# The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time: opinions wanted **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 31, 2006, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903 "2006-05-31T17:17:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/121 "2006-06-05T03:57:49Z")
> [@tmcinroy](#): > > I’ve never had any trouble with Real Player On my Mac, maybe you have the wrong computer. Newtons don’t make the list becouse hardly anyone bought one. If that’s the case, then why is the Apple Pippin on that list? I don’t think that was ever released! If it was, why is considered any worse than some of the game systems that were out at the same time? C32? 3DO? ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/122 "2006-06-05T20:11:09Z")
> [@mrrealtime](#): > > 1. that 40% increase in volume of advertisements on television (and whatever the partial mute technology that prompted that move) > > 2. Pop up windows. If we’re going down this road, I’d have to say the #1 most annoying technology of the last decade is the “bug” in the corner of the TV picture. It started out innocently enough: a semitransparent logo sitting innocuously in the corner. Then it became solid. Then it became larger. Then it became animated. Then it started making noise. Now, we sit watching our favorite drama, only to have a character from some other show pop up in the corner of the screen and move around for a few seconds, sometimes even talking over the dialog in the show! There are no pop-up blockers for the TV world to kill those cursed things. They’re the spawn of Satan. They make Web-based pop-up and pop-under windows positively innocent by comparison. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2006, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/123 "2006-06-05T20:20:37Z")
> [@InvisibleWombat](#): > > If we’re going down this road, I’d have to say the #1 most annoying technology of the last decade is the “bug” in the corner of the TV picture. Word! The uae of audio in those things was the last straw. I want to put my boot through the TV whenever i see and hear them. ---
**Author:** ![Seven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Seven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seven)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 7:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/124 "2006-06-06T07:35:52Z")
> [@Beware of Doug](#): > > The little bitty B&W scanner (circa 1993?) that was supposed to sit right under you screen while you fed it pictures and clippings and stuff. No computer would recognize the thing more than once or twice, so it just sat there. > > I can’t remember the name of it. One of those TwoWords kinda names with a capital letter in the middle. ScanBuddy or HeadLiner or CrapMaster or something. I think those were the ScanPort things. I remember they build a black and white scanner into a keyboard. Looked cool,. the idea was great. I bought one. I returned it a few days later because I couldn’t get the bastard to scan more than a half sheet at a time. If you rebooted the computer you’d have to reinstall everything again. I’d like to put my vote in for **design flaw** in the [Compaq Presario 7000](http://cgi.ebay.com/Compaq-Presario-7000-Complete-Computer-Package-LOOK_W0QQitemZ8816477656QQcategoryZ51147QQcmdZViewItem) series computer. When these came out I had a computer repair shop. Costco up the street had a huge sale on these. About a week or so later I had at least 10 of these in the shop. I have a picture somewhere of 5 or 6 in a row on the “waiting to be serviced” shelf. These computers started to blue screen at wierd times. I tracked the problem down to an over heating issue on the CPU. It seems some beancounter at Compaq decided the only fan they needed in the computer was one between the CPU and the power supply (If I recall correctly). The idea is the airflow would pull hot air off the CPU and out the power supply vent. Too bad it didn’t work. A small fan mounted on the CPU heatsink fixed the problem. A stupid 2-3 dollar part would have saved HOURS of user frustration and tech support calls (and I’ll bet a fair amount of returns). ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 8:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/125 "2006-06-06T08:05:41Z")
> [@Dominic Mulligan](#): > > What about PostScript? Seems to work OK for graphic designers, but not so well for ordinary mortals; I’ve had terrible trouble opening .PS and .EPS files on a PC - as I understand it, it’s not so much a format as it is a _container_ - the content inside can be in one of a range of formats. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/126 "2006-06-06T15:40:57Z")
PostScript itself is a language to mathematically describe a page, along the lines of HTML. Pretty standard (and old!) stuff, really. Where it goes wrong is when people start adding and embedding special fonts and images. EPS is Encapsulated PostScript - it attempts to gather up all of the added bits into one file that can get unfortunately large. Inspired by Seven’s tale of a bad Compaq, has anyone else here had the misfortune of working on the innards of an AT&T computer? Their AT-clones, IIRC they were called the PC6300 for a regular PC and the PC6300WGS or “workgroup server” - they were made by Olivetti and were radically non-standard. They were the first, and only, PCs I’ve seen that had bolt terminals on the motherboard for the power. No shortage of sharp sheet metal edges inside, either. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/127 "2006-06-06T16:51:33Z")
> [@Larry Mudd](#): > > You’ve got to be kidding. You realize you sound exactly like a guy who “smoked for years” and is fit as a fiddle, right? > > It wasn’t just that they failed – it’s that they failed regularly, catastrophically and were completely unrecoverable. > > I lost the bulk of the mesh files from a 3D Studio project I’d been working on for a couple of months. Click-click-click. > > My best friend, who I’d enthusiastically recommended the damned things to, didn’t _entirely_ take my later warning not to trust it to heart. She lost a bunch of Photoshop files, maybe three months after my fiasco. > > For months, I’d holler “IoMega!” when I needed a particularly _nasty_ curse in moments of pain or anger. > > If you didn’t get burned, you were just _lucky._ Wow–I also used them for years. I never had a failure. Heck, I think I still have a couple of ten-pack cases in shrink wrap at home. ---
**Author:** ![D\_Odds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/d_odds/32/2882_2.png) [@D\_Odds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/D_Odds)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/128 "2006-06-06T16:54:12Z")
> [@InvisibleWombat](#): > > I had a half dozen of the drives and dozens of 100Mb disks spread out over my home and office, and used them for about four years. I never lost a byte of data, and never found a computer I couldn’t make them work with–both Mac and Windows. Zip drives worked much better than the 44Mb SyQuest or those 10Mb Fuji (?) cartridge drives I used before that. I guess you just got a bad batch. The article accurately portrays why the Zip belongs on the list (bolding mine): > [@](#): > > Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc **permanently inaccessible**. Small chance of catastrophic failure, with no mitigation or warning. That, and Iomega pretty much ignored the complaints. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/129 "2006-06-06T18:10:44Z")
> [@D\_Odds](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc **permanently inaccessible.** > > (bolding mine):Small chance of catastrophic failure, with no mitigation or warning. That, and Iomega pretty much ignored the complaints. That explains our different experiences. If they sold “tens of millions” of drives that “worked flawlessly” and “thousands” that died, that says about 1 in 10,000 were bad, so it’s not surprising that I, like most of the people I know, were happy with the product. ---
**Author:** ![Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troy_mcclure_sf/32/4150_2.png) [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troy_McClure_SF)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2006, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/130 "2006-06-06T20:38:18Z")
I used Zip drive and they did work pretty well until they inevitably crashed. And when you’re on a Mac IIsi with a 40 meg HD, that’s worth quite a bit, really. I’ll second Lotus Notes. One of the things that bugs me about Windows is that simple things don’t always stay consistant. But though most of Windows, a given action will do one or two things; annoying, but managable. Lotus Notes, on the other hand, must have been designed someone who’s never used Windows or a Mac, because I don’t recognize _anything_ it does. Double-click a word? Re-draw the page! Shift-tab? Do nothing! What the _hell_? ---
**Author:** ![Cazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cazzle/32/75_2.png) [@Cazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cazzle)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2006, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/131 "2006-06-07T00:28:21Z")
Martini Enfield’s comments about technology in Australia reflect his own experience, and it is true that we are often a bit behind the US but I don’t believe the situation is as severe as his post indicated. For instance, he may not have heard of DVD until mid-2000, but we owned a DVD player in 1999 and were able to purchase/rent disks from local stores at that time. [Wikipedia’s article on DVD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd) indicates that they were released here in 1999, two years after their American release. I remember a lot of coverage in the tech section of the newspaper ahead of their debut. Also, while we do not have Netflix, [Bigpond Movies](http://bigpondmovies.com.au/) has been around for years now. I was briefly a member back when they were called FetchMeMovies. The technology gap between Australia and the US was greater in the late 80s/early 90s, but I believe it has been closing up over the years. It’s services like Tivo that we are most likely to miss out on because we don’t have the population to support them. ---
**Author:** ![Stan\_Shmenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Stan\_Shmenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Shmenge)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 12:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/132 "2006-06-11T12:32:42Z")
> [@fishbicycle](#): > > Anybody remember the Elcaset? “The perfomance of reel-to-reel with the convenience of cassete!” A Sony format as I recall. > [@RickJay](#): > > What was OS/2’s problem? I installed it around 1993 if memory serves. We needed to run R:Base in a window and multitask it with Crystal Reports in Windows. That all worked fine. The only problem I had was lack of drivers. That was really holding it back. I had to run it using standard VGA drivers and the refresh rate was giving me a headache. Can’t work with a headache, out it went. Too bad, looked very promising. > [@Dominic Mulligan](#): > > Wasn’t OS/2 a joint development between Microsoft and IBM? Microsoft chumped IBM by promising collaboration while actually pouring all of the development money into Windows. When this became obvious to IBM, the companies had a tiff and went their seperate ways. > [@gotpasswords](#): > > Inspired by Seven’s tale of a bad Compaq, has anyone else here had the misfortune of working on the innards of an AT&T computer? We had one of those where I worked. The keyboard used a rj connector, very nonstandard. I would always know what employee was going to be canned next because they would have me give them that computer. Just walking into a room with it would turn the occupant white as a sheet. 😃 The last employee to be canned cut all the connector cords with a pair of scissors, so it went onto the junk pile only to be rescued by another guy so desperate for a computer that he soldered all the wires in the cables together! Gotta admire that fortitude so he was awarded the computer. I am surprised that no-one has mentioned IBM’s Micro-Channel. Never widely supported and offered only on overpriced models from IBM and Tandy, few cards were ever made, and it was immediately obsoleted by cheaper EISA and VESA bus computers. ---
**Author:** ![Stan\_Shmenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Stan\_Shmenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Shmenge)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/133 "2006-06-11T12:46:44Z")
Oh, and what about the whole cockamamie IRQ scheme? That probably caused more headaches and limitations than any other “technology” in PC history! **ALL HAIL USB!** ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/134 "2006-06-11T15:32:08Z")
Not really a complaint, but what happened to Zenith PCs? They were very well designed and easy to use, but then a French outfit bought them (Bull) and they just seemed to disappear from the market! Like wise , Packard\_bell-they were known for low-cost PCs they just seemed to disappear without a trace ---
**Author:** ![Stan\_Shmenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Stan\_Shmenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Shmenge)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/135 "2006-06-11T21:56:32Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Not really a complaint, but what happened to Zenith PCs? They were very well designed and easy to use, but then a French outfit bought them (Bull) and they just seemed to disappear from the market! Like wise , Packard\_bell-they were known for low-cost PCs they just seemed to disappear without a trace Packard Bell made some of the WORST pc’s in history. They were sued for incorporating used parts into their systems. They actually had a scheme where they would make two old USED hard disks look like a single volume with a proprietary system that rendered many disk utilities useless. They claimed “no harm-no foul” but if you believe that people who thought they were getting an 80 MB hard drive but actually had two 40 MB’s ganged together (twice the chance of failure, duh) weren’t harmed, you must be a PB lawyer. Add in poor (nonexistant) tech support, frequent incidence of problems of ALL KINDS and you have a recipie for BK. Zenith probably never should have been in the PC biz to begin with, although they did fairly well at it. They did produce the first flat screen CRT in history, and that is really the answer. Their strength was in display technologies, so they sold the computer biz. ---
**Author:** ![Stan\_Shmenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Stan\_Shmenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Shmenge)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2006, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/136 "2006-06-11T22:05:54Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Not really a complaint, but what happened to Zenith PCs? They were very well designed and easy to use, but then a French outfit bought them (Bull) and they just seemed to disappear from the market! Like wise , Packard\_bell-they were known for low-cost PCs they just seemed to disappear without a trace Packard Bell made some of the WORST pc’s in history. They were sued for incorporating used parts into their systems. They actually had a scheme where they would make two old USED hard disks look like a single volume with a proprietary system that rendered many disk utilities useless. They claimed “no harm-no foul” but if you believe that people who thought they were getting an 80 MB hard drive but actually had two 40 MB’s ganged together (twice the chance of failure, duh) weren’t harmed, you must be a PB lawyer. Add in poor (nonexistant) tech support, frequent incidence of problems of ALL KINDS and you have a recipie for BK. Zenith probably never should have been in the PC biz to begin with, although they did fairly well at it. They did produce the first flat screen CRT in history, and that is really the answer. Their strength was in display technologies, so they sold the computer biz. ---
**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2006, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903/137 "2006-06-12T17:02:58Z")
> [@Happy Wanderer](#): > > Packard Bell made some of the WORST pc’s in history. In my old software company, we sold very specialized (and expensive) software. After wasting many, many hours of support time, we finally added a clause to the contract stating that if you loaded the software on a Packard Bell computer, we would not provide any tech support. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-25-worst-tech-products-of-all-time-opinions-wanted/358903.md?page=6)