Yet Another List of Technologies - Things That Eventually Vanished

[Ed Hansberry]

[quote="unxmully"]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

Although there was Lotus Improv which manywho used it would say was ahead of it's time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv.

The main reason 123 died and with it went Lotus' domination of the office market was't that Excel was better but that Improv was too advanced for the user base. By the time Lotus realised it wasn't going to sell, Excel had improved over 123 and the "war" was done.

I had improv and tried to use it. bottom line is it was too limited, not too advanced for the user base. MS got the concept right by integrating pivot tables into Excel. I had hoped Lotus would integrate the features into 1-2-3 but they never did.

[Ed Hansberry]

[quote="unxmully"]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

Although there was Lotus Improv which manywho used it would say was ahead of it's time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv.

The main reason 123 died and with it went Lotus' domination of the office market was't that Excel was better but that Improv was too advanced for the user base. By the time Lotus realised it wasn't going to sell, Excel had improved over 123 and the "war" was done.

I had improv and tried to use it. bottom line is it was too limited, not too advanced for the user base. MS got the concept right by integrating pivot tables into Excel. I had hoped Lotus would integrate the features into 1-2-3 but they never did.

[unxmully]

[quote="Ed Hansberry"]

Originally Posted by unxmully

I had improv and tried to use it. bottom line is it was too limited, not too advanced for the user base. MS got the concept right by integrating pivot tables into Excel. I had hoped Lotus would integrate the features into 1-2-3 but they never did.

Hmm, that's not the view I formed. Improv allowed me to look at data other than as cells but as collections and incorporated pivot tables before they appeared in Excel. The reason none of the additional features made it into 123 was that Lotus had committed to much to Improv that Microsoft were able to extend Excel before they could do the work.

And I never said it was too complex, simply that the concept was ahead of it's time, though it was also a different paradigm which complicated things. Microsoft did what they do best which is to take other ideas and graft them into existing products while Lotus were trying to create a new product and the 123 users didn't want that.

[Chris Spera]

Originally Posted by jimcapraro

I'm not sure if Wordstar ever ran on MSDOS, we ran it on a CP/M machine. CP/M was a nifty little opeating system for controlling z80 era processors. CP/M preceeded MSDOS. In fact there is a famous story (maybe urban legend) about the developer of CP/M missing a meeting with IBM causing Big Blue to contract with Microsoft to supply MSDOS for there firs PC's, and well, the rest is history -- talk about being a day late, and dollar short!

P.S. Hey Chris Spera, good to see you, miss you from the old PDAPhoneHome i700 forum.

hey Jim... I thought that was you! Nice to see you too. Wordstar did run on MSDOS, though the features and capabilities were different...enough so that those differences frustrated the CP/M users who got the MSDOS version for home use, which is one of the reasons why it eventually died out. Besides, as I remember it, remembering all of the control codes and commands was a bit difficult...

[virain]

Here's technology that vanished, but came back to life storng. . I am talking about "Touch Screen" It was a big deal in the late 80's early 90's but than disapeared for a decade. Now It is everywhere- Pocket PC, Tablet PC, some home and office apliances. But, that maybe another topic

[yawanag]

I Can't believed I lived through and experienced most of these. I was never crazy about Lotus 1-2-3. When I bought a new computer back in the 90's, it had Quattro Pro installed. Anybody remember that one?

[jsp91470]

Before Lotus came VisiCalc. This was the original spreadsheet program. It ran on the Apple ][. My mom used to to bookkeeping work for a friend at our house while I was growing up, and he provided an Apple for her to use. He let me use it as well and it was the first computer I ever used. This was in the late 70's. VisiCalc was the "killer app" that made the home/office computer more than just an expensive toy. Before the spreadsheet, you had to do it all on paper, calculating each column by hand. Can you imagine?

[daS]

Here's a few I would add:

Vacuum tubes Up until the 1970's every drugstore had a help yourself tube tester. Regular Joes were able to pull the tubes out of the backs of their TVs and radios and take them to the store to see if they were still good. Even after transistors made portable radios possible, high-power applications, like TVs had the glowing glass domes. As tubes slowly where replaced by transistors in TVs, each new model had fewer and fewer tubes until only the CRT was left (see below.) While the TV makers were highlighting how many transistors they had in their new sets, Hi-Fi makers started putting the vacuum tubes on the outside to show them off to the Luddites that loved them. (And if you're one of them, yes I DO understand the claimed advantages of tubes, but you can make a great transistor based class A amplifier too. :roll: )
7-Segment LED Displays The first digital watches and calculators all had those bright red numbers - but because of battery life, LCDs took over.
Magnetic tape From high-fi audio to computer backups, tape was king. Don't see much of it these days. And that brings us to...
Sony Walkman, et. al.Like the iPod today, the Walkman (and its knockoffs) were everywhere.
Modems How many people today hear the screech of a dial-up modem negotiating a connection? Still quite few out there, but they are fading away like, well, my next on the list...
Vinyl records Again, still has a small rabid following, but then there are sill Wordperfect fans out there too. :wink:
CRT displays The kings of the desktop - especially when your desk was small and you had a 19in behemoth weighing it down.
Dot matrix printers Ah, the buzz buzz of those little hammers striking the ribbon at 200 chars/sec. Of course, before that, the technology that was everywhere was...
Typewriters Anyone else old enough to remember them?
I know my list could go on and on, but I have one last personal favorite:
Slide rules Despite what you may have seen in the movie "Apollo 13", they didn't use them to calculate orbits - they did have HUGE computers for that - still, up until HP came out with their HP-35 scientific calculator, you'd find a sliderule hanging from the belt of every engineer and engineering student. While I'm a little young to have needed one, I was in 6th grade when a cousin gave me his old sliderule that he had no use for. My math teacher spent the time to show me how to do trig on the thing and sent me out to measure the height of trees and distances buildings through triangulation. The sliderule gave me an understanding and therefore an appreciation for math that I doubt I would have gotten with an electronic calculator. Sometimes there's advantages to keeping the old technology alive.

[daS]

Originally Posted by yawanag

I Can't believed I lived through and experienced most of these. I was never crazy about Lotus 1-2-3. When I bought a new computer back in the 90's, it had Quattro Pro installed. Anybody remember that one?

I bought the original HP 95/LX Palmtop PC specifically because it had Lotus 1-2-3 in it. I also tried Quattro Pro, and even did the page layout for a local glossy magazine (the type they leave for you in hotel rooms) using Ventura Publisher - originally using the version based on the "GEM" desktop!
This was all after my DEC PDP-11 assembly language days. (Does anyone remember "Saturn Systems"?)

[Don Tolson]

Originally Posted by daS

Typewriters Anyone else old enough to remember them?
I know my list could go on and on, but I have one last personal favorite:
Slide rules Despite what you may have seen in the movie "Apollo 13", they didn't use them to calculate orbits - they did have HUGE computers for that - still, up until HP came out with their HP-35 scientific calculator, you'd find a sliderule hanging from the belt of every engineer and engineering student. While I'm a little young to have needed one, I was in 6th grade when a cousin gave me his old sliderule that he had no use for. My math teacher spent the time to show me how to do trig on the thing and sent me out to measure the height of trees and distances buildings through triangulation. The sliderule gave me an understanding and therefore an appreciation for math that I doubt I would have gotten with an electronic calculator. Sometimes there's advantages to keeping the old technology alive.

I guess I'm showing my age (again), but I actually went through 2 years of 'Typing' class at school on old manual typewriters and grew up through the development of the IBM selectric. (Remember when it was a computer printer?). I also was taught to use a slide rule and used it for the last 2 years of high school!

[jgrnt1]

OK. I guess I can show my age, too.

Slide rules -- I learned to use one in high school. I also learned to use a computer (sort of) at the same time. We had a teletype machine in the library. I used to play Lunar Lander on it.

I still have a slide rule, a Keuffel and Esser Log Log Decitrig, which belonged to my father. I also have the pocket calculator we gave him as a present to replace the slide rule -- a Commodore Minuteman 3 (1973?). Do people even remember Commodore for calculators? They made them long before they made the PET, VIC-20 or C64. I think they actually got started repairing typewriters.