Slashdot Mirror
Vintage Collection of Tech Failures
StormDriver writes "For every good design there are a dozen failed concepts. Nothing illustrates that better than a great online vintage gadget collection, published yesterday by the Microsoft Research team. The collection is a brainchild of Bill Buxton, one of the principal Microsoft researchers, a guy who's been through 30 years of continuous tech design. Awarded with three honorary doctorates and several professional awards, Bill also likes to gather things – the vintage, geeky kind of things, to be precise. Over the years, he has gathered an impressive collection of prototypes, probably the best I have seen online."
For every good design there are a dozen failed concepts
We're at Windows 7. Only 5 more to go!
Have gnu, will travel.
Why do I sense a large number of Slashdot users hitting up eBay and Craigslist looking for number 5?
It's not a definitive list of tech failures without the ::cue::cat ! That changed everything! We never browsed the web the same again!
:CRQ "audible URL" technology that was going to allow us to directly link tv advertisements for fine products to the web?
Hey, whatever happened to their
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Look at the collection and then try and convince me that our slow rate of progress is due to a lack of technology rather than a lack of imagination.
What the hell does that even mean? Slow rate of progress? Lack of imagination? I'm sure it was beautiful in his head but that thought didn't cross out into the real world all that intact.
Ah HAH! Begging the question! Finally, I have a chance to say "this is what begging the question is"... What slow rate of progress was he talking about? The one where we went from a cd jukebox that was 30 lbs and held 1,000 songs, to a mp3 jukebox that is .3 lbs and holds 10,000 songs in the span of about 10 years? Not fast enough for you, old timer?
The frogpad was not a failure. I work for a not for profit serving the disabled and we used FrogPads all the time. It was insanely useful for those with limited hand movement. It sucked when they stopped making them.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The /. headline is wrong - the iPod is on the list.
To you and all the other commenters complaining that great things like iPods and Etch-a-Sketches are on the list: you clicked the wrong link. Actually RTFS and you'll see that the links go to two separate lists, one of failures and one of successes. It would have taken you less time to read the relevant 3 word description of each link than it took you to click the wrong link, come back here and post a complaint, you know.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Bamboo is such a ripp-off. Anything from Wacom is. Look for a local distributor who might have their own brand. I got a tablet two times larger with the same sensitivity for $30. I'd rather not say where lest I be confused as a spam bot.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Forgot to add:
Automated coffee maker... need that. I'm one of those guys with the IQ of a house plant up until about 10am. If I tried to make coffee in the morning, assuming I somehow mustered the ambition, I'd probably boil my keys and put the coffee grounds in my pocket or something.
Not all prototypes: most of the items I see in the collection are production models. Not all failures: quite a few of the items dominated a market niche during their time, even if they didn't take over the world and find a home on every desktop, and are still available for purchase.
I wouldn't even want to automate the lights or the coffee pot. It's trivially easy to flick a switch when you enter/leave a room, and it's also easy to prepare the coffee, and do something else (fix a sandwich, use the bathroom, comb your hair), while it is busy. The advantage is that the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh and hot, exactly when you need it, even when I decide to snooze for an extra 15 minutes.
That's why I use MisterHouse, to turn the lights off when the kids leave the room and forget. The way snoozing is handled is motion sensors. The motion sensing is also adaptive based on time (get a signal at 1am? Stay dark until switch is hit; on the other hand, get a signal within an hour after "wake up time" and then ...)
Also my motion sensing security lights, and a few other things, adapt their schedule to the changing sunrise / sunset times. Its not as trivial to flick lights on and off when carrying stuff, and MisterHouse just automates all of that away for me...
All of this is like 10 lines of Perl... well MisterHouse overall is probably multi-megs, but my customization work was pretty easy. Don't remember if MisterHouse is GPL or BSD, but its basically free, anyway.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The CD was first sold 1982. The IBM PC-compatible iPod, the first popular MP3 player, was not released until 2002. So twenty years, which is pretty long time to wait.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The lights in my office at my last job were on a motion sensor. Let me tell you, the office of a computer professional is about the worst place for motion activated lights: ::tap tap click tap tap {light out} {sigh} {wave at sensor} ... tap tap tap tap {lights out} {sigh}...::
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The handeykey Twiddler is still in production and still used by many. It's a godsend to people with disabilities.
Frnaklin ebookman worked great for when it was viable. It's failure was that publishers were afraid of ebooks. it had good readability unti lthe Rex came about with a far better screen. Both were ahead of their time and only "failed" because of publishers.
A lot of that stuff were far from failures. they were designed for a specific task. the 3d mousing devices are STILL used to this day in high end 3d CAD.
I think the submitter needs to understand what "failed" means.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a code. Using Google Translator, I took it from Portuguese to Afrikaans to Azerbaijani, Vietnamese, Chinese, Latin and back to English, and suddenly it all becam clear:
"To abuse it and I shall manage the more slowly than the degree of progress is the lack of the imagination, not technical it is attached. "
Hope that helps.
"...a fan blowing crap all over my office."
That should only happen when the shit hits the fan.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Sorry to be a nit-picker, but the original mouse had 3 buttons, and was invented 50ish years ago. The one button mouse concept was an Apple idea, and that was 35ish years ago.
Most advanced linux users do really think that Windows 7 is unstable and slow. It's slow because they run it on 15 year old hardware.
They expect old hardware to run a modern system because their modern system can run on old hardware.
Circumcision is child abuse.