I’m the first to admit I’m starting to age. It’s a good thing. Honest. Where technology is concerned I personally find that age brings some benefits and one of them is the ability to reminisce over technologies past. Now Harry McCracken over at MSN has created a list of one time technology leaders who have fallen by the wayside and I have to say not only do I agree with his choices I also used many of these items in my youth.
Some of these venerable technologies are still actually in use today. The first item on the list being a prime example;dot matrix is still king in many places and whole businesses rely on the technology to produce invoices and payroll. Even the old fashioned modem (although not the Hayes brand in the article) is still in use in places where the reliability of a phone line and some beeps are king.
Others on the list were the victim of progress. Iomega at one time were the people to go to for reliable,reusable and high capacity storage devices. Now they are a historical footnote. This change took less than 5 years which may seem a long time but in business planning terms is nothing. The rise of USB flash memory devices is one of those phenomena that came out of left field. The technology of flash memory was well known but packaging it in a USB device with a really useful form factor was genius. What many people forget is that when it started the devices where low capacity and quite big and slow. I still somewhere have my 16Mb device which was from Compaq as a “special gift”. You didn’t misread that by the way,that is Mb not Gb. To see how things have changed I have in the last month received 4 USB memory sticks unsolicited from suppliers and added 6Gb of storage to my collection. To be honest my problem now isn’t capacity but remembering where I’ve saved everything!
Probably the only entry I would slightly disagree with is the Sony Minidisc. I had one,actually I had a number of these over the years,and I personally liked the format. As a replacement for cassette it was unbelievable. The quality and flexibility was great. Unfortunately it wasn’t a replacement for cassette,it was a replacement for CD and that I think was the real death of the format not downloads,at least not for most owners. What killed MiniDisc for me was the cheapness of CD-R and built-in car CD player. MiniDisc simply failed to evolve,it required specialist hardware in a world that moved to comodity.
Of course some of the items are quite US centric,to compile a UK list would require the inclusion at the very least of Sincair and Acorn. But that’s another story.
