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| Our favourite 'forgotten tech' - from BeOS to Zip Drives |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-23 12:48:20 |
| "We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise - the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. But people do forget - and quickly - about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else." I was a heavy user of BeOS, Zip drives, and MiniDisc (I was an MD user up until about 2 years ago). I'm starting to see a pattern here. |
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| RE[2]: Comment by drcouzelis |
| By zima on 2012-08-24 03:30:53 |
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> > I had a minidisc player too. I always thought it was a the perfect blend of "CD quality audio" and "record anything anywhere any time" like an audio casette. What I did like about Minidiscs was the form factor. They were quite handy [...] You can also see a certain trend in computer media with a "step backward": tape reels, 8" disks, 5.25" disks, 3.5" disks, minidiscs, but then: CDs and DVDs again at 5.25"-like form factor [...] I'd like to see that form factor (and cartridge!) instead of today's CD and DVD formats. But people want cheap, they get cheap. Though MD never really was a computer medium - I believe the early plans for dedicated data storage drives never materialised, and the later (larger in capacity, and IIRC seen as storage by computers) MD variant was just... too late, when flash-based mp3 players and USB pendrives were already taking over - oh, and those do have a smaller form factor (but also not too small, usually) And the Minidisc faced a still very strong, similarly handy, entrenched competitor - the Compact Cassette. With "inexpensive" being also a very important feature, especially in a portable audio player (easily lost, stolen, or broken - still, WRT the last one, cassette players were probably most rugged and resistant), don't brush it off. Meanwhile, MD tended to be silly expensive for what it offered, throughout most of the 90s (especially the portables which could record). And we have to put it in the context of the times - those were the years when the CD not only already enjoyed major network effects, also still had plenty of room for growth in getting really widespread. Between those two, grabbing a CD player was a clearly better choice (and subsequently to that, it was harder to swallow the cost of MD player, especially with very inexpensive portable cassette players around). When the prices of MD tech finally became acceptable, the world already started the move to MP3. (and it's not really a "CD quality audio" - uses quite sub-par lossy codec; not that it matters too much in portable scenarios...) > > Oh well, that was before I realized just how proprietary the format was. :/ Proprietary stuff will die, sooner or later. That killed many formats with potential. Anyone remember CDi? I still have lots of CDi gear here, because I'm a living museum. :-) But the Red Book CD is also a proprietary standard, as are DVDs... (or MP3 and AAC; even Compact Cassettes, I think - at least in conjunction with Dolby noise reduction, which kinda made using them for music practical) MD doesn't seem that much out of the ordinary. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE: Plan 9 could be included here too |
| By zima on 2012-08-24 03:39:58 |
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> Plan 9 [...] sadly looks destined to remain in a backwater, never having fulfilled its huge potential. If only Lucent/Bell Labs would release it as "public domain", the uptake would rocket [...] they would gain great kudos and PR. You seriously believe that it would make any difference? (for Plan9; with PD, I can see some cannibalising of its bits & pieces for less academic operating systems) Look how becoming more open made the uptake of Solaris or Symbian rocketing... And what potential? (versus widespread "good enough" OS) Oh, and don't forget one important thing: Plan9 can afford to maintain its elegance and "purity" precisely because of its niche status - if you wish for it to succeed, you wish for it to likely become similarly messy to all the other ~*nixes, eventually. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Plan 9 could be included here too |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-24 04:44:02 |
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The belief that systems survive if you make them open source if false. They only survive if there are enough developers getting paid to keep sustained development, because if everyone is doing it on their free time, it eventually dies anyway. |
| - Score: 2 |
| the greatest (almost) lost technology of all |
| By unclefester on 2012-08-24 05:51:15 |
| What about HP RPN scientific calculators? Completely and utterly brilliant devices. For some bizarre reason HP decided they should be sold for 10x the price of a regular scientific calculator and almsot totally lost the market. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-24 06:25:11 |
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I think the were great, it's just they came too late for some (writable CDs coming) and were too expensive for others. For some strange reason the 2.88 MB floppy also flopped, while to me it would be great to have a disk with double the usual amount. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Zip drives are the devil! |
| By bitwelder on 2012-08-24 06:36:37 |
|
Fully agree. Also apart of the bad technical problem itself, I pretty much hated the way Iomega managed (or rather, did not manage) to handle the issue. Personally, since then I'm not considering any other product from Iomega, no matter how good it looks. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by drcouzelis |
| By Morgan on 2012-08-24 11:04:50 |
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> I hate hate hate TI graphing calculators. This makes me sad. :( I absolutely loved programming in TI-BASIC and ASM on my TI-86! Granted, that was several years before the smartphone era, and the PDAs of the time were barely more powerful than the TI calculators and certainly not capable of emulating them. > I've never used BeOS but I'm an active Haiku user. I think that is so awesome, and bodes well for the project if you're not the only person who uses Haiku without having used BeOS. I did use BeOS back in the day; I started out with the free version of 5.0.3 and was so impressed I immediately bought 5.0 Pro from GoBe Software. I put it on my PII home-built system and it was freaking amazing! I even managed to get it to install on a modified Netpliance i-Opener (anyone remember that device??) but it didn't support all the hardware so I went back to GNU/Linux on that one. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Comment by drcouzelis |
| By Johann Chua on 2012-08-24 11:24:06 |
|
> > > Oh well, that was before I realized just how proprietary the format was. :/ Proprietary stuff will die, sooner or later. That killed many formats with potential. Anyone remember CDi? I still have lots of CDi gear here, because I'm a living museum. :-) But the Red Book CD is also a proprietary standard, as are DVDs... (or MP3 and AAC; even Compact Cassettes, I think - at least in conjunction with Dolby noise reduction, which kinda made using them for music practical) MD doesn't seem that much out of the ordinary. Maybe "non-widespread standard" would be a better term? I know there were non-Sony Beta VCRs, but I've only ever seen Betamaxes in person. Checking Wikipedia, I see that other manufacturers made MDs, but did anyone else make the players and recorders? Basically, MD seemed to be a case of Sony vs. the rest of the world. Edited 2012-08-24 11:25 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: Comment by drcouzelis |
| By zima on 2012-08-24 16:14:04 |
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> did anyone else make the players and recorders? Yes, I remember at least some Sharp portable units. Keep in mind that, in practice, MD was mostly confined to Japan; was quite widespread there - and the place is, in some regards ...unique ;p & who knows what goes around over there. And "non-widespread standards will die, sooner or later. That killed many formats with potential" veers way into the area of truisms, is not a very revealing thing to say :P (also with "MD doesn't seem that much out of the ordinary" - I think it's safe to say that most introduced standards never really manage to gain the required momentum) PS. Also checking Wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min... ): "JVC, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic and others all producing their own MD systems" (and some of those Sharp units in: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wik... ); and it seems that MD Data was released after all. Edited 2012-08-24 16:23 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by drcouzelis |
| By drcouzelis on 2012-08-24 16:23:27 |
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> > I hate hate hate TI graphing calculators. This makes me sad. I'm sorry, I should have been more specific. I agree that what you did on your calculator in the year you did it was very cool. :) But the fact that calculators like the TI-83 are still the same price and still the same form factor and still "required" for math classes makes me mad. It's been well over a decade! I just can't see it as anything other than milking a business model on an outdated product. I believe a student nowadays should be able to easily do all of the cool fun stuff you did on your calculator on their mobile phone. Oh. That reminds me. I'm mad at the mobile phone market too. :D Edited 2012-08-24 16:25 UTC |
| - Score: 1 |
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