Yet Another List of Technologies - Things That Eventually Vanished

[Ed Hansberry]

Well, we've seen articles <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012345">of 21 technological flops</a> and <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,54650">and the best 50 tech products</a>. What about products that came on strong and then disappeared as quickly as they came, or their creators just couldn't keep the product relevant and the company largely disappeared? I am not talking about things like the floppy drive, as that just was surpassed by newer better technology. I am thinking about things like the Netscape Browser, once king of the hill and was utterly crushed out of existence, or the Commodore Computing, that never could repeat the success of the Commodore 64. Here is my brief list:<br /><br /><br />*<b>Netscape Browser </b>- the first browser for the masses, based on Mosaic. It simply didn't survive the combined onslaught by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the poor decisions by AOL after acquiring the company.<br />*<b>Commodore Computing </b>- The Commodore 64 was the first computer for home users to have real penetration into the market, but it was the last big product for Commodore. The 128 never took off and all subsequent products were relegated to niche status.<br />*<b>PalmOS </b>- You knew this would be in the list. Not the first mobile device on the market, but this is the one that established it, so effectively that even today, people think PDA and Palm Pilot are synonymous. However, The only thing left of PalmOS is a 5 year old platform being held together with spit and bailing wire to ineffectively keep up with today's mobile computing needs.<br />*<b>Iomega's Zip Drive </b>- Back in the day when the biggest portable media was a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy, Iomega came out with the Zip Drive, a disk that held 100MB of data. It was later increased to 250MB and 750MB sizes, but by then, CD-R's were becoming popular and far cheaper per MB. Iomega tried to keep its portable storage technology relevant with the 1GB Jazz drive, but it never took off. They are still in business, but they have nothing special and their stock price is a mere 3% of what it was in its heyday in the mid 90's.<br />*<b>Big Online Service Companies - Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL </b>- Compuserve really got the ball rolling with online access. Their IT support forums were critical to many users and developers trying to get the most out of their software, plus they had online stock market information, shopping and dozens of other features in one place, something unheard of at the time. Prodigy came a bit later and was moderately successful for the home user, then AOL came along and trounced them both, only to be relegated to an also ran by cheap broadband service from local phone and cable companies. In the mid-90's, most people needed these services to get online, avoiding tedious modem configurations, SLIP configurations and logon scripts. Now, you just plug your DSL/Cable modem into your PC's ethernet port and you have the whole internet available. No one seems to care about AOL's proprietary offerings anymore, turning AOL into just another service provider.<br />*<b>Lotus 1-2-3</b> - This was <i>the</i> spreadsheet in the 80's and early 90's. Not using Lotus 1-2-3 back then was like not using a petroleum powered car today - it is possible, but not easy to do. It was available on a number of platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2, Unix and even IBM mainframes. They finally got a decent Windows version out with Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows version 4, but by then, it was too late. Their first version for Windows was an embarrassment, and V4 still didn't have a real programming language. Microsoft's Excel, on the other hand, had excellent Windows versions and included Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, a full 4 years before Lotus added LotusScript to its first 32 bit version of 1-2-3, called 1-2-3 97. By then, it was too late. Office 97 was out and development for 1-2-3 slowed and has almost completely stopped. IBM now owns it and you can find it on their web site, but I suspect the only reason IBM continues to fool with it and the rest of the SmartSuite package is to mollify a few of their key corporate customers that still use it.<br />*<b>WordPerfect </b>- Another example of the king of a product category. WordPerfect was the de facto standard word processor, especially in legal firms. In fact, today, there are still law firms that use WordPerfect for DOS because they have so many templates set up they have no desire to invest money in to convert to any Windows product. For the rest of the world though, they were too slow to embrace Windows and Microsoft Word took over as part of the Office suite of applications.<br />*<b>Ashton Tate's DBIII </b>- See Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect above. :wink: <br /><br />So, that is my quick list of flash-in-the-pans, but I am sure I missed a few. What products or companies can you think of that were the absolute king of the hill for their market and were pushed aside by something else, unable to stay relevant?

[jgrnt1]

How about the original Atari - arcade games like PONG and then the Atari 2600? The Atari name exists today, but it is not the same company.

Ed, your list brings back some memories. I used Lotus 1-2-3 for a long time. I used Sideways to print large spreadsheets on a dot-matrix printer. After using WordPerfect for DOS for a long while, I switched to Lotus AmiPro, which I still think was superior to WordPerfect for Windows and Microsoft Word. Eventually, I had to get on the Office bandwagon, when my company chose it as their standard.

[Chris Spera]

... *WordPerfect - Another example of the king of a product category. WordPerfect was the de facto standard word processor, especially in legal firms. In fact, today, there are still law firms that use WordPerfect for DOS because they have so many templates set up they have no desire to invest money in to convert to any Windows product. For the rest of the world though, they were too slow to embrace Windows and Microsoft Word took over as part of the Office suite of applications.

This isn't entirely accurate. I used to be a WPDOS instructor, and the problems wasn't that they were too slow to embrace the technology; they didn't understand it. They had trouble with the paradigm shift. They embrace it; or at least tried to. They just didn't get it.

Their original forey into Windows was a HUGE flop. It never made it out of Orem. The original "release" of WPWin (the one that many saw on the shelves) was actually a complete rewrite. The original version was nothing more than WPDOS in a Windows wrapper. The version that WAS released implemented more of the Windows 3.x standards, but it was still more of a DOS program with a coat of paint than a Windows app.

Just my $.02 of useless knowledge... :)

[jimcapraro]

Yes before word, there was wordperfect, but before wordperfect there was wordstar, whichi ran on CP/M machines -- no mouse in those days everything was done with keystroke combinations. Old fashioned touch typists loved Wordstar, because you could fly without having to take your fingers off of the keys.

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.

[Joelacrane]

How about the Sega Dreamcast? It was so far ahead of its time, it even ran a stripped down version of Windows CE for some basic web browsing with the dial-up modem. If I remember right, the graphics were far superior the the Playstation and N64. It even ran Quake III Arena. At first, a simple modem was used to dial in to "sega-net" or whatever it was, but they later replaced/added an Ethernet adapter to it for broadband. "Sega-net" itself should have taken off. Once again, if my memory is correct, Xbox Live! wasn't even in the works.

It sported two memory card slots on the controllers, and the memory cards themselves had little gameboy sized games that had something to do with the game on the console.

Its hard for me to remember (I'm 18, and I've never owned a console. Dont worry, Xbox 360 coming as soon as i buy my motorcycle), but man, it just seemed like it was so much more than anything else out there.

I apologize if any of my information is incorrect, its just so difficult to remember. As a kid, i was definitely in awe when my uncle fired up Sonic Adventure on his big-screen.

Why didn't the Dreamcast make it?

[thierryb]

There was also Digital with a wonderfull operating system VMS and an excellent processor Alpha. Everything vanished in Compaq which vanished also in HP.

[Don Tolson]

...and as a former employee, I should add "what about Wang Laboratories? Great word procesor, a competitor to DEC in mini-frames, a leader in imase processing. Lost it all when they thought they could sell a proprietary PC.

[Ed Hansberry]

How about the original Atari - arcade games like PONG and then the Atari 2600? The Atari name exists today, but it is not the same company.
Yeah, the 2600 and Atari is a perfect example of someone that created a market, dominated, then virtually vanished. The 5200 was cool, but it never took off and Atari never really found their way after that.

[unxmully]

*Lotus 1-2-3 - This was the spreadsheet in the 80's and early 90's. Not using Lotus 1-2-3 back then was like not using a petroleum powered car today - it is possible, but not easy to do. It was available on a number of platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2, Unix and even IBM mainframes. They finally got a decent Windows version out with Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows version 4, but by then, it was too late. Their first version for Windows was an embarrassment, and V4 still didn't have a real programming language. Microsoft's Excel, on the other hand, had excellent Windows versions and included Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, a full 4 years before Lotus added LotusScript to its first 32 bit version of 1-2-3, called 1-2-3 97. By then, it was too late. Office 97 was out and development for 1-2-3 slowed and has almost completely stopped.

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.

[x51vuser]

You obviously did not see Commodore Amiga nor SGI machines in graphic animation. Still in use in TV studios, Windows PC are not even close ;-)

[Ed Hansberry]

[quote=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]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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

[jgrnt1]

Another to add to the list would be 3dfx and their Voodoo video cards.

[lsbeller]

On the subject of WordPerfevt and Lotus 123 demise, I always thought in retrospect, the true bane of those products was Microsoft's business decision to sell Word, Excel, and PowerPoint together for the same price as an individual product. So, essentially, why buy just one when you could get all three.

That way, Microsoft was able to attack all markets at once. If someone liked word perfect and lotus 123 or that hp presentation program ala powerPoint (what was it called?), but were willing to use Power Point...why not get all three applications for the price of one and not buy WP or 123?

Microsoft defined the business model (or at least epitomises its use) of giving away something for free to dominate market share.

Steve

[Ed Hansberry]

On the subject of WordPerfevt and Lotus 123 demise, I always thought in retrospect, the true bane of those products was Microsoft's business decision to sell Word, Excel, and PowerPoint together for the same price as an individual product. So, essentially, why buy just one when you could get all three.
Lotus was selling SmartSuite, whichhad 1-2-3, AmiPro (later renamed Wordpro, and it almost always got better reviews than MS Word), Freelance Graphics (more powerful than powerPoint), Approach (lame database compared to Access) and Organizer (way better than MS's Schedule+ program).

the spreadsheets were the flagship products though. every business I know uses office now and 95% of the people use Excel for something while Access, Word ad PowerPoint may lay dormant on their hard drives. Plus, MS was the first to install all office apps with one installer. Suites used to just be a box with 4-5 apps shoved in it. MS also integrated better with common icons and real OLE. Lotus used DDE for too much.

WordPerfect tried to team with QuattroPro and a few other apps for their suite, but it was a distant "also-ran."

[jlp]

Yes before word, there was wordperfect, but before wordperfect there was wordstar, whichi ran on CP/M machines -- no mouse in those days everything was done with keystroke combinations. Old fashioned touch typists loved Wordstar, because you could fly without having to take your fingers off of the keys.

I'm not sure if Wordstar ever ran on MSDOS...

Not only did it run on MS-DOS, but every text editing program HAD to use the very same Ctrl-key combinations, because Wordstar was so familiar.

I remember many computer companies did offer their machines bundeled with WordStar, CalStar, etc. all edited by MicroPro: amongst others, (trans-)portable computer makers Osborn and KayPro.

I had Borland Turbo Pascal (also a de facto standard that vanished) on my very first PC in 1984 and the editor used WordStar's Ctrl-key combinations. Borland's Sidekick's editor also used them too if I remember well.

[jlp]

Just found this long WordStar history here. (http://www.wordstar.org/wordstar/history/history.htm)

[pnjm]

Hey, as somebody who went through 2 Pocket PCs before jumping to Palm OS (Palm TX was my very first Palm) - how do you think I discovered pocketpcthoughts.com? I take strong objection to the remark "5 year old OS held together with spit and wire" - and to the inclusion of Palm OS near the top of the list, since it implies that there is actually something better out there, namely, in this context, offerings from Microsoft.

This 5-year old OS held together with spit and wire beats MS hands down in the reliability department - almost never hangs (and the TX is slammed by some Palm afficionados as unreliable), syncs to 2 computers (I NEVER got Activesync to work with 2 computers as advertised by Microsoft - a case of the hype outpacing the reality - which for Microsoft depressingly fits the profile), gives me a choice of desktop PIM (Outlook or Palm desktop) instead of locking me in to what is frankly an inferior product for my needs, and allows me (via Versamail) to get email directly on my PDA via POP without having to mess with Outlook's "profiles".

Palm OS may indeed be a bit player now, relegated to a comparatively tiny share of the market, but that is testimony to the power of monopoly-induced fear. Group psychology is a powerful thing.

I'm never going back to the Evil Empire's Activesync; and I have faith in the ability of good products to bounce back. Just wait and see. Monopoly power can only get you so far. Microsoft should be the ones looking over their shoulder if they can't get such a basic thing as desktop sync right after FIVE versions of their OS.

PN

[Ed Hansberry]

Hey, as somebody who went through 2 Pocket PCs before jumping to Palm OS (Palm TX was my very first Palm) - how do you think I discovered pocketpcthoughts.com? I take strong objection to the remark "5 year old OS held together with spit and wire" - and to the inclusion of Palm OS near the top of the list, since it implies that there is actually something better out there, namely, in this context, offerings from Microsoft.
Well, the name "FrankenGarnet" - referring to the cobbled together platform PalmOS5 currently is was coined by Palm OS fans/users. ;)

This 5-year old OS held together with spit and wire beats MS hands down in the reliability department - almost never hangs (and the TX is slammed by some Palm afficionados as unreliable), syncs to 2 computers (I NEVER got Activesync to work with 2 computers as advertised by Microsoft - a case of the hype outpacing the reality - which for Microsoft depressingly fits the profile), gives me a choice of desktop PIM (Outlook or Palm desktop) instead of locking me in to what is frankly an inferior product for my needs, and allows me (via Versamail) to get email directly on my PDA via POP without having to mess with Outlook's "profiles".
I really don't understand this comment. I have 4 POP accounts on my Pocket PC above and beyond the Exchange server account I sync with. And on my desktop, I only have one Outlook "profile" - my default. I haven't seen the "Profile" dialog box in years - like, since Outlook 2000.

I only sync with my PC 2-3 times a week to keep my sync'd files up to date. My email accounts are all direct against the various POP servers, and my PIM data is direct against my Exchange server.

That being said, I am glad you are happy with your TX. Different stroke, different folks and clearly PalmOS has something in it that you like. I just hope your dislike of the Pocket PC isn't due to misunderstanding its features regarding how email on the device works, because quite frankly, I've never heard anyone say they like the operation of Versamail better than Inbox on the Windows Mobile platform. Never heard anyone say it was really worse either. Both are competent POP and IMAP clients.

[redraiduzz]

8O

What do you mean Netscape got crushed and faded away? I use it EVERY friggin' day!!

And on top of that, IE STILL has not caught up to Mozilla browsers like Firefox &amp; Netscape!

And if you have to debug Javascript? Forget IE!! It's an afterthought totally! :evil:

WordStar!! Now THAT is something that came and went fast!