Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it’s clear many products people thought were great at the time don’t look so great any more. In fact most weren’t all that hot when new. Yet many continue to worship them as if they were even better than sliced bread.

1. August 1, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with
hindsight
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with ped plastic earns vinyl a spot on our curmudgeon’s
hindsight top 10.
“Sure, vinyl records sound warmer than digital, wha-
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it’s clear many tever that means to you,” says Troy Davis, CTO for
products people thought were great at the time don’t coupon marketing site CoupSmart (and a graduate
look so great any more. In fact most weren’t all that of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory
hot when new. Yet many continue to worship them of Music). “But that’s because of low-level distor-
as if they were even better than sliced bread. tion inherent in the process of scraping vinyl to
reproduce complex, high-frequency information,
Well, enough of that. Here are ten technologies not some magical hippie goodness that comes from
that don’t deserve all those accolades. Join us as the forces of nature.”
we stumble down memory lane and tip over a few
sacred cows. 9. Segway PT (2001)
10. Vinyl records (1948) It was supposed to revolutionize personal transpor-
tation. Jeff Bezos was an early investor, and Steve
Jobs allegedly predicted future cities would be de-
signed around them. But when the first Segways
rolled off the production lines, most of us uttered
a collective “Huh?” Who uses them today? Tour
guides, Google employees, mall cops (at least, the
Hollywood version), and a handful of stubborn Se-
gway devotees who’ve managed to rack up nearly
4 million miles on them… very, very slowly.
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We’re not big fans of compact discs or evangelists
for MP3s. But the utter devotion “audio purists” pay
to those hissing, popping, scratched-up slags of war-
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2. August 1, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with hindsight
8. Apple Lisa 1 (1983) 7. Amazon Kindle (2007)
The Lisa is often hailed as the first personal com- With its boxy shape, clumsy keypad, and putty color,
puter to sport a graphical user interface (but only the original Kindle looked like the bastard offspring
by those who conveniently ignore the Xerox Alto, of an IBM PC and a Texas Instruments calculator.
built a decade earlier). That — and a $10,000 price The no-glare screen looked great, thanks to its E-
tag — are really its only claims to fame. Yet some Ink electronic paper; but so did the Sony Reader,
fanboys still can’t let go of Lisa, even though Apple which had been using E-Ink technology for more
did, burying the last 2,700 of them in a landfill in than a year. The Kindle’s primary advantage was
1989. it let you download book directly via Sprint’s wi-
reless Whispernet. But that also allowed Amazon to
“The Lisa is only noteworthy for being Mac-like be- undownload books, as we discovered in July 2009
fore the Mac was released,” notes Dave Farquhar, a when when Amazon deleted unauthorized copies
network security engineer who writes The Silicon of Animal Farm and 1984 from users’ Kindles.
Underground blog. “It was unreliable, there was
no software for it beyond what was shipped with
it, and nobody bought it.”
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3. August 1, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with hindsight
6. CP/M (1973) 5. 8-bit video games (1981)
Sure, the original versions of Space Invaders, Frog-
Before Windows there was DOS, and before DOS ger, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario are “classic”
there was the Control Program for Micro compu- video games, but only in the same way that “Who’s
ters, or CP/M. (Before CP/M? Typewriters.) As the the Boss?” is classic TV or Culture Club is classic
legend goes, had CP/M developer Gary Kildall of rock. Like many products of the 1980s, the chunky,
Digital Research Inc. not blown off a meeting with two-dimensional games don’t stand up well to the
IBM about licensing a version of his OS in 1980, DRI test of time. But never underestimate the power of
might have ended up ruling the PC roost. Instead, pure nostalgia; nearly all of these “classics” have
Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapted a clone of CP/M been reincarnated as Flash games. If you still like
for Big Blue, and the rest is history. to play those, you’d probably also enjoy watching
Tony Danza reruns on your VCR while listening to
The problems with that story? 1. Kildall didn’t ac- Boy George on your Walkman.
tually blow off the meeting; and 2. CP/M wasn’t really
all that good, says Winn Schwartau, author ofIn-
formation Warfare and chairman of smart phone
security firm Mobile Active Defense.
“A number of my friends still run Kaypro CP/M ma-
chines because they’re still fast and not cluttered
up by endless DLLs and other crap,” he says. “But
I think CP/M was a kluge that fell far short from a
usability standpoint.”
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4. August 1, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with hindsight
4. Super Nintendo Entertainment System 3. Windows 95 (1995)
(1991)
Windows 95 was an enormous improvement on the
various Microsoft operating systems that preceded
When you’ve lived in an 8-bit gaming universe, mo- it. But that’s only because Windows versions 1.x,
ving up to 16 bits is like cranking up the amps to 2.x, and 3.x set the bar so low that an ant could
11. But after a while then you come to realize that have tripped over it. A$300 million marketing
louder isn’t necessarily better. While Nintendo sold campaign couldn’t hide the fact that Win95s “new”
tens of millions of 16-bit Super NES units, it was har- features — like better multitasking and memory
dly state of the art even back then, says Luis Levy, management, or a mouse friendly graphical inter-
co-author of Play the Game: The Parent’s Guide to face — were already available from the Mac OS
Video Games and co-founder of Novy PR. and IBM’s OS/2. It was still buggy, crash prone, and
had trouble running older DOS games. And though
“People used to adore the SNES for its cheesy Mode Win 95 didn’t come with the notoriously insecure
7 effects and ‘orchestral-quality’ music,” says Levy. Internet Explorer built in, IE eventually became
“But the console was hampered by a dog-slow CPU part of the standard Win95 installation. An entire
and a sound chip that severely crippled creativity generation of malware authors are in its debt.
because it was sample-based. The Sega Genesis,
which featured 6 FM and 4 Programmable Sound 2. Facebook (2004)
Generator channels, was vastly superior.”
Back when it debuted in Fe-
bruary 2004, “Thefacebook”
was a far cry from the750-
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million-member monster it
is today. It looked more like
LinkedIn marinated in beer
and testosterone. You could
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create a profile, add friends, send messages, join
groups — and that’s about it. The ability to view a
steady stream of updates from your friends, share
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5. August 1, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
10 ‘great’ technologies products back with hindsight
photos and videos, and run apps all came later. This
social network was pretty much all about seeing
which coeds were available for hookups. (Not that CloudTag: technology , products , Hp pavilion dv5
there’s anything wrong with that.) batteries , Dell xps m1330 batteries , dell inspiron
1300 batteries , Dell d630 batteries
The one thing the original Facebook was pretty good
at? Privacy. Once it expanded beyond Harvard Yahd,
you could only qualify for a Facebook account if
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Yeah, sure, the iPhone changed everything. But if you
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mind back to June 2007, you’ll realize the original Battery Technology
iPhone was crap. Sure it had a multi-touch screen
and all that whizzy interface stuff. But remember, How to Make Your Laptop Run Quieter and Cooler
this was a 2G phone — and we’re talking AT&T 2G.
The iPhone had no copy and paste function. No To read more good posts, please follow us on Twit-
multimedia messaging. No push email or support ter: http://twitter.com/batteryfastuk
for Exchange. No GPS. No Java or Flash. You had Thank you!
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to jailbreak it to add these features on their own.
Most important, when the iPhone debuted there
was no app store. It was just a friggin’ phone — one
that cost $600, plus a two-year commitment to the Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a com-
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