Big Misses in Technology

oddly enough, not peda flops, not ter flops. No, we're gonna we We decided we wanted to look at some some famous in some cases infamous technological flops, stuff that just did not go as planned, didn't perform as well as it was supposed to, maybe you know, made a big splash and then immediately sank. Um. So we're we're focusing on the hardware side. I'm are in the future podcast. We will focus on software that totally flopped as well. Sure,

went on, So do you want to start each shall I? Well, I don't know you said you had yours divided up into category. Okay, I have handheld devices, game systems, computers. Well, I'm kidding. I'm kidding about the potpourri's words. So U so, do you have a particular category you want to start with or should I just launch whatever you like? Because like I said, I mean, I've got I've only got a couple of handheld devices, but I have several game

systems and computers that I can talk about. Well, my my all time favorite and the one that made me think of this is a game system related um. And some people consider it a success. I consider it a sort of a flop. And that would be the you knewer people were you know, if you're born after or just gonna get would um the at man um. I I had an attor growing up. My wife had, so she added that to my tech museum from the marriage.

I consider it the the prize of my collection. Um kind of her dowry, Yes exactly, you know, forget the hope chest. And the problem is and and this is uh, from what I've I've read in the past, Umtory really pushed its engineers to come up with new stuff that it could patent, and uh, they came up with this joystick, which is an analog joystick exactly like well not exactly like but very similar to the ones you might see on modern controllers like I'm the Xbox three sixty or

the PlayStation controllers that the little thumbsticks. But this is bigger, and it's a it's a lot bigger actually, UM and uh comes attached to a a numeric keypad. And the problem with this is a lot of the games at that point were very you know, up down, left right sort of games, and so this sixty degree controller made it a real pan and neck to play stuff like pac Man and anything you needed a firm straight up and down left right direction fire. I heard that it

had a real hard time resentering. I also heard that they were fairly flimsy and could break at you know, a moment's notice. Some if you were a an energetic gamer, let's say, you could probably go through one and just

a couple of gaming sessions. I actually sent back the one that had my my the one that came with my wife's system, had broken, and I sent it to this place in California called Best Electronics, which actually has a lot of the old Attari parts, and if you send in your controller, they will give you a discount on a remanufactured one. It has since broken too. I'm not surprised it was. It was not very hardy. There were some other problems with the attar besides the fact

that it had allows the controller. So I'm glad you mentioned the controller because that was definitely on my list, but itself was on my list. The main reason was because it was not backwards compatible, not in the least. You couldn't play at games on the R which was a very common gripe at the time and had a bunch of games. Yeah, and the worst part was was that they started to re release the games in formats, so you would have to buy the same game to

play it on your new system. So you have to have two copies of the same game just to be

able to play it. So if you are a current console owner and wonder about backward compatibility and why they bother doing that, that's why, because people will gripe now, yeah, as anyone who's owned any of the Nintendo machines leading up to the WEI could argue, because of course that's the same problem is that they would they off Nintendo would often ignore backwards compatibility, and um, and I mean that was one of the things about PS two that people loved was the fact that you could still play

the PlayStation one games on the PS two, most of them anyway. And same thing with the Xbox three sixty. You could play most of the Xbox games on it, so you know, you didn't feel like you had to keep an old machine around just to be able to play some of your favorite games. You could. You could actually get rid of it, play the stuff on the new machine so much now and and so on it went.

As a matter of fact, a Torii had a giant lead in the home with sort of began squandering it because on my list or also the Attry Links and Jaguar, and they got increasingly hard to use and people stopped developing for them. Yeah, you've got smaller and smaller libraries of games. The games that did come out were pretty lame, and so ATRII, you know, eventually was no longer a

player in the video game console war. I probably probably shouldn't have mentioned the Links in a way because the Links actually, from what I understand, was a pretty good gaming system, but at that point they had already squandered their developers, right. Yeah, that was the problem was that, you know, it was a good device without good content.

That's the problem. And because they were going up against the first Game Boy at that point, and endo because some of these flops are are flops, not because the hardware that itself was was faulty, but just because of bad timing or other consequences. Um, all right, well, let me let me throw another game system at an infamous game system flop. Nintendo Virtual Boy. Oh boy, did you

ever actually try one of these? No, I'd seen them and they looked kind of it looked kind of flimsy, and I didn't want to mess with it, okay, because they didn't want to try it out in the store and have a break. Right, Yeah, you don't want to end up buying a multihull system that has only fourteen games in the United States. So the Nintendo Virtual Boy, if you don't remember this or have you never seen one, you wonder what we're talking about. It looked like a visor.

Um it was. It was this system. It was a virtual health advisor. Yeah. The the system was was like a you know, think of like an electronic binoculars really, um on a little tripod and you would put your face up to it and you'd look through the lenses and it was all in red and black. Those were the only two colors that could display, and it would because you're looking at it through binocular vision, you would

given the feeling of depth. So it created a three D effect, although I have to say, from my own personal experience, it was not an overwhelmingly convincing three D effect. And not only that, but Nintendo started to build in elements in the games that would require you to take breaks after you played it for a while, because users were reporting problems with headaches, and I strain after using it for more than, you know, fifteen minutes at a time. And I don't know about you, but when I'm gaming,

it's usually longer than fifteen minutes. Um. In fact, as a as a kid, I was one of those kids who would brack up the you know, three or four hours of serious gaming all in a row, um, depending on what the system was and what the games were. So yeah, that would have been pretty irritating. Now. I only tried it out in stores, and I think, um, there's one kid in my neighborhood who had one, and

before we ostracized him for his choice and video gaming. Um. I played it a couple of times at this house, but then of course we ended up, you know, ostracizing him. Yeah, we we we kind of banished him from the neighborhood. Yeah, we do not speak of him. I I have what I call Jonathan rolls his eyes at me moment. But he may he may actually, uh, he may actually enjoy the fact that I'm doing this. A long time ago, the Commodore company had something that they purchased from somebody

else called the Amiga. I made a series of fairly successful computers, but what they also made was a console called the Amiga c D thirty two. It was the first thirty two bit console game system available in Canada and Europe, and actually, uh Amiga was actually known for its games. In fact, when I had my Amigas and they were my only computers, people used to laugh at me because they said, oh, well, I've got a PC

or I've got a Mac and you've got a game machine. Well, I think that's really funny now when people buy five thousand dollar PCs to play games on. But um, the c D thirty two was going to capitalize on that because it was a console that you could hook up. It actually had ports for keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately, Commodore didn't manage things very well, and they never even got to introduce it in the United States before it folded, so it just sort of, uh, you know, it went away.

It was the game that that almost was. There were some titles that I played that were available for the c D thirty two that I played on the Amiga that we're pretty cool. But you know, again, it didn't matter that the uh just Hardna, it wasn't okay, it was just sort of I mean, first thirty two bit system. All right, I got another one for you, okay, Nakia Engage. Ah, yes, this is sort of a handheld gadget slash games system. Yeah. So uh, and there's another one that I can add

in there too afterwards. No, no, no, the Engage two was an improvement over the Engage and still was a flop. But so then the original Knockia Engage. First of all, uh, it looked pretty weird. Um. If you wanted to use it as a phone, because it didn't have phone capabilities, you had to hold it um in a really weird sideways uh fashion, and you didn't hold it flat side to your ear, you held it edge to your ears. So people said it looked like you were holding a

taco to your face. Um, had Mexican food for lunch. So uh, but yeah, it's an awkward design and uh and the other the awkward in more ways than one. If you wanted to switch the games out of the original Knockia, you had to remove the battery to do it. You had to take the battery out, take out the cartridge, put a new cartridge, and put the battery in and start playing. So yeah, bad design. And um, it didn't get a whole lot of support. Not a whole lot

of games came out for it. So although it hung around for a couple of years, um, it just it never really got a big market share. There's still some elements of the Knockia Engage out there now. Knakia still has the gaming platform um for the for its phones. You can use the Knockia Engage platform on your phone. Um, you're not actually using the the engage device itself. But yeah, that was another flop. The other one I was gonna mention,

of course, was the Gizmondo. Yes, which never was. This was this was a handheld device, had had lots of cool features in it, you know, a camera, GPS receiver. Um, but it was like four dollars for a little handheld device, and from what I understand, it would drain the batteries so quickly that there was really no way you can have a satisfying gaming experience on it in the first place.

So another technology flop, and that, you know, the company turned out to be sort of Yeah, the there are a lot of interesting, interesting, controversial things about that company and its founder. Um should read up on that. It's interesting. Yeah, we really can't go into it because that's not really about the flops. I mean, that's more. We should do technology controversies at some point. That would be a fun one. Um.

I'm done with game systems, by the way, I am too. Actually, well, there was the c d I. Yeah, we could talk about other ones like the c d I, the three D O. Yeah, I mean there are plenty of other ones that that flopped. Well, the cd I was sort of cross platform, you know, because it had one DVD player and other stuff in it. Just that it was kind of expensive and nobody wanted to buy it. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of those that just never really found a place either. Um. Okay, well, how about I go with

handheld devices? So we can go ahead and put up the flameproof shielding around the podcast. Hold on one second while I flip a switch. All right, there we go, there we go. Here we go. The Apple Newton. Don't hit me, not in the face. Um the Apple Newton. Okay, I know it has its uh devotees, but uh Apple Newton was spanned. What a what a mess that was,

especially the original Apple Newton that came out. It just even some of the designers who worked on the Apple Newton say that it was rushed to market and that it was not ready when it hit the store shelves. That never happens with technology, right. I read a report from one I wish I had written down the fellow's name, but I read a report from one of the founders are one of the people who designed the Newton. Um. He actually left the project before it it finally went

to the stores. But he specifically said that that Apple should not the Apple marketing crew should not say that the Apple Newton could recognize your handwriting, because he felt that that capability was not fully implemented and that it presented an incorrect picture. And not only did they use it, but they've used it in the largest font and put

it on the front page of the marketing materials. So the Apple Newton, in case you don't know what it is, it was sort of a PDA and it was as a pd A it that you could use to to take notes. You you had a little stylist that you could write on your your the screen, and it was supposed to have handwriting recognition as well as all these other capabilities. That was just one thing that it could do, but that was what was really known for doing poorly. Yeah,

that's true. The the handwriting recognition sort of gets a bad rap for an otherwise pretty decent little machine. And for those of you who don't know what a p d A is, For some of our younger listeners, it's a smartphone without the phone or the camera. Yeah, it's the GPS system. It's it's the way that you can keep your your calendar and contexts and things like that all at hand without actually being able to make any

phone calls. And the Newton technology actually moved into something else called the eMate, which was supposed to be for educational purposes but sort of a clamshell device and had a little keyboard in it. A lot of people thought it was kind of neat, but Apple killed it. That was right at the point where Steve Jobs came back to the company and he pretty much said, yeah, no more Newton or EMI, right, mat Um, And the Newton was UM. Well, first of all, it was small, but

not small enough. It was still a pretty bulky device. When you're talking about handheld devices, and the most expensive model costs a thousand dollars. That's a lot of money for a p d AH it is, especially one that doesn't necessarily recognize your handwriting. Yeah, I've got one other handheld device I can talk about very briefly before we move on to one of yours, if you like, or if you have one you want to throw in. I've got a I've got a handheld device, and I had

another gadget that's not really um handheld device. I have the que Cat that cue cat. I don't. I don't. That's not ringing any bells. Oh, Jonathan, I think that's good for you, because the que Cat was advice UM that actually Wired was going to try out this partnership, but it seriously, you need to be sitting down for this. It was a cat shaped barcode reader USB barcode reader.

Why because there was. It was a marketing device. You would get a que cat and then they would send a magazine to you, like Wired, and you would scan the barcode. So if you were interested in something on page seventeen and then had a barcode for the que cat,

you could read it. However, it also became known that they each device had a number that was identifiable, so it basically had cookies built into it, if you will, and so they could figure out what you were interested in, what you weren't interested in, and now wouldn't have personally identifiable information, but they would know that, you know, whatever your user number was, you know it was interested in

these kinds of technologies. Are number three really likes ladies underwear? Exactly? Um? However, hackers started using them for different things. They found ways to use them for other stuff like, uh, scan barcodes to add things to your database. You could create your own home library. And that made the que cat people really upset, and they threatened to sue those hackers if they could ever find them. Um. Nonetheless, the que cat sort of evaporated and never came back. Um. And yes,

it is cat shaped. It looks like a reclining cat. Well, let me hit you with this hang held device really quickly. Um, hopefully not literally. No, no, no, I don't own one, so I couldn't. Um, but there are lots and lots of cell phones that have come out that have we could call a flop, okay, lots of phones that just didn't work out, and um, I mean there are hundreds of them. So I'm just choose. I just chose one out of all the different designs, and I chose it

for one specific reason. I wonder if I'm right, but let me see, I doubt it. The Semens Celebrity X one. Is that what you were thinking? Yeah, because it was an oval shaped cell phone that looked like a Star Trek communicator device and this thing just, um, you know, it just didn't do well. It was a little oval device, and I mean I had a big monochromatic screen and

um and a weird keyboard that was our keypad. I guess I should say a weird keypad that was shaped oddly because it was at the other end of the oval. And um, yeah, I mean it was one of those things where I'm sure they thought it was a good idea at the time, but I don't I don't know anyone who bought one at all. Right, what which phone did you think I was gonna say, I thought you were going to talk about motor Motorola's Rocker. That's also

another good one. Yeah, that's because they basically was you know, they're big MP three player slash phone combination, the one that if you were to play an MP three it stopped almost everything else on the phone. And there was very little storage on board. So so not only does it well, it doesn't hold very much. It's very sad because it was nice looking. Yeah, oh no, it was pretty I have a piece of technology that's not handheld, nor is it a computer, So I guess maybe it's

our segue device. And that's Audrey. Okay. Um actually worked for a company that that was very interested in the Audrey at the time, and it was a an internet appliance.

I'm not talking about the fridges that have internet access, although those are kind of flops too, or the coffee mate yea with internet access, right, but um no, this was a It was a very sleek device that that three Calm made and very cool look and had a little screen and it was basically so that you would have an Internet appliance in the kitchen so that you could, you know, maybe while dinners cooking, you can check your email or you know, look up a recipe online, or

you know, do something for the It's sort of a p D A light because it had a stylist that you could use to use the screen. Pretty neat looking. Hackers love it. They could, they could get into it

and mess with it. The thing is, it didn't sell very well, and three Calm had to change direction, so you know, it was really on sale only for about a year, year and a half thousand time frames, so kind of neat, but you know, and maybe now would actually succeed a little better than it would have back then, because now that we have more of an emphasis on cloud computing where you don't even need a very strong, you know, computing device or to access some really really

cool features, maybe today it would do better than it did back then. But you see that with a lot of the there were a lot of devices that were meant to access the Internet and that's all they really were supposed to do, and there were these thin client devices. But the problem was back then there weren't the web services that you needed to make that a useful device. You didn't have the Google Docs where you could create

a document and save it to a cloud storage system. Um, you would needed a hard drive and most of these devices didn't have any kind of real storage space on them. So you know, back then not so much today. Who's to say it might actually work? So? Uh, you have computers? Yeah, I got a whole bunch of them. I can talk about them real quick. Okay, So here's the first one. A couple three. So the Apple three is supposed to be to follow up to the Apple to the most

expensive model. Are the most expensive version of the Apple three was a seventy dollars when it came out. That's um pretty expensive in the mid eighties. Uh so actually early eighties. And um so it had a proprietary floppy disk format, which made it incompatible with earlier UM Apple computers. So once again we're compatibility compatibility issues. Um, there are a lot of hardware problems. I read one place where supposedly, and I was not able to verify this, so this

is under the rumor. And but uh supposedly one technician suggested that if you're your hardware wasn't working properly, what you needed to do was lift the computer a couple of inches and drop it, Yeah, so that it would reset the chips. That's not good tech support if you have to drop your device so that it were I mean, that's essentially kick it. That's the FONDSS version of tech

support percussive maintenance, right. So, Um, anyway, Apple had to recall thousands of these machines shortly after putting them up for sale, and uh, you know, I think it was like fourteen thou units they had to recall. It was it was a horrible, horrible image problem for Apple. Um. And it just was a complete flop. Yeah, And uh, I bet I know another one on your list, the immediate predecessor to the Mac, which was actually developed at the same time as the Mac, but a total flop

Lisa Lisa, most of which are in landfills. Now I did not choose the Lisa, but I figured that once you started talking about that, that that had to be what you were And it was a very similar situation. The Apple way way expensive uh similar technology to the Mac because it was developed by an entirely different group at Apple at the same time, and uh, you know, it was so extremely expensive that they kind of just let it go all right. So, um, do you remember E machines? Yeah,

I had any machine? Did you ever have any machine? Okay, so E machines these are IBM. These were IBM compatible computers, UM that uh and still are still are. Yeah. But the early early E machines that came out, uh, there were problems with them. One of the problems was that they were super cheap. I mean, that was the really the benefit thing about the machine. Yeah. And you could even sign up for a service contract where you get a free computer in return for this service that you

had purchased. I imagine, if I remember correctly, you had to sign up for internet service for several years. It's like it's like two years, um, and ended up being but it still ended up being a fairly cheap computer by today's standards. Anyways, we're talking about like seven bucks. But you're since you would have had to have purchase service somehow otherwise, I mean, you know, it looked like a deal. The problem was that a lot of the machines UM had faulty hardware. The early ones, early ones

had things like bad power supplies. There the noisy fans. Sometimes the modems wouldn't work. Sometimes it was impossible to get hold of tech support. Um, so they were cheap but not reliable, the early ones. Anyway, at this point, I haven't used any machine in years, so I have no idea what the quality is now, but back then not so good. On a similar note, the Dell Dimension hundred so that came out in two thousand three, also

had problems with power supply failures. So the real problem with this was not that only that you would have a power supply failure, but that Dell had misidentified the problem and thought it was a motherboard problem. So their solutions did not fix the problem for a very long time, and for a while the company was adamant in denying that there were any power supply issues. So that was kind of where Dell fell from grace for a while. So they've had to you know, that's where the dude,

dude don't get a Dell. That's where the little phrase came from out of that after their dude get a Dull commercials. So yeah, um, okay, how about the Packard Bell PCs, all of them, lots of them. One out of six Packard Bell PCs returned to the store by users. Now, you know, Packard Bell still exists, and I know that they had bad problems in the nineties. Yes, I haven't

heard how they're doing now. The nineties are really the era I'm looking at, because one of the issues was that they were accused many times of selling used parts and claiming they were new. They would get old computers, they would cannibalize the parts, they put them into a new computer, send it back out, And you're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to claim it's new anyway, because that's false advertising. Really, you're saying you get an

old new computer and you're actually getting a refurbished one. Really. Um So that was one of the big problems now these days, not necessarily the case, but that did plague them for quite some time. Yeah. I would just on a note, I would recommend checking out any computer you're seriously considering purchasing, uh, just to see because anybody can

make a dud. Well and and I mean I I remember when I was looking at Gateway computers, I had a friend of mine cautioned me against it because he said, well, the reason why Gateway computers are so inexpensive would be because they get there. You know what they get their various parts from whatever the cheapest vendor is at the time. But the problem is that you can't always guarantee that the parts from one vendor are going to be compatible with the other parts you have that make up the

whole of your computer. Now again, or your mileage may vary. You might end up with a computer that works perfectly fine, but you might not. Um, we need to. We probably need to tail this off. However, I do have a couple more that I'll run through quickly, UM, and I'm

glad we didn't. We went into some PCs because I was going to bring up the twentieth Anniversary Mac, which was a beautiful black plastic machine that was that looked a li'll like the iMac because it was vertical, But because it was vertical and they didn't have the same CD technology, they had to put in a CD drive that was slower than the others. Um, then you might find in another computer and it was underpowered and overpriced

and basically didn't take off. I also want to mention the PC JR from IBM actual chickolate keyboard and the

PS one. Both of those were problematic, and then a couple of other off the Beaten path ones, the B Box, which was a really neat machine from Apple alum Jean Luis gass Um, had dual processors in it and its own operating system, which a lot of people thought would get bought by Apple, except they bought another computer, the app and my List the next because they also got Steve Jobs in that bargain and incorporated next step o s into the Apple New mac os, and uh, the

b went away. So but both of thes ended up. You know, they could have been their own thing, but you know, not so much. And that's that's all the computers I had. That's I'm done, all right, I am, I am tapped out of flops. You know, before you send us email, and you might choose to do that at at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. But before you do that, tb rate us for our choices or mention something. We didn't keep in mind that these are our opinions. So you know, we wanted to

throw out something that we thought were sort of floppy. Yeah, and when we're saying flops were not even necessarily saying that, we're talking about bad hardware or some of these cases, the hardware wasn't bad at all. It's just that didn't succeed, and some were financial successes. But we're kind of if you on the technology side, so you know, feel free to point out, but keep in mind just our two cents, right,

or maybe five adjusted for inflation. Now, if you want to read more about these kind of devices, well, we have articles in the Electronics and Computers channels that will cover just about everything we've talked about, from p pas to computers to everything in between. You can find that how stuff Works dot com and we will talk to

you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you