Some interesting thoughts vis-a-vis technology Down Under.
I guess a lot of it is just that we wait to see how it will work out in the US before taking it up here. So, in a way, the US is our Beta Tester. Cool. 
You know, I didn’t see the MegaCD or the Sega 32X “Mars” on that list, either…
Sure, but that’s because it’s ancient! At the beginning of its life cycle, hardly anyone was using CSS. I’m not even positive the standard was complete - if I remember right, NS4 came out in 1996 or 1997 - I was in eighth grade when my dad installed the beta version of it on our Windows 3.1 computer. 
The trouble is no replacement existed until - what - 2001? I know it was about when I started college that I installed NS6.1 so I’m assuming it was somewhere in the latter half of 2001 that it came out, which means that Netscape missed a really critical period in the development of the web what with the company slowly dying. By the time I stopped using NS4, it was a dinosaur, but that doesn’t mean that it was an inherently awful product. It just hung around in a small-but-significant number of users long after it really was decrepit by modern standards. But it wasn’t inherently broken or just incredibly badly thought-out like the ones here. It was a decent browser that just wore out its welcome.
(Yeah, I was one of those jerks still using it in 2000 and 2001. What, I should switch to IE? I need that kind of browser security issue like I need a hole in the head!)
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.
A great article, and a great thread.
Now… can anyone help me to find advertising materials or other official promotional materials that appeared at the same time as these products, so that we may compare ‘what the company said/claimed at the time’ with how these products performed in the real world?
Sorry, we’re still computer semi-illiterate around here, and though I do know the CPU is actually a chip inside the case, we tend to refer to the whole case/tower as “the CPU.”
I almost said, “I’m still a computer idiot, I’m probably missing something,” and I guess I should’ve done.
I’ll join with the crowd that says Quicktime should have been on that list. Especially since QT seemingly requires a new version every time I use it (which these days is maybe a couple of times per year), plus the latest version came bundled with iTunes, which I did not want and do not use. (Aside: can I uninstall iTunes without messing up Quicktime?) I won’t say that it should be tied with RealPlayer, because RealPlayer richly deserves that #2 spot. Buggy, slow, resource-intensive, and the controls were apparently designed by the lowest bidder. Some of you have trashed Windows Media Player, but I’ve always found it to be a good, solid player. Certainly better than its two main competitors.
I’ve never used AOL, but when I was a kid my parents signed up for a service called Prodigy. I think they were competitors of AOL. They had a some interesting content, but once I realized how much bigger the net was, Prodigy just felt so confining.
I never used Windows ME. I think we skipped from 98 directly to 2000.
I had a ZipDrive. Never had any trouble with it. In the end, it just became obsolete when CD burners became cheap enough that I could afford one.
It installs, you just have to know how to do it.
I have PERSONALLY installed OS/2. On a PowerBook. A Mac PowerBook (BankStreet model!). Running Virtual PC.
An OS running an OS running an OS.
It was a slow day at work, okay? :eek:
I’d do this : uninstall iTunes & Quicktime entirely.
Then go here : http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html (Mac users substitute ‘mac.html’ at the end).
Search around on the page. See the link that says “Quicktime Standalone Installer”? No? It’s hard to find, disguising itself as regular text on the page. Here’s a hint : On the right side, below the large “UPGRADE NOW” button. Oops, don’t press that button! Yes, the link (looks like text) below it. There you are, Quicktime free of iTunes.
Count me as someone else ‘lucky’ with Zip disks. Actually, it’s not so much that they never failed as that they were really way better than the other storage options back then. Much huger than floppies in not a lot of space, and more reliable. Of course, floppy disks failed so often everyone knew not to trust anything to them. Zip disks were just reliable enough to burn you if you weren’t careful.
Might I add the 9000 series? I have cut myself wide open on that damn case SO many times… THAT was an evil case design. Too many screws, too many cables, and that DAMN SINGLE ONE in the MIDDLE of the BACK of the motherboard that you ALWYS forget… I hate 9000 series Macs.
Still want one. Life’s objective is to own 1 of every mac ever made.
Although not nearly so much, and not as much as QT used to in previous incarnations, it still sucks - for one thing, it adds a service ‘qttask’, that resists removal and doesn’t actually seem to do anything besides consume resources.
This isn’t PC related, but since others have gone there, I will too…
Is there anyone, anyone who bought those Picture CD TV units from Kodak back in the mid 90s? IIRC, it was a VCR sized piece of equipment and you would send your photos in to Kodak, they’d burn them to CD for ya, and ship you the CD. (Pretty much the same business model as the Brownie). Anyway, you’d get your CD in the mail and your family would have minutes of fun looking at overexposed shots of Grandmas dentures on the new 21-inch TV set. Joy!
That and DIVX. If I could have, like I wanted, placed a put option on those two products the second I heard about them, I would be worth billion$. Easily.
Acrobat Reader isn’t on this list? Yeah, yeah, I know it has its place. However, a thousand different updates needed (or not), everything installs it, it is resource heavy, it crashes often. The most annoying feature? People insist on putting files in .pdf format that really have no reason to be in .pdf format. The reader is free, but the writer is expensive, so if you have something you want to keep, but modify, you are almost forced to print it out, write on it and file it away somewhere.
Ebook Readers: Oh sweet baby jeebus. I’m an avid reader and read in bed. I would love one of these things. Why don’t I get one? Let’s see, last I checked, they had no A/C adapter, a proprietary download site, limited offerings that sold for as much as a hardbound book but was kept on a website “forever.” Here is a clue book publishers. Include a disk in every hardbound book that has the digitized version of it. This will allow book lovers like myself to have the book, while fiddling around with becoming adjusted to reading them digitized without worrying about some website being around “forever.” Sure, it might cost a few pennies more per book, but in the long run, you will ultimately convert us over to a pure digital format. Can you say iTunes?
The IBM PS1 was pretty crappy too. I think the only thing we didn’t have replaced on it, no, wait, we replaced that too. Hard drives, monitors, ram, case, power supply, video cards, keyboard.
Why isn’t Outlook on the list? Every slight version changes all the menus, it wants to control everything. It is impossible to support. Even if you are familiar with the OLD version it has not bearing on your ability to use the NEW version. I ran an ISP and we supported Netscape as a browser and Eudora Light for email. It was actually possible to support those programs. (It just occurred to me that Outlook suffers from the same problem as any other MS product, world domination or BSOD)
Kudos for including Real Player. Even its’ CEO said when polled, what first came to mind when asked about the product and the overwhelming response was “buffering.”
I consider my computer utopia to be a world where I don’t have to install Reader, Outlook or Real Player.
I agree that it is a resource hog; furthermore it’s intrussive and an annoying nag when it comes to automatic updates, and it’s buggy and sometimes unstable…
…but it really is so terribly useful; what other common format is there that gives equivalent control of the appearance of a document at the receiving end? - everything else I can think of will fall down on font embedding, reflowing text or generally preserving layout.
Generally, people want information. Not nearly as many things require slavish attention to font size/color/layout/etc as Reader would have you believe. Yes, certain applications (employment etc) need to be standardized. However, far, far, far too many people are so enamoured of their paragraph spacing they feel they MUST preserve for all eternity in .pdf form. Yes, there is a place for it, but not nearly as many places as people think their is, think Powerpoint presentations.
Google, let me count the ways I love you and your little “view as html” tag.
Gotta agree with you on this one though; I used to be a bit of a fan of Outlook, until I had to do a series of upgrades in one of our offices; every machine was different; the personal folders files were differently-named, in different (sometimes quite obscure) locations, some of them were set up as Internet Mail only; others Corporate/Workgroup, but only using Internet mail… and so on; importing the messages from the old pst file just never seemed to work properly (it would miss a few items, or a few folders).
Worst of all is the bloody address/contacts book; I have yet to get this working properly on Outlook; on one machine, I can browse contacts, but when I try to select one in a new message, it says there are none. On another machine, I went to create a new contact and it asked me “Do you want to use the Outlook Address Book, the Outlook Contacts book, or the Windows Address Book?”… Ummmm… I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!
Maybe my view is skewed on that; certainly in my line of work (IT for a publishing and distribution company), I have lots of instances where I have to preserve layout - sending a price list to the printers - emailing a copy invoice or some form or other to a customer - publishing manuals and other documentation for our software, etc…
Philips electronics should lead the list. In the 1990’s they release several examples of soon-to-be-obsolete technologies, and left their customers holding the bag. foe some odd reason, they didn’t think to get other companies signed on, so as to have an industry-wide standard.
Here goes:
-DCC (Digital compact cassette). A digitally incoded cassete tape format for audio recoding. only problem-nobody else signed on! The system worked well, but nobody bought it. AND the cassettes were about 4X the price of standard audio cassettes. the market verdict; dead on arrival!
-Philips VideoDisc; a new format for video-incompatible with any other. So, failing to sign on the big guns (Sony, Toshiba, etc.0 the format languished for years, till philips got tired of losing money.
-Philips/Grundig VCR2000: a tape-based VCR format that used a continuous-loop tape 9like the old 8-track audio tapes); dead on arrival!
-Philips universal appliance controller; supposed to eliminate all your seperate VCR, TV, audio remote controls: only it won’t recognize most of the codes used in N. America.
Last but not least: Philips made a foray into kitchen appliances in the 1990’s (in N. America): their appliances were 99% plastic-after two blenders that self-destructed, and a toaster that went beserk (it was 'programmable", we gave up!
Whifton, when you have to say “It installs, you just have to know how to do it” to guys who’s been working on PCs and associates OSes since the days PCs used tape recorders, I would suggest that maybe the software is too hard to install. If OS/2 was THAT hard to load onto a computer, it was a bad product.
It’s tiresome to hear the user blamed for everything. Look, Murphy was right; if something is used wrong, it’s likely the designer’s fault. Now, you can’t stop really brain dead users from forgetting to plug the printer in and whatnot, but don’t tell me that OS/2 was a good product. It was a pile of shit. Software should install on almost every first attempt, pretty much flawlessly, on any working PC. Most software is easy to install. Most Windows installs go right first time, every time. What was OS/2’s problem?
It also ran head-to-head against DAT, which didn’t catch on at the consumer level either, but caught on quite well at the enthusiast/pro level.
Seems like most of the portable digital recording formats (DAT, DCC, Minidisc, standalone CD recorders, and their predecessors) never made it at the consumer level until CD/RW became common in PCs. While the others never had broad appeal for whatever reason, I wouldn’t classify them as ‘worst’, since they all worked quite well and found their niches. Except DCC. I forgot about that one.
Some AOL memories of the top of my head…this was back in the 90s though, so I don’t know what the current AOL is like.
They charged hourly, while simultaneously delivering tons of ads and graphics to slow down your connection. Checking your email was a half-hour task minimum. Also, one wrong click into a graphics-heavy area meant that your computer stalled while slowly loading everything. All of those litte 5 and 10 minute chunks add up rapidly when paying by the hour.
It was impossible to use a third-party browser for just internet, you were required to go through AOL’s clunky internal browser.
It was nearly impossible to disconnect their service, and misbilling was common. I had to dispute many charges and resorted to reporting my card as stolen when they refused for months to disconnect my account.
They didn’t have line capacity to support their users. Redialing twenty times, and unusable service at peak times were common.