These weren’t really failures, were they? They had a short product life because they were just surpassed by new technology. Unlike real failures like New Coke and the NBA’s new basketball, the PCjr and Lisa actually did what they were designed to do, but newer technology overtook them.
Ah, but when gas was cheap enough and people had cash enough, plenty of consumers were willing to shell out megabucks for slick, fancy, giant, gas-guzzling SUVs rather than tiny sums for fuel-efficient, reliable compact cars. Detroit made a tidy profit from that as recently as a couple of years ago–but the environment changed, and people now aren’t willing to buy as many of those cars.
Twist lemon menthol cigarettes
:smack: :eek:
Not sure if I’d agree with you on the PCjr. My family’s first computer was the jr (a number of people in my extended family were IBMers, I assume we got it at a discount). I believe that we got the final configuration of the machine that was sold as it had a standard keyboard (save the numeric key pad), not the chiclet one.
Anyhow, the jr was supposed to be just like the PC, only better for home use. Unfortunately, there were enough functional differences between the PC and the jr that most any off-the-shelf program you bought at your local computer shop that said “PC Compatible” wasn’t “jr Compatible”. It was a crapshoot, with the odds heavily slanted towards incompatibility. In my neighborhood growing up, the computer stores had lousy return policies so after being bit one too many times after buy a program and not being able to get a refund we gave up trying to buy new stuff for it.
We basically learned to live with the software it came bundled with for eight years (in 1992 I got an IBM PS/1 (IBM’s next entry into the home market) for my high school graduation gift). IBM did provide a nice little office suite, and it served its purpose in terms of producing school papers and keeping a baseball card collection organized and I became pretty adept at BASIC programming. But I sure missed out on all the “fun” side of PC ownership.
In addition to the spreadsheet program (LOTUS 123), LOTUS made a (very costly) foray into the multitasking software market-anybody remember abortions like "Symphony’ and “LOTUSWORKS”? They were easy enough to use, but just ddin’t have the range of functionality-the word-processing program of “SYMPHONY” was extremely slow, and writing a letter took a LOT of keystrokes. anyway, I remember seeing oodles of unsold packages of this stuff at “Building 19” (a Boston-area salvage shop). Oh-and did ANYBODY ever buy the AMIGA PC? they were one of the first to offer color in word processing-but nobody ever wrote software for it!
I had an Amiga in 1986.
Amigas offered true multitasking, video support, and an interface comparable to the Macintosh at a time when IBM-compatible PCs had a choice between monochrome high-resolution display adapters (‘Hercules’ cards) or 16-colour VGA displays.
Amigas could have become the standard home PC, but they were essentially killed by incompetent marketing and upgrade compatibility on Commodore’s part.
There was the beginnings of a solid industry of programs, services, and magazines around it–anyone remember AmigaWorld?–but the original machine was not very expandable and did not have a hard drive, and successor machines that had expansion slots and hard drives went through at least two completely-incompatible expansion-slot hardware versions (the names ‘Zorro’, ‘Zorro-2’, and ‘Zorro-3’ seem to ring a bell).
Because they did not take off, Motorola eventually discontinued the processor line (the 68000 series).
I’m suprised no one has mentioned OK Soda with its insulting anti-marketing campaign marketing-campaign designed to appeal to cynical gen x-ers. The stuff tasted terrible (I recall one of the ingredients was “glycerol esther of wood rosin”).
It sounds gross, but it’s not uncommon as an ingredient in fruity sodas. Off the top of my head, I recall Mountain Dew containing it (along with “brominated vegetable oil” - yum!).
Sunspace:
I never owned an Amiga, but I knew of their existence. I’ve often wondered what the evolution of the microcomputer would have been like if Commodore had been run by competent people.
The Amiga is/was neither like the MacOS nor like Windows; I don’t know my way around in it, but I’ve seen enough to get a solid jolt of “oooh, different!”
I have UAE and some diskimages of install diskettes but never could get the thing to install correctly.
It wasn’t exactly before its time; the problem with the Newton was that its new concept of handwriting recognition took forever to learn your writing style, and even once trained was barely accurate half the time. Newton also didn’t really so much fail as got upstaged in a big way when 3Com released the Pilot, which was easier, had a “graffiti” recognition system that actually worked (even if it took a short bit to learn) and was fast at accessing any information.
With regards to computers, there were a metric assload of bombs from pretty much every company. To highlight but a few:
- IBM PC Jr. (Chicklet keys? A cartridge port? This wasn’t a Sinclair, here)
- Apple /// (too little, too late)
- Apple Lisa (weird aspect ratio, bulky, expensive, killed by the Mac; not even Kevin Costner’s commercial for it helped)
- Atari 1200XL (Buggy, buggy, buggy! No one used the extra function keys)
- Atari 1400XLS, 1450XLD, 130ST (All prototyped, never released)
- Atari 260ST (16-bit machine with barely enough memory to load the OS; released only in Europe, quickly replaced by the more successful 520ST)
- Atari Falcon030 (Great machine, zero market awareness)
- Atari PC1 and PC2 (Atari’s IBM XT compats)
- Commodore PC (Commodore’s IBM XT compats)
- Commodore Amiga 1200 (A castrated AGA Amiga)
Speaking of sports, anyone remember the Fox network and their new puck for the NHL? The one that tracked the puck and displayed it on your TV screen as a glowing red streak because apparently people had trouble following an ordinary black puck on white ice? Yeah, that lasted long.
Technically they weren’t discontinued. They lived on in the form of mobile processors like the 68ez328 (a.k.a. “DragonBall EZ”) and used in most Palm Pilots up to and including all PalmOS4 machines from both Palm (up to the m515) and Sony (up to the SJ33), these last models of which used the 66Mhz 68vz328. All of these processors used the same 680x0 instruction set. I don’t know what their status is now that pretty much all smartphones and PDAs have switched to Intel, TI and Samsung processors.
My favorite was something called Mister Disc. It was similar to a Sony Walkman, except it played vinyl records. :eek:
The Lisa was more advanced than the Mac, especially the very first Mac which really didn’t have enough RAM to be useful. The Lisa was killed because Jobs fails in every attempt at carpentry… er, designing a Really Cool High-End System.
Which reminds me: You geeks mentioned the Lisa and the Apple III but forgot the NeXTcube and NeXTstation! NeXT is the perfect example of Dear Leader Jobs getting sick of not being the main wheel at Apple anymore, going off on his own with dreams of showing everyone how to make a computer company, lording over his minions with sheer King Hell Control Freak glee, and getting creamed in the marketplace because his black cube is a white elephant that is compatible with absolutely nothing else this side of Altair. Plus, you get to quote Bill Gates saying things like “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it.”
OK, did Jobs really fail? No. He got $400 million from Apple in 1996 and is once again God King of the Shiny Realm. Did NeXTSTEP, the OS used on the NeXT hardware, fail? No, it got rebranded as MacOS X and is selling hardware pretty well. (Never forget that Apple is a HARDWARE COMPANY.) However, the NeXTcube and the NeXTstation sure as hell failed, even though the first web server was a NeXTcube.
Want something that is more unambiguously a tale of failure and defeat? Be, Inc. and its BeBoxes and BeOS is your story. Jean-Louis Gassée, the guy who replaced Jobs at Apple when Jobs left to found NeXT, left Apple in 1990 when he couldn’t deliver the bacon any better than Jobs could at that time. (Apple fans probably don’t like remembering the 1990s. I’ll just throw “MacOS 8” out there to torment them a bit and leave them alone.) In 1991 he founded Be, Inc., under the premise that he could build a really cool multimedia computer that would out-Apple the Macintosh and out-Amiga the 68000-based Amigas in that realm. The BeBoxes Be made, because God knows nobody then could dream of touching standard commodity hardware, were cool little dual-processor (Which processor? Early pre-release models used two AT&T Hobbit processors, later versions used two PowerPC 603s.) computers complete with blinking lights (“Das Blinkenlights”) to tell you how revved the processors were at that moment. BeOS ended up being ported to Macintosh clones, and when Jobs returned to Apple and killed the clone business Intel helped port BeOS to the x86 ISA. For a while, the Be people expected Apple to buy them out so BeOS would be the new MacOS. In 1996 Jobs killed this by returning to Apple and taking NeXTSTEP with him. In 2001 Be was bought by Palm and hardly anyone noticed. That is failure. The BeOS page on Wikipedia lists various projects to revive BeOS in a Free Software form that can’t be killed just becuase some morons can’t keep a corporation running.
What about WAP? I recall it being a red-hot, must have technology for about four months back in 2001 or so, and then everyone realised that it really had almost no practical value as anything except a novelty to check news headlines and stock prices, if that was your thing.
Pretty much any type of “Something Coke” has been a complete disaster in Australia- the only exceptions are Vanilla Coke (Coke with Vanilla flavouring, which I rather like) and Coke Zero, which is basically Diet Coke but without the “Girly” image.
All the others- Rasberry Coke, Cherry Coke (both of which I was quite fond of), and Lime Coke (a foul abomination) were discontinued almost before the first shipments had been unloaded from the delivery trucks. Lime Coke stuck around for a bit, but wasn’t being sold in the supermarket I used to work in when I left a few months ago.
Dr. Pepper used to be available in Australia, but isn’t anymore- but irony of ironies, you can now get it in NZ- I developed quite a taste for it when I was living in NZ and visting the US, but you couldn’t get it in NZ for love nor money. Until I bought a case back from the US in '98, that is.
No-one else I generously shared a can with liked it- they all reckoned it tasted like cough syrup. Which, incidentally was part of the reason Dr. Pepper was pulled from the market here in Australia (or so I’m told, anyway).
You can still buy Clayton’s in the supermarket here, though.
What’s really funny, though, is that Royal Crown Premium Draught Cola and Pixie Caramels are made in Australia, yet you can’t buy them here! I’ve looked and looked and looked for Royal Crown Premium Draught Cola (the best Cola in the world, IMHO), and no-one’s even heard of it, despite the fact it’s made just up the road in Bundaberg, and the only place you can get Pixie Caramels is from specialist lolly shops, which re-import them from NZ and charge something like $2 each for them.
A guy I knew at school came back from the UK in '99 with a brand new, shiny, top-of-the line piece of technological gadgetry known as a MiniDisc player. It had only cost him £400 (about NZD$1200, an obscene sum of money- about the same price as a one-way airfare from NZ to London), and he was happily showing it off to us, until my mate asked him where he was going to buy spare discs for it.
Even now, I remember this poor guy’s face as the realisation that he was the only person within 1000kms who owned one of these dawned on him, and that the entire number of units in the whole country could probably be counted on one hand with fingers left over- which meant that there weren’t any consumables available for sale anywhere in New Zealand.
“FUCK!” pretty well summed up his reaction, actually. 
NZ may be a bit behind the times in many respects, but in 1999 the Internet was pretty well established- most of the guys in my 7th Form year had it, or access to it- and so he was able to get MiniDiscs and so forth shipped out from the US.
A lot of the Game Consoles that were supposed to come out around the same time as the PlayStation should probably also be on this list- 3DO/Jaguar, anyone?
:eek: I reemmber seeing mention of this when I was in electronics school in 1984, and when I describe it, people think I am just joking. Thank you for digging it up!
The linked page says it was from the seventies, but the design has that early-eighties look all over it.
Wasn’t that kind of the same fate as the Buick Reatta? Buick tried to deliver a luxury sports coupe but it only lasted from 88 to 91.
The BUICK REATTA was an interesting car; I was the first car with a CRT with touch-screen controls (it turned out that most buyers DIDN’T like this feature)!
Needless to say, parts for these are impossible to obtain. The car was never a hot seller; it was modestly powerful, but had the usual GM plastic interior-out of place in a $30,000 car. :smack:
The Arch Deluxe is not a bit like the Big N’ Tasty. The Arch Deluxe had pepper bacon, mustard sauce and a sourdough bun. The Big N’ Tasty has the usual sesame seed bun, and is basically the McDLT put together like Og intended.
How about those Paper Mate [?] pens with erasable ink… Eraser Mate? It sounded like a great idea but in practice they were more trouble than they were worth. They must’ve sold very well though for a while.
Those were ALL the rage when I was in elementary school. The sucky thing about them was that the ink was never truly dry, and thus could be smeared by just about anything - not just the eraser. As a lefty, this meant the heel of my writing hand got all gummy and blue. Yick.