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Tech That Failed To Fail
itwbennett writes "There are tech fads that flare up quickly and then, pouf, they're gone (Tamagotchi, anyone?). And then there are technologies that industry bigwigs predict will follow that familiar pattern and instead end up withstanding the test of time. The Internet, for example, has famously failed to implode, despite dire predictions by Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe. And what about TV, the cornerstone of the American living room? Inventor Lee DeForest, known as one of the 'fathers of the electronic age,' declared TV a commercial and financial impossibility, a sentiment that was shared by 20th Century Fox exec Darryl Zanuck. And FCC engineer T.A.M. Craven was absolutely certain back in 1961 that there was 'no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.'"
I've pretty much always been in favor of ATMs, but that's because I'm relatively anti-social -- I certainly recall the hue and cry about how impersonal and awful it was when they first became common. (Yes, I'm old, get off my lawn, etc.)
I'm still cranky about ATM fees, though -- the other thing I recall from when they were introduced was how much money the banks would save by not having to hire as many tellers, and these savings would more than cover the cost of the machines, so of course there would never be fees, they said. Simple common sense.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bank close at 3PM, because, in the pre-computer days, there was several hours worth of counting & bookkeeping that had to be done between kicking the last customer out & close for the night. Why they STILL close at 3PM, is... well... tradition, I guess.
Despite all the problems, using an ATM machine beats standing in that long ass line trying to cash a check.
Only if it's an automatic ATM machine. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I prefer human checkout operators - they're faster than robo-checkouts. The majority of the time spent checking out is rotating the goods so the barcode is visible to the laser sensor and selecting the correct item for produce by weight - both of which are something that a human has to do, and which a checkout operator has much more skill at than myself. On top of that, a robo-checkout adds a mandatory pause after each item to check the bag scale to make sure the barcode matches the mass of the item you put in the bag, so even if you DO get as fast as a checkout operator at scanning, you won't be able to operate at full speed.
The only reason to use a robo-checkout I can think of is when you're in a hurry, you only have one item, the other checkouts are saturated, and the robo-checkout lane is empty because they are so crap. Even then, I prefer to use the human lane - a minimum wage checkout worker needs their job more than I need to buy stupid crap faster.
Unfortunately, it looks like many people are missing the humor in the redundancy and superfluously of your redundant comment. The thing that bugs me about automatic ATM machines is having to set and remember a personal PIN number.
The x86 CPU architecture would be a good candidate too.
The fashion was (and is). Really the tech for MP3 players has never been a big deal for most users. "Plays my music," is as far as they care about anything. Please remember that people were happy with discmans and walkmans and shit like that.
What the iPod did was make MP3 players cool, it made them a fashion accessory. The best way to notice that is the white earbuds, with cord hanging out front where it is visible. Their commercials show this and it is the style that sold. An iPod is fashionable and has thing like the white earbuds so that you can proclaim ownership and show off the fashion. Heck when the iPod came out all of a sudden high end earbud manufacturers suddenly had a demand for white earbuds. They'd always been a darker colour before since being understated was what people wanted. However white earbuds were a fashion statement. People wanted better sound, but only if they could still have the iPod fashion going.
That is why the iPod was so successful. Other MP3 players were just music players so people really didn't give a shit more than they had before. However the iPod was a fashion accessory that you had to have.
Then of course once it started to take off you got one of those nice positive feedback loops. People didn't know about MP3 players, they knew about iPods. If you wanted a music player you got an iPod simply because that was all you knew, even if there were no fashion concerns. An "Everyone uses it because everyone uses it," sort of situation.
Technology was never the big factor, and in consumer electronics that can sometimes be the case.