thought it was their missing the boat for the PC market.

We could all be running Alphas instead of Intel if digital was on the ball.

What about Wang? A legend in computing until nepotism killed it.

Re:digital

[Anonymous Coward]

The culture inside DEC made that company unique, today threre is no one that can be compared. You only have to read the names of the people that worked there and what products they offered.

Re:digital

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not clear that they could have been saved. They were basically steamrolled by the PC/x86 commoditization of the hardware market. What was left of the mid-systems market went to the Unix vendors who managed to convince people that they offered a consistent development platform for applications. The market for VAX evaporated rather quickly.

Oh, if they had a crystal ball I suppose they could've thrown much of their resources into x86 systems development, but that's not realistic.

Re:digital

[jonwil]

Just remember how much of the early Unix work was done on DEC hardware.

Easy to summarize.

[Xeno man]

I'd say about half of the companies on the list were failures due to lack of vision and avoidance on making changes. If they weren't so busy trying to squeeze every buck out of their old assets and actually invested in new tech, they would still be around as the giants they once were. Now that's not true for all of them Companies like Heathkit and Napster were victims of the times. Not all markets last forever.

Re:Easy to summarize.

[HTH NE1]

I'd say about half of the companies on the list were failures due to lack of vision and avoidance on making changes.

That figure's about right. A shame I've already posted or I'd mod you up. About half (6 of the 12) decided to change markets and even their names and are still successful businesses.

What about the Acme Buggy Whip Company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't they on the list too?

Re:What about the Acme Buggy Whip Company?

[HTH NE1]

Why aren't [the Acme Buggy Whip Company] on the list too?

Because no one is making ACME Buggy Whip dessert topping today.

Re:digital and a frontrunner for 2010

[bobstreo]

Mod Points if I had em.

They mentioned altavista though.

How about what will be happening to SUN once the Oracle deal is "approved"

Adobe

[moosesocks]

Might not quite be there yet, but it's well on its way.

From the abominable performance/security of the Flash player to the ever-increasing bloat of Photoshop, Adobe's users are pretty much fed up with the company.

At one point, it would have been heresy to criticize Photoshop. Now the design community is practically screaming for a replacement. (It's twice as bad if you're a mac user. Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce, but it's been ugly)

Re:Adobe

[ducomputergeek]

Apple bought Final Cut and later Shake creating a video production suite that beat the tar out of Premiere and After Effects. Especially in the Premiere 6 days.

Re:Adobe

[cheesybagel]

Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce

It's fairly simple. First, Apple made expensive hardware, with a crap OS that was like Windows 3.1 (albeit with a better interface), while Microsoft was selling Windows NT for low-cost workstations using the Pentium Pro processor.

Then Apple started selling Final Cut Pro. That was about the time Adobe decided they would not bother to make software that ran on a competitor vendor's hardware. I guess it did not help that Adobe had years of software written in C++, while Steve Jobs wanted everyone to program in Objective-C for Ma OS X, either. Apple later developed Objective-C++, but for quite a while they lost developer mindshare when they switched to MacOS X.

Re:Adobe

[jonwil]

I think one issue for Adobe was that Apple promised a 64-bit version of Carbon (which would have allowed Adobe to port its main apps to 64-bit on mac without the need to rewrite them in Coca) but then after promising it for so long abandoning the idea.

Re:Adobe

[MtViewGuy]

What will REALLY end Adobe as a viable force is the arrival of HTML 5.0 standards for web browsers, which does most everything that Flash does. And that transition will happen faster in the next few years as the HTML 5.0 spec is finalized.

Re:Adobe

[moosesocks]

Actually, I'd call it anything but simple.

Back in the day, any machine that could run Photoshop competently cost about as much as a Mac. Mac OS classic was about on par with Windows 9x, with a few tradeoffs here and there -- I won't defend either operating system because their successors were so much better. ...which brings me to my next point. Adobe was one of the very last vendors to port its software to Mac OS X. Even Microsoft had a head start on them.

Similarly, nobody misses the "Mac Classic" mindset of software development. Apple was largely correct to "clean house" and depreciate many of their old and dated libraries.

Silicon Graphics

[Rob Riggs]

SGI should be on that list. It was amazing to watch their death spiral in the mid-late 90s. That brand is way more tarnished than Napster (which didn't have much of a brand to tarnish).

Re:Silicon Graphics

[Leebert]

Not just Silicon Graphics, but also Cray.

Alas, how the mighty have fallen.

Re:Silicon Graphics

[TheGratefulNet]

soon, add Sun to the list (I'm willing to bet)

Polaroid

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I like my Polaroid video camera. Just $149.00, it shoots HD tv, and has SD card recording - up to 10 hours.

Oh, oh... I've got one!!!

[wjsteele]

How about this one: Slashdot!!!

Remember when they used to give us the news ONCE, BEFORE everyone else did?

Bill

Re:Oh, oh... I've got one!!!

[Brianwa]

Remember when they used to give us the news ONCE, BEFORE everyone else did?

No, not really...

:D

Re:Oh, oh... I've got one!!!

[HTH NE1]

Actually, it's been months since I've seen a credible "dupe" declaration here.

Personal Anecdote

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I was on the phone with HP Premium Printer Support when the official announcement was made in their office that Carly was leaving.

All hell broke loose. People were screaming, crying, shouting for joy. It sounded like total pandemonium. It sounded like the celebrations of slaves suddenly freed from a cruel master.

It was nearly impossible to finish the call. Having worked under cruel/crazy/incompetent bosses before and known the joy of release when they move on, I couldn't help but be happy for them. HP may have never recovered but for at least a few minutes those poor folks had hope, God bless 'em.

Re:Personal Anecdote

[shadowbearer]

  Indeed! I had a couple support tickets open with HP at that time. In one of them the tech and I were exchanging an email two or three times every hour, trying to troubleshoot a group of networked printers; I saw the announcement in my news feed and mentioned it to the tech in my next email back, his response was along the lines of "Thank god the bitch is leaving, we're all celebrating after work!" I was transferred to another tier up a couple days later because that tech didn't have the expertise to solve the problem we were having, but the relieved and happy attitude was obvious in the calls and emails there, too.

  It seemed to me that after that there was a noticeable improvement in their tech support, especially on the phone. I hadn't been paying much attention to it at the time, but it was obvious afterward just how badly that woman screwed that company up.

  Slashdot's article was quite a fun read as well :)

  I still use HP printers exclusively at home, and recommend them to customers as well. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly among the best. My most reliable printer, a PSC 2350, has performed like a champ since I bought it new, despite having been dismantled and rebuilt a couple times to clean out enormous amounts of cat hair and assorted species of dust bunnies. Like another poster mentioned, I tend to use the raw drivers and my own apps, but I have a lot of customers who are happy with their software as well. (Hint: Don't update unless it's absolutely necessary for a bug fix).

    I've also found that overall their printers tend to be the ones that work the best with linux.

SB

 

Re:Personal Anecdote

[purpleraison]

I still use HP printers exclusively at home, and recommend them to customers as well.

Then you, sir, are a douche! HP printers can eat a bag of ass. Have you ever come across the 'expired ink' message (you know, where the ink has been in the printer 'too long', so it will not print until you replace the cartridges-- quite expensive even when you ARE out of ink!!). That was the last straw for me. I will never recommend or buy another HP product ever.

As for working best with linux, I'd have to disagree there too, I think Brother is far more supportive these days.

Regardless, I will chisel crap in stone before HP gets another penny of my money.

Re:Personal Anecdote

[shadowbearer]

  Yeah, I've run into the expired ink message. Only once when the cartridge hadn't run past it's expiration date, and HP replaced that cartridge for free once I let them know the particulars.

  I'm well aware that they have expiration dates on their printer cartridges and that the software can read them, and I've made my opinion on that quite clear with the HP reps I've dealt with. I think it's wrong, as well. But I - and nearly everyone I have dealt with - tend to use the cartridges up well before any the expiration date becomes a problem.

  Actually, my biggest beef with the printer industry in general is that the ink cartridges aren't big enough and they cost too much. I'd much rather they priced the printers for what they really cost and lowered the price on the cartridges to what they really cost. (As long as I'm talking about that, I'll include cellphones in that rant, as well. I much prefer up-front honest pricing)

  I don't know about Brother printers, don't encounter many of them and have never owned one. They may well make good printers, they certainly made good typewriters back in the day. If their printers work better with Linux out of the box, great! Good to hear, I'll pass it on- but also do my own research on it.

  Chisel all you want; chiseling anything in stone is damned hard work; I can testify to that, having done so at a few points in my life - and masonry work of that caliber I charge >$50/hour for. ;) - hell, just tooling up for that at a basic level costs a few thousand dollars. I own the tools.

  If a "bag of ass" is what my overactive imagination tells me it is, you can keep that particular bit of cuisine; I've eaten many things most snobbish people would turn their noses up at, but never a bag of ass.
  However, I suspect it'd be rather hard to force a printer to eat one. Printers in general tend to be rather picky when it comes to eating paper stock that isn't fed to them the right way, nevermind a _bag_ of anything.

  As to "douche", well, I'm in my forties, and my girlfriend is going thru menopause in a rather serious way; I suspect you have no idea what the term means. I would respectfully suggest that you move out of your parents basement, and refrain from commenting on that topic until you have lived with a woman for more then 24 hours, know what it's like to have to buy more than 24 rolls of toilet paper a week, and don't get embarrassed when you have to tell the cashier at the grocery store that yes, it's for my lady friend. If you ever manage to do so.

  Cheers.

SB

Re:Personal Anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention HP's very comprehensive drivers for linux; HPLIP. i'm not a fan of their laptops, i don't believe i was purchasing a platform to make more purchases from, no i bought a computer. but oh well.

Re:Personal Anecdote

[vaporland]

just wait until she becomes the next Governator

Monster Cables?

[Ellis D. Tripp]

I don't remember a time when Monster Cable actually sold a worthwhile product. As far as I can remember them (back into the 80s, anyway), it was always overpriced fancy-looking speaker cable that sounded no different than ordinary lamp cord from the electrical aisle at Home Depot.

Re:Monster Cables?

[Dun Malg]

Oh no, to get the equivalent of their high end stuff, lamp cord won't do. You have to buy 12v outdoor lighting cable (12ga 2-cdr stranded) at 49 cents a foot!

SCO

[nattt]

surely SCO is the most tarnished?

Re:SCO

[phantomfive]

Surely, you didn't read the article.

Re:SCO

[couchslug]

The difference is that SCO was obviously turned into a weapon with no concern for its viability as anything else.

SCO didn't try to succeed on merit and fail, and is merely the corporate equivalent of an exploded land mine.

Re:SCO

[RMS Eats Toejam]

To Linux fanboys? Yes. To everyone else.... SCO who?

Another small list

[ZXSpectrum42]

Some Random Companies come to my mind 1) Digital 2) CRAY 3) Siliconn Graphis 4) Borland 5) Xerox 6) Old HP 7) Compaq 8) Sun 9) Sinclair 10) Atari 11) Comodore 12) Microsoft (no visionaire left) 13) Netscape 14) Control Data and the list goes on. Maybe some companies die with their creators

Re:Another small list

[Jeremy Erwin]

CRAY is hardly tarnished

DEC at least died an honorable death

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Unlike the companies in the article, the DEC brand is not being pimped by a lousy shell company to licensors that are slapping it on discount pantyhose.

HP printer ink

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

Don't forget about printer ink that costs more than blood:

http://gizmodo.com/212444/

Like apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar to Apple where a legions of 20-40+ think apple means quality (at least Sony still have better quality of sound than any apple device any day) as well as large number of iphone fanbois that either don't know about apple's anti-consumer practices or don't care?

The bad news is that they seem to be raking in shitload of money to care.

First P2P?

[Mike Rice]

Uh, Read RFC 1.

December 1969.

I'll agree that Napster immensely popularized the use of P2P tech... but it wasn't the first, not by a long shot.

Dell?

[kehren77]

How did Dell not make this list?

Re:Dell?

[nycguy]

Because Dell sucked from day one. It was always a cheap, so-so computer...

Re:Dell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell who?

Napster? A once-great brand?

[argent]

Napster came pre-tarnished, and if anything it's been rehabilitated.

Re:Napster? A once-great brand?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT!

Prodigy

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember Prodigy online hehe, I had prodigy as friends had compuserve back in the day

Another personal anecdote or 3

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Lets see, I bought an HP printer that had an option to tell it to print B/W only. (Using the B/W cartridge.) The option didn't work. (Pain in the ass since the vast majority of the time I was printing B/W and I didn't want to waste ink on printing color. The only way to stop it was to pull out the color cartridge.) Also the driver for it was so bad I once wasted an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't print on one machine but could on another. (Answer I had to set up the guest account on one of the machines because of network security. However the error didn't indicate why it wasn't printing. I got the useless "Printing failed" so I checked to see if I could print on the other PC and went from there.) Oh, my brother got a "great" hp camera years ago. It uses compact flash, too bad it has problems with CF larger than 32MB. (My bro also had a Kodak camera that also uses CF and is older. It had no problem with a 4GB CF.) God HP sucks.

Re:Another personal anecdote or 3

[mpe]

Lets see, I bought an HP printer that had an option to tell it to print B/W only. (Using the B/W cartridge.) The option didn't work. (Pain in the ass since the vast majority of the time I was printing B/W and I didn't want to waste ink on printing color.

I've seen this happen on quite a few ink jets from various manufacturers.

The only way to stop it was to pull out the color cartridge.)

With some printers that just results in a refusal to print anything. Also the combined cartridge as opposed to separate C M Y means that you will always end up throwing quite a bit of very expensive ink away.

No brand is as tarnished...

[twoallbeefpatties]

...as the GNAA. Those guys used to be everywhere.

Heathkit

[bromoseltzer]

Tarnish is not the right word. Heathkit had its beginnings in aviation and developed into electronics kits after WW II. Electronics equipment was generally assembled by hand until the late 60's or so, and there were substantial savings to the customer if he/she was willing to assemble it him/herself. Then, printed circuit techniques and especially integrated circuits and automatic (and off-shore) assembly reduced the labor cost dramatically. It was technically harder to build competitive gear at home, and the labor savings are now probably negative. Kit building is much less interesting now, except for specialized market niches.

So the Heath company was bought by Zenith and eventually left the general consumer electronics business entirely. (Zenith used to be a famous brand, by the way. It could have been on the list.) A company needs to seek the most profitable markets. It's sad, but it's not a moral decision. Change is not "tarnish".

Re:Heathkit

[kokyuho]

I wondered if any other /.ers knew about Heathkit. My grandfather worked for Heathkit in the 20's and at one point, was offered a substantial share of the company which he turned down as it was just stock, not money. He knew Edward Heath and he helped build airplanes such as the "Baby Bullet"(http://www.airracinghistory.freeola.com/aircraft/Heath%20Baby%20Bullet.htm), perhaps Heath's most famous plane. His best friend was guy named Roger Lorenzen,(http://ww_heco.home.mindspring.com/wwheco2/hsp_sup2.html) who was perhaps one of the finest wooden propeller makers in the US. They both lived in Niles, Michigan, near Benton Harbor where Heathkit proper began. I have photos of him assembling Heath airplanes at their factory in Chicago.

2 from the gaming world

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Would be Atari and Sega. Atari used to be the biggest video game company in the world, sold tens of millions 2600's and had billions in sales at the beginning of the 80's. I wonder how many current gamers would believe me if I told them that. (Since they're just a label now. As for Sega, they used to make systems and while they might have not been the most popular they're not the joke they are today. (I mean Sonic, how badly did they screw up Sonic? Of course sometimes they do something right by mistake but you know it'll only be a moment before they mess up something else.)

Apple!

[Tumbleweed]

Depending on your perspective, I'd put Apple on the list. As soon as Jobs' marketing ego took over the company from Woz' technical brilliance (see a pattern here?), this company went all screwy. This happened with the original Mac (a pattern which Jobs would repeat). Let's replace our monumentally successful, paradigm-shifting platform (Apple 2) with something that costs 2x as much, and doesn't even have color (or available software base)! Yeah, awesome idea. Oh, and seal up the box, we don't want users installing any pesky expansion cards or more memory.

Jobs later went on to make NeXT, where he doubled (or more) (again) the price of the machine, and again started with a monochrome display (not sure about the expandability of NeXT cubes). This dude is a bit weird.

I much prefer Apple from their 8-bit days. The //GS was delayed, then crippled by marketing decisions. Very sad.

Re:Apple!

[frank_adrian314159]

Jeez, Woz, get a better handle. And quit bitching - the company's moved on. And people like monochrome in their computers... you can get the iBook in two colors - white and black - just like God intended. And He knows we've done something right, because the stock's only gone up 20X or so since you left.

Namaste...
The (not-Real) Fake Steve Jobs

Re:Apple!

[Tumbleweed]

Jeez, Woz, get a better handle.

If I was the real Woz, my user number would probably be 6502. And I would be a better dancer. :)

Re:Apple!

[BitwizeGHC]

Woz was a technical genius but it's Jobs's design and marketing vision that has enabled Apple to revolutionize electronics not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times: first with the Apple I and II, secondly with the Macintosh, thirdly with the iPod, and now with the iPhone.

Thats funny

[ArchieBunker]

Next to the Slashdot logo it says "NEWS FOR NERDS". Now they are a day or two behind Fark and Lifehacker.

Re:Thats funny

[selven]

This is probably old news, but websites and organizations change. In 2000, this was a news site. Now, it's a discussion site. Slogans don't always reflect reality.

RCA

[Anonymous Coward]

They bet the bank going up against Philips Laserdisc with their cheapo Selectavision and lost big time.

Gutenberg

[Subm]

Well before HP printers, Gutenberg utterly dominated the printing market. For a time, virtually every printed book on the market was printed by Gutenberg.

Perhaps due to no effort whatsoever made to maintain the brand, it is associated almost exclusively with one book least popular among techies.

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Re:Gutenberg

[Gorshkov]

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Taking classic, famous literary works that are in in the public domain, and making them available to the .... ummm .... public ...... is piracy?

Re:Gutenberg

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Taking classic, famous literary works that are in in the public domain, and making them available to the .... ummm .... public ...... is piracy?

Whoosh!

Re:Gutenberg

[Changa_MC]

Taking classic, famous literary works that are in in the public domain, and making them available to the .... ummm .... public ...... is piracy?

The very definition of piracy, no doubt.

Sigh...

[mackinaw_apx]

Unfortunately, you could probably also add Motorola to that list, too.

Re:Sigh...

[cheesybagel]

Motorola has actually been having a resurgence since they started selling Android cellphones.

Oh, did you mean microprocessors?

Lucent / Bell Labs

[witherstaff]

Also the K56Flex people, Lucent - AKA Bell Labs. I know they had AT+T on that list but not the same. Livingston, bought by Lucent, was the best maker of remote access equipment. Portmasters were rock rolid for ISPs. It was impressive to see one box with 30 serial cables connecting to stand alone modems. (Or later on in the pre VM and blade days, connecting to 30 different serial consoles.) Then the PM3s were all digital pushing the 56K ISP offering. The Portmaster 4 even let you plug a DS3 in and get 700+ modems. Very cool stuff, shame they were bought by some french company.

Packard-Bell

[BitwizeGHC]

If Packard-Bell was bought by Acer it may have a shot at redemption. Acer makes good kit. I reluctantly, queasily bought my sister an eMachines PC for Christmas, only to find out that while not specced at the top of the line, it is a solidly built piece of equipment nearly identical, in some respects, to certain Acer machines. Turns out eMachines was acquired by Gateway was acquired by Acer.

Polaroid now escaping Ponzi Petters

[ctmurray]

Coming out of grad school I had job interviews with Polaroid. Even to a naive young pup you could see everyone there was working themselves into an early grave. I am glad they took too long to offer me a job and I was employed elsewhere.

Now they are slightly embroiled in the Tom Petters Ponzi scheme, he was a buyer of at least one fragment of Polaroid.

Playboy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Had a full head of hair - now it has gone bald :>

Re:HP -- Blame Carly

[Anonymous Coward]

That's correct. Carly did in fact fire all the engineers and hire sales people. So after 2 years they had nothing new to sell nor understood how their own equipment worked. I had top tier support during that time and the 4 hour support experts could not find an engineer to diagnose anything server related. It was really very sad. The guy I was working with also thought he was next to get fired. And don't even talk about the printer engineers. I heard they all got kicked out via email.

So innovation? No, Carly Fiorina destroyed HP. She left a gaping wound that they haven't recovered from yet.

She destroyed their most valuable asset- the ability to out engineer a guy in India and Taiwan with 3 doctorates and no experience. Big loss. Too bad.

Schwinn

[Anonymous Coward]

Not "high-tech" related, but you could add Schwinn bicycles to that list.

Re:Schwinn

[herojig]

I miss my Swinn "chicken" and banana seat 3speed stick models...

Radio Shack

[HalAtWork]

Radio Shack went from a great resource for hobbyists to get their start, to a glorified alarm clock store.

Re:Radio Shack: warning, whining ahead

[shadowbearer]

Sad, yeah.

  I got laid off earlier this year, and since I personally knew the manager of the local Radio Shack (and have a lot of respect for him, he and his wife are pretty sharp), I thought I'd go in and put in an application for PT work. It's not like I'm not qualified - I've done everything they do there from sales to electronics and computer repair; and was told that he had no positions open. I was pretty hard up at the time, deep in bills - I am (was :( ) a professional maintenance tech for HUD/RD apartment complexes with a lot of years of experience there in addition to my other skills, and people with my background don't exactly grow on trees, but there aren't many openings here in this small town.

  After a couple weeks had passed, I heard that he had lost one of his personnel, so I called him back. He told me that he'd love to hire me, but that the company had passed my application up because I was "overqualified" for the position. He apologized so much for it I felt sorry for him and told him so.

  Since then, he has been thru 18 (yes, eighteen) different employees - since March this year - mostly, from what I've seen going in there, kids in their early 20s (not meant to be derogatory towards those kids, but it was plain that none of then knew a damned thing about the products they were selling, but they looked and dressed nice) - and he told me two weeks ago that he's considering leaving Radio Shack after managing that store for nearly twenty years, because corporate won't let him hire, nor pay decently, people who are competent, work hard, know how to sell honestly, and show up on time.

    That pretty much sums it up.

  My opinion is that "overqualified" is corporate doublespeak for "we don't want to pay you more than $cheap, because we have to maintain our shareholder's income" - which is damned sad, because Radio Shack, in particular - and I speak from almost thirty years of experience shopping there and dealing with employees there - could really benefit from hiring competent, hard working people and paying them a decent wage. Like many other companies - Best Buy, etc - the beancounters who run them think they are saving money by hiring cheap unskilled labor and giving them a basic of training.

  What fools, they.

  Bitter? Yeah, I am. After working for decades to get where I am, to learn and practice the knowledge and skills I have, being told at this point that I'm "overqualified" for any damned job I get angry, bitter, and question even more the motivations and intelligence of the people who run companies like that. There's entirely too much separation between the upper management's grasp of what their company does and the lower end worker's grasp of what it does.

  I know, I know, it's not anything new, but that's my whole point - these people NEVER FUCKING LEARN from the mistakes their predecessors make. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country.

  Rant over... it's New Years eve and these things should be said at *least* once a year. Rant on :)

SB

 

Amiga status

[Orion Blastar]

In Europe they went crazy for the Amiga. Most Amiga users are upset at Microsoft and Apple for screwing them in the past and some dual-boot AmigaOS and Yellow Dog Linux or some other PowerPC version of Linux.

If Slashdot had bothered to cover the Amiga we'd know what went wrong and what they are currently doing.

AmigaOS 4.0 was written by Hyperion or some other company and there was licensing deals. AmigaOS 5.0 was supposed to outclass and outperform Windows Vista and Mac OSX. But due to lawsuits it never got released.

The best open source project to come out of the Amiga technology is Amiga Research OS which will work on Intel X86 systems and virtual machines and has a version that runs native inside of Linux. But it lacks proper third party hardware drivers for modern systems so I'd run it in VirtualBox or some other virtual machine like HaikuOS does. AROS is AmigaOS 3.1 based on the APIs and started out as a WINE product and became a full OS.

Amiga, Inc. sells some of the classic Amiga games for Windows and mobile devices under the Amiga Anywhere titles. Some day like the C64 they will port them to the WII, PS3, and XBox 360, etc.

In an attempt to open source and modernize the Amiga and AmigaOS technology they are taking a page from Apple and making an AmigaOS merge with Linux to create Anubis OS but it is not Amiga, Inc that is doing it but another group. While Mac OS X was based on NextStep (A MACH kernel *BSD Unix based OS) and the Classic MacOS series the Anubis OS claims to be Linux based with the Amiga GUI and ability to run Amiga software.

I hereby challenge Slashdot editors and readers to report on the Amiga projects as they mature and make progress. See if 2010 can be the year of the Amiga coverage at Slashdot and create an Amiga category if one doesn't already exist.

SUN?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about SUN guys? Now that company is above and beyond repair...

Sorry...

[IANAAC]

but I'll have to agree with the parent pot... I've never experienced problems with HP printers. Never run into that errors, but I will say that I've been able to use non-HP branded cartridges.

Just because you've had trouble with a certain brand doesn't equal universally bad. And certainly no reason to call him a douche (can no one around here disagree without resorting to name calling?)

Just your opinion - just as this is only mine.

How dare they tarnish Westinghouse !

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese paid good money for Westinghouse !

How dare you tarnish the good money of Japanese !

EA was win once?

[malp]

Electronic Arts almost defines "tarnished brand," considering their origins.

Really? EA was founded in 1982. I remember playing their horrible sports games at my friends' houses in the late 80s and early 90s. The games were almost non-interactive, but the moms kept shelling out $40 each year for the latest version number. Madden NFL 1989... Madden NFL 1990... Madden NFL 1991... All suck; no win.

Re:EA was win once?

[swordgeek]

Oh yeah, but before the NFL schlock came along, there was MULE, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Hard Hat Mack, Seven Cities of Gold, and others. Genre-defining games! Also, their marketing was different--the ads took the name seriously (Electronic Arts, taking games to a new level, that sort of thing)--and they introduced their programmers to the world as the artists and stars of the company.

WANG computers

[hotdiggity]

WANG was a brand that stood out proudly in the face of stiff competition.

Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.

Re:WANG computers

[linhares]

WANG was a brand that stood out proudly in the face of stiff competition. Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.

This is why I read /.

Re:WANG computers

[grizdog]

Wang was really one of the great one-product companies, and it wasn't the product most people associate them with, word processors. An Wang invented the core memory, independently from IBM, who also invented it, but after Wang. Wang had taken the precaution of getting his notes notarized so he could prove he was first, and won a lawsuit and received huge royalties not only from IBM but everyone else, until integrated circuit RAM took over.

Wang invested that money into other projects including calculators (desktop, programmable machines, some with integrated printers and tape drives - really small computers) and word processors, and did achieve some success with those lines in the 70's, but never established the kind of critical mass that could keep up with all the fast changes in those markets. They also never really got their minds around the real problem, which was to come up with the best software for their niche markets. Wang was always a hardware company at heart, and getting the ideal look and feel for a word processor was simply out of their league.

Wang came up with some good OEM hardware, but really never established themselves as a company who understood the end user. In that sense I don't think they fell so much as they got passed by by the companies that understood software and their customers better.

Re:HP -- it sucked before Fiorina

[asackett]

I was involved with H-P in various capacities from 1994 through 1998, pre-Carly, and the high zoot engineers for whom the company was famous were nowhere in evidence. Absolutely nowhere. The company mission statement already said that H-P was a "shareholder driven" company, and the old-timers all lamented that The HP Way was long dead.

I'm not defending Fiorina, as she was in well over her head and everyone except the BOD knew it right from the start, I'm just saying that the company was broken before she got there.

They honored mine...

[El_Oscuro]

About 20 years ago, I bought a $150 car stereo and they gave me the usual warranty pitch. It wasn't until they mentioned it also covered theft that I signed up for it. Wouldn't you know, it was ripped off the day after I installed it? It could have been an inside job, but it seems like a lot of effort for a $150 stereo. Than again, I got the extra insurance for a car rental in FL and someone stole the hubcaps, so maybe there is a reason why the drone always wants to sell you the extra insurance!

Interplay

[Anonymous Coward]

Interplay was once the 2nd largest producer/distributor/developer of video games. It's success include Descent, Neuromancer, Starfleet Academy, Fallout, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate. Today, it's the playground of a French company and as far as the releases show, a vaporwares company.

geek squad should be on the list Best Buy turned i

[Joe The Dragon]

geek squad should be on the list Best Buy turned it in to UP sell Squad and got rid of most of real techs (replaced them with people who hit up sell number over doing good tech work) remotes many more to people out side of the USA.

Want a cell phone with that?

[mrscott]

I live in a small town, but well remember the days when Radio Shack used to sell useful stuff. I'm still forced to go there sometimes when I need a mouse or something, but hate going in now. I went in a few weeks ago and the district manager was there and was way too aggressive. I was looking for a USB cable, so she naturally told me I needed an iPhone. I told her that I already had an iPhone so she told me that I should switch it to Radio Shack. I told her that my college (where I work and happen to handle the cell phone contracts) owns the phone and the plan. This was where she sat there and badgered me trying to get me to move all of the college's phones to Radio Shack, called the store manager over and ordered him to grill me further. Now, every time I walk in the store, the sales droid asks when he can expect that cell phone contract to be changed. I keep telling them that it isn't going to happen - right now, we get a 20% discount, can order through AT&T premier at any time and the sales people I work with are actually good... sure, I'll switch to Radio Shack where I have to drive to the store hoping that they are open). So, this is a long rant... "The Shack" name change just reinforces how far the company has fallen.

Hayes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised I haven't seen them mentioned anywhere.

Heathkit!

[ridgecritter]

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I helped my dad build a Heathkit stereo amp and an FM tuner. I was six or seven, and it was great! My dad knew tons about mechanical stuff and explosives, but not much about electronics beyond house and car wiring, so we got to learn a new area together. My mom was totally cool with the burn marks on the table and the rug from stray solder blobs. The gear worked the first time we turned it on, and it was still in use when I left home for college. Thanks for some wonderful memories, Heathkit!

Bell and Howell

[j1m 5n0w]

I have an oscilloscope made by them. I use it to tune my piano.

CompUSA? CircuitCity?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about CompUSA or Circuit City?

Re:geek squad should be on the list Best Buy turne

[yuhong]

Yep, that was another mess altogether. I once did a lot of research, particularly on the Consumerist on that mess.
From http://consumerist.com/2007/03/geek-squad-city-insider-rebutts-founders-retort.html :
"our tipster contends that Robert is too far away from the action inside Geek Squad City to really know what's going on there. ..."
Ouch, sounds like a common problem.
From an interview:
"FSB: If you could go back to before becoming part of Best Buy and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?..."

The Shack

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, how about Radio Shack? Can you even get parts there anymore?

Yes. I live in Minnesota, I've been to half a dozen of their stores. The closest two both sell passive components, and ICs. A surprising amount of good things are still hiding in the dark corners.

It was only two years ago I bought a circuit board etching kit from them, which was my first exposure to it. They sell Ferric Chloride, somehow without being sued by the mothers of the world. I've also seen a kit there for learning about microcontrollers. They've got generic power supplies, power resistors, solder, electrical tape, good tools and wire suitable for breadboarding, and the desoldering iron I've used over the past decade (still the same one, oddly).

And for icing on the cake: A cute gal working there was really interested in me (geekese:thought I was sexy) for buying a bunch of Timer ICs and 10W power resistors. Opportunities to impress women, are priceless.

Clayton Christensen...

[simplerThanPossible]

said in a talk that it was DEC's demise that inspired his PhD research that he wrote up as "The Innovator's Dilemma".

It wasn't management - it's that minicomputers were replaced by workstations (Sun and the like). They went from top to bottom in a couple of years, with the same management team.

What is the common theme behind decline?

[beachdog]

I have been reading the posts trying to figure out why so many of these iconic technical-industrial organizations have slid.

Most of the posts associate the decline of organizations with a change of management. The management stories tell similar tales: where there is a replacement of management, the decline is expressed as selling off low performing assets and re-organizing to reduce costs.

Most of this discussion doesn't dwell on the massive de-industrialization of the USA. Around 1980, factories in the Far East were making electronic assemblies for less than the price of the American parts and American labor in a Heathkit kit.

But with the shift to tech manufacturing in the far East, did American corporations lose control of the products they made?

Here is a question; Have Apple and Hewlett-Packard done something different with their manufacturing organization? Do Apple and H-P own offshore factories in a way that enables them to prevent their proprietary products from being copied by others? Do these two companies retain a manufacturing control that prevents them from becoming a rented out brand like Bell & Howell?

I know from anecdote that the 80's era computer maker Morrow had great difficulty with it's computer mother board. The board was engineered in Silicon Valley and the Japanese board maker either sent no boards or way way too many. The result was first Morrow had trouble meeting demand, then it had too many boards as the market changed. Morrow went out of business around 1983 leaving behind a warehouse of unsold components that became one of Oakland's best computer surplus stores for several years afterward.

Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath sort of tells the story of the decline of American manufacturing. The USA and Canada exited World War II with their manufacturing plants intact. By the end of the Regan Presidency, the de-industrialization of America was a sideshow mixed in with high interest rates and the second energy crisis.

Re:What is the common theme behind decline?

[MtViewGuy]

A big issue that made this problem worse is the fact Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, actually ends of discouraging personal savings and capital investment in the USA because we impose taxes on the process of earning money.

Between the tax compliance costs estimated somewhere between US$350 to US$500 BILLION per year, American citizens and businesses sending around US$15 TRILLION in liquid assets out of the US financial system either by participating in the cash-only underground economy or using tax loopholes to funnel money to offshore financial centers to keep these assets beyond the reach of the IRS (care to explain all those "banks" located in various nations in the Caribbean?), and outsourcing millions of jobs for income tax reduction reasons, is it small wonder why the American economy is going downhill fast?

This explains why we see increasingly powerful movements to MASSIVELY overhaul our national taxation structure so it encourages American citizens and businesses to keep their personal savings and capital investments in the USA. Steve Forbes' flat tax plan and the even more radical FairTax plan have gained a lot of supporters because Americans are tired of all the disadvantages of the current income tax system.

AOL managed to ruin everything it touched

[DrXym]

Netscape, Nullsoft, Compuserve, MapQuest, Digital Cities, Moviefone. Each of the the "divlets" had huge potential as independent entities while still offering innovation or tech that AOL could leverage. Instead AOL interfered with them, fucked with their culture, diverted their development efforts towards the AOL service, forced them to adopt AOL email addresses, even to use the AOL client even for business (yes really) and of course lay people off.

AOL central managed to squander all that potential. Is it any wonder most of these brands are now dead or just hollowed out husks? AOL is almost like King Midas except everything it touches turns to shit. Even Time Warner must seriously regret the day it "merged" with AOL.

How about SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Santa Cruz Operations may not have been a bright and shining star, but you can't get more tarnished... And, yes I know the current patent troll only bought the name to give themselves "geek creds."

Back in the day SCO used to produce the only Unix for the PC called Xenix. I always wanted one, but they went under before I had the chance.

Seriously, someone bury AltaVista somewhere

[BlortHorc]

I remember when the options were AltaVista, Yahoo, and several other completely pointless search engines.

Repeat after me: they all sucked arse. You never searched just one portal to find what you were looking for, and often you could search all of them and not find the thing you were looking at a week ago.

The reason Google owns internet search? Because as soon as they came along, it was like night and fucking day. No longer did I have to diddle around with half a dozen search engine in the vain hope that one of them would not be so stuffed with crapware for those keywords that I might actually find what I was looking for.

Oh, and second reason I am well pleased to see AltaVista on this list: when working at an ISP migrating customers from one set of DNS servers to the new ones, I had the misfortune of answering a call from a customer whose response to my query as to what browser he used was "Oh, I don't use a browser, I use the AltaVista". I would like to claim that hilarity ensued, but that would be a big fat lie.

Gottlieb and Williams, the pinball machine makers

[mbstone]

If any former OEMs deserve to be called "most tarnished," it's these two. The pinball machine in your local bar, movie theater or bowling alley is probably tarnished to the point where it's all but unplayable, because most pinball machine operators never clean them....

eBay!

[Niubi]

Soon eBay's going to be old hat, a tarnished brand. Why? Because of http://www.dubli.com/ More and more people are hearing about this year on year, and few people are going back to eBay once they've had the DubLi experience. Think about it: eBay used to be all about the auctions, now it's more about buy this now and the general marketplace. Anyway, go give DubLi a shot - you won't regret it!

Out of the ashes

[ascari]

Companies and brands get tarnished, almost disappear etc. all the time. It's really not that interesting. More interesting to me are that some actually are resurrected. Apple and Nintendo come to mind, as does Maserati for a mandatory car analogy. I understand that somebody actually bought the rights to the PDP-11 from DEC when things went to hell - maybe there's still hope?

Oh dude....

[DG]

I personally owned 4 different Amigas - including installing Linux on an A3000. For a little while, I sold them. I belonged to CATS. I posted on comp.sys.amiga before the Big Split to all the subgroups. I jousted with -MB- and laughed my ass off at BLAZEMONGER! I even maintained the Amiga Netrek port for a year or so (not that I accomplished much with it)

I own an original copy of the Deathbed Vigil.

The Amiga is DEAD. Yes, there are still Amigas functioning and a tiny core of hobbyists who still get joy out of tinkering with them - and good on ya. But as a relevant component of modern computing... not a chance.

Seriously. Move on. Enjoy your retro-computing hobby, but it is really time to understand that the Amiga era is over.

DG

       

Re:Radio Shack: warning, whining ahead

[Too Many Secrets]

My opinion is that "overqualified" is corporate doublespeak for "we don't want to pay you more than $cheap, because we have to maintain our shareholder's income" What do you think the markup is on a capacitor? Solder? How about batteries? The fact is, is that electronics retail is a dying business with little to no profit to be had. How can they stay in business paying 40-60K for trained employees?

One that coulda, shoulda, but din't..Tandy!

[seekertom]

I worked with tandy/radio shack computers for several years, right from the beginning (early 80's?). On one hand, they had the opportunity to blast past ibm and all the others, having everything in-house... design, mfg, distribution.... And, where were all the others when the Mod I came out, delivering true computing to the masses? It eventually had 5.25 in floppies, up to 4 of them, hard drives, and memory expansion boxes! and let's not forget the os called TRSDOS! that called it :C, rather than C:! The Mod II was a true business machine, with some of the best, and perhaps almost only, affordable accounting software available over the counter, WITH support! (ignore it began written in basic, then grew up into cobol) The beloved Coco brought gaming to anyone with a tv set; they had laptops, palm-tops, and even dedicated 'internet' boxes, although internet wasn't what they called it at that time. They had networking that actually worked, and it went into countless school classrooms, quite successfully! ...and they even went out on a limb to jump above the 8086 pc-types... remember the 80-186??? as used in the tandy 2000 series, with 'high' graphics and color? It also ran the first version of turbo cad, now in it's 16th edition. It beat the pants off whatever else was out there at the time. So what happened? It seems the penny pinchers decided to hire dumb engineers (most of the 'repair' jobs on tandy mod I, coco were more re-engineer jobs and quick-fix patchups, rather than simply replacing a broken part). And they seemed to be run by folks who didn't even know what a computer was, because at a time when the whole industry was poised to leap-frog into the 21st century, tandy said, noooo, let's limit what we do in this field, it won't go anywhere anyhow! One of the last straws was to hire 'outsiders' to run the company, but actually were axe-men, who brought great upheaval into the company with stringent dress codes and policies that stiffled creativity and initiative, and eventually buried the division. If you knew the product line, you knew they had the 'up' on just about everyone, and coulda, shoulda been the tops, but instead, they trashed it all with some of the dumbest decisions made by corporate execs! (do ya know ANYONE who reveres the tandy/radio shack name????) thanks fer lis'nin' seekertom

I can't tell which would be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Known bozo versus known clown

http://cbs5.com/politics/carly.fiorina.senate.2.973661.html

Re:Radio Shack: warning, whining ahead

[St.Creed]

You see failure. I see a business opportunity. Get together with that manager and drive Radio Shack out of town.

One trick

[zogger]

They may have been a one trick pony, but dayum, that one trick sure was fun and *interesting* at the time. Especially when you had the option of taking your ..err.. "research" snapshots to the drugstore for developing..or having it develop in the *privacy* of your own home %^)

CEopaths

[zogger]

Hey, better late than never. Good link and submission. Goes with what I feel is one of the primary causes of economic woes, that quarterly outlook...when that is as far as they ever look.

Re:geek squad should be on the list Best Buy turne

[AK Marc]

I never heard of Geek Squad before Best Buy housed them. Were they something bought by Best Buy? I thought they were just a new department.

Trademarks?

[sjames]

Supposedly, trademark law is intended to prevent consumer confusion by keeping cheap knock-offs from trading on the name of a good brand. So why does trademark law permit one company to buy a strong brand name from another? It CREATES consumer confusion by making them think the incredibly crappy new company with their cheap junk is somehow up to the standards of the golden brand name.

I maintain printers...

[Anonymous Coward]

...HP build quality went southerly on Carly's watch.