Fax machines for example.
When the plain paper fax came out, I was so thrilled that I forgot to ask, WTF was up with that other paper in the first place? Why didn’t they just make it plain paper in the first generation?
Also - Crock pots
I have one that doesn’t have a removable bowl. Any convenience gained by use of the crock pot is easily offset by the cleaning process since I can’t submerge the thing in water. Why in god’s name didn’t they make them removable in the first place?
others?
They did, but nobody bought 'em.
I believe that plain paper faxes were available at about the same time as the paper roll ones. They just cost a whole lot more!
Faxes were new then, many businesses weren’t sure they would ever use a fax machine very often, so they didn’t want to pay 2-3 times as much for a plain paper one. The paper roll ones faded when stored, but they didn’t forsee saving faxes – they were just for a quick notification, surely they would be followed up with a real document in the mail. All that changed when faxes became common, machines became cheaper and more commonly used.
Why? Because the removable ones don’t work as well as the non-removable. The removable ones don’t transfer heat as well or as evenly as the non-removable ones, so they are less effective crock pots. This is from a review in Consumer Reports, several years ago (last time I was looking for one). I suppose the makers have been working on this, and now there may be removable ones just as good. But when they first came out, the removable ones just weren’t as good.
The Game Boy Advance SP is sooo much better than the regular Game Boy Advance that it is almost like a new system.
I think that if Nintendo had waited to release the Game Boy Advance until the SP features were possible, it would be much better in the long run. I have heard too many people say that they will never buy a Nintendo product again because they hated the regular Advance. And the things that they hated are almost always: no backlight, no rechargable battery, too big. All three things were fixed witht the SP.
The first Macintosh should’ve been the 512K version. The original, at 128, just didn’t have enough RAM.
Not for Nintendo. They wouldn’t have been able to sell GBAs and then GBA SPs to the same customers :rolleyes: (They’re counting on winning back your friends, you know.)
But I don’t understand the “no rechargeable batteries” comment. Flodjunior has the plain vanilla GBA, and the first thing we bought for it was the rechargeable battery pack, on the advice of the store clerk. Good thing, too, because the damn thing eats batteries worse than the GB Color even. Was it not available when GBAs were new?
Well, I’ve heard a lot of people say that they are never going to buy another Nintendo product because:
They though the GBA sucked.
They didn’t like being suckered into buying 2 Game Boys.
I’m just saying that the SP is a much better product and it would be better for Nintendo to wait to release it.
About the rechargeable batteries, the SP comes with the rechargealbe battery, and has the backlight and everything, and it costs the same as the regular GBA did.
The FAX machine sucked (and continues to suck) as a consequence of it sending image data rather than text data. No one would design them that way nowadays. Flatbed FAXes and FAXes of JPEGs and whatnot would of course still be image data, but you should be able to FAX a Microsoft Word or BBEdit document and have it land as immediately-selectable/editable text.
Same is true for cellphones. Calls should be send as text as well as compressed sound and the text record of the conversation should be autosaved as a downloadable-searchable file if sought within the cache limits of the cellphone. We have voice recognition. There’s no damn excuse for analog-only phone calls. (I’m not entirely sure there’s any excuse for cell phones period but that’s another rant).
All printers should speak PostScript. End of story. We don’t have Hercules and CGA monitors out there any more, why do we still have nonPostScript printers???
You can. It’s called email.
And it’s put a major dent in the volume of faxes.
Also, if you don’t have the text already in a digital format, this would require every fax machine to have OCR sofware & enough CPU power to run it. A significant, costly addition to every fax machine. And even then, you’d likely have a few errors on every page, given current OCR capabilities.
Because PostScript is a patented technology, owned by somebody, who charges (fairly high) fees for using it. So printers can be made cheaper without it. We would not have printers available for under $50 if they had to speak PostScript. There are plenty of PostScript printers available if you want one, and are willing to pay more for it. But there are also cheaper ones available for people who have no need for PostScript. That’s the marketplace at work.
I have a dot-matrix pinfeed printer, used exclusively for printing mailing labels. In what way would speaking PostScript make this printer any better for me?
P.S. Why choose PostScript, instead of another of the many other printer description languages available? Some of which are public-domain, not patented.
What about television sets with remote controls? Remotes were available in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s when they became fairly widespread. Doesn’t seem like it would cost that much more to have a remote control back in the good 'ol days.
Another thing that was around forever, but didn’t become commonplace until recently, are power windows in cars. In the late 1940s, you could get a car with power windows, but again it wasn’t something that became a standard feature in North American automobiles until the 1990s. Why? It’s not as if electric motors were some cutting edge, high-tech, outrageously expensive device back in 1950.
The original actually had a megabyte, quite a bit for the day. Remember the Lisa?
But they were much more expensive! The first wireless ultrasonic remotes (introduced in June, 1956) “increased the price of the TV set by about 30 percent”. [See History of the TV remote control.]
And, of course, when most of the country had only 2 or 3 networks, and 1 or maybe 2 independent stations, there was a lot less need for a remote control. I remember as a kid, on Sunday nights we watched NBC all night (Wonderful World of Disney, Bonanza), then at 10pm our parents switched to CBS because they liked their news better. So a remote control would have been used once or twice a night. Not worth the cost!
No, but reliable ones were. Heck, even today, Consumer Reports often recommends against electric windows, as they seem to be very prone to break down, and expensive to repair. I expect that was even more so 30-40 years ago.
Also, the electronic technology used to automatically stop & reverse them if they encounter an obstruction (like a child’s neck) wasn’t around then, so they could be rather dangerous in the car of a family with children.
With regard to TV remotes-- My father, curmudgeon that was, ‘invented the mute button’, at least as far as I’m concerned. It was a primitive solution – just a toggle switch from the TV speaker run invisibly to the wall beside his comfy chair.
It seemed like useful technology, so I made sure that every TV I lived with had the same modification, which saved me a lot of aggrevation until the TV remotes became commonplace. Yay! I avoided ten years of commercials! Thanks, dad.
More to the point of the OP – CD Burners needed sync-recovery from the get-go.
Come to think of it, portable CD players needed skip-protection from the start – they were pretty-near useless without buffering. The first Discman that I had ended up being used as a CD player for my PC, for those rare times when I needed to have a data CD ROM in the drive, but still wanted to listen to music. I stuck with my cassette walkman when I was getting all crazy and, um, walking.
Besides what t-bonham said, I also think it was more like the early to mid 1980s when remotes started to flourish. This was because more and more people were getting VCRs. Well, with all the functions on a VCR, you have to have a remote; you can’t be getting up every time you want to rewind/FF/record, and forget scanning. Then, you realize that if you’re paying good money to rent videos, or buy them, or subscribe to cable, you really should watch them on a decent TV. One of those new ones, with all the bells and whistles. And now adjusting color and hue and so forth is a delicate process, one that should be done on the remote button, not by turning those knobs on the old TV that always ended up snapping off. And wait a minute…the cable company also gave you a remote for the box, and now that your brother showed you how to hook up your stereo to that new converter you bought, you’ve got a lot of remotes here! Hey, I saw an ad for Radio Shack where they’ve got these universal remotes…
Necessity —> invention.
[. . . grumble grumble grumble. . .]
How 'bout a damn “save password in list” function on the newest version of Outlook 2002?!? It’s not like they were reinventing the wheel or anything.
[/grumble grumble grumble. . .]
Tripler
Is it me, or did Micro$oft just not beta test the damn thing?
Certainly they beta test. It’s called release version 1.0. And you are one of their beta testers. Don’t worry, by about version 3 they will have a workable product.