User:Blaxthos/Tech failures

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Here is a list of flops in computer technology: ==Hardware flops== Read this below by pakiman

Personal computers

3Com Audrey and Kerbango

The failures of these simple web and audio devices were widely seen as the death-knell for internet appliances.

Amiga CDTV

This early multimedia computer was overpriced and suffered from using the obsolete AmigaOS 1.3, when version 2.0 was already available.

Apple Computer

flops

The

ProDOS, which was written for the Apple II

line.

Atari 1200XL

The Atari 1200XL home computer was introduced in 1982 to replace the aging

Atari 800; both the 400 and 800 was abandoned that same year.. Although the computer was the first Atari computer to have 64 kilobytes of RAM standard, software incompatibility with the 400 and 800 (due to a faulty XL OS) caused people to avoid the 1200XL. It is said that sales of Atari 800 computers increased with the failure of the 1200XL, as people rushed to buy the 800 before it disappeared. The failure of the Atari 1200XL (along with the collapsing video game market) may have been a key factor in Warner's decision to sell Atari to Jack Tramiel

.

Atari Falcon030

The Falcon came right at the time when the

Macintosh computers had eluded the competition of smaller products, such as the Atari ST, the Amiga, or the Amstrad CPC

. Virtually no software was written for the Falcon030.

Be Inc.

Mid-90's personal computer maker/OS vendor founded by former

Mac OS waned after Apple chose instead to acquire NeXT. After the failed introduction of the BeBox and Apple's decision to acquire NeXT, BeOS was unsuccessfully marketed as a replacement for the then-ubiquitous Microsoft Windows. Ultimately, Palm

acquired what remained of the company.

Coleco Adam

A home computer created by toy/video game company Coleco that nearly bankrupted the company.

Commodore Plus/4 and Commodore 16

In the 1980s, Commodore International became the first company to sell a million home computers. Hoping to repeat the success of its multi-million-selling

Commodore Amiga, but went bankrupt in 1994

.

DEC Personal Computer trio

DEC was prepared with not 1, but 3 competing entries. The

DECmate II was a word processor based on the doddering 12 bit PDP-8, and was not competitive with dominant Wang word processing. The LK201 keyboard had no fixed ESC key. You had to buy expensive pre-formatted floppies. In the 90s, the entire computer industry in New England collapsed with the death of the minicomputer. The economy in Redmond

would benefit.

Enterprise 128

Announced in September 1983, but failed to be produced until May 1985 when its features were not so impressive anymore. The manufacturers change of name from Samurai to Elan helped sales no more than the massive delay; the great specs of 1983 looked average in 1985: "with obselecance built out" was dropped as quiickly as a tag line as the Enterprise was by stockists.

Go

(pen computing corporation)

Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".

Hip-e

Announced with great marketing and hype in mid-2004 by the Digital Lifestyles Group, this personal computer, which aimed at teenagers, failed miserably in the market. As a result, all productions and support stopped just one year later. [http://www.cnet.com/4520-10602_1-5ater acquired by 3Com.

Sinclair QL

A somewhat unsuccessful attempt by

32 bit computer in the mid-1980s

.

WebTV (now MSN TV)

Internet delivery via television set and set-top box. Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".

Large computers

HP 3000

The first implementation of this stack based multiuser mini was so slow it was withdrawn soon after its introduction. Later models were successes; it was eventually one of the last proprietary minicomputers to survive, outlasting the highly regarded VAX in RISC form.

HP 300 Amigo

Personalized adaption of

Screen Labeled Function Keys

and windows, sealed hard drive, stack architecture, graphical editing of RPG program. Very few examples survive.

Advanced Scientific Computer supercomputer by TI

Convex C3 mini-supercomputer

Cray-3 gallium arsenide supercomputer

IBM 7030

Also known as "Stretch", the 7030 was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. Its actual performance was less than one third of its original specification. This resulted in IBM drastically dropping the price and losing money on every machine sold.

ILLIAC IV

array processor supercomputer

Fifth generation computer

Japan's vision to leapfrog the west in computer technology, the FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the

Intel x86

machines).

ATI Rage Fury MAXX

In an attempt to compete with NVIDIA's newly released GeForce 256 graphics cards, ATI created a dual-chip version of their Rage 128 Pro series. Not only did it not outperform the GeForce, it proved to be incompatible with any operating system other than Windows 98 and Me.

BTX motherboard form factor

Designed by Intel to replace the ATX form factor, it has been widely rejected, including by Intel's main competitor, AMD. It was widely seen as an attempt to redesign the form factor only to cool a next generation of Intel multi-hundred watt CPUs. Intel has abandoned further development of the BTX form factor, instead producing new low-wattage CPUs with lower heat production.

Bubble memory

Heralded as the next big thing, it was widely expected to all but replace every other form of storage. The technology and engineering were sound, and numerous products were actually brought to market, but it was never able to gain any significant cost edge over the rapidly improving technologies it was supposed to displace.

CueCat barcode scanner

Designed to allow magazine readers to read magazines while seated at their computers, and navigate effortlessly to advertisers' websites by passing the CueCat over barcodes printed in ads that caught their fancy. Thousands were given away free at

Radio Shack

stores. What killed it was people's utter lack of interest in its functionality.

Philips' CD-Interactive technology

Released in

infomercials, CD-i never truly caught on with the public, and was discontinued in 1998

.

Compact Floppy

3 Inch floppy disk

With 360k or 720k DD, used mainly in obscure systems like Osborne Computers, Einstein, MSX (in some regions, though 3.5" disks were more common with the platform) and famously Amstrad CPC/PCW range before being outclassed by the now standard Sony 3.5".

DataPlay CD replacement disk technology

Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".

IBM's

Micro Channel Architecture

PC bus (MCA)

Solved the problems IBM had itself created with its predecessor, the PC-AT bus. IBM and many industry analysts assumed that the need to be "IBM-compatible" would force other vendors to adopt the MCA, for which IBM charged high licensing fees. In fact customers did not care, and the industry largely ignored the bus. This flop was significant because it was widely interpreted as indicating that IBM no longer controlled the PC architecture and had lost its leadership position.

Imation SuperDisk

Also known as the LS-120 or the LS-240, the SuperDisk was a drive using special disks that could hold 120MB or 240MB, depending on the model. Although it enjoyed some initial success, the prevalence of CD writers and the falling cost of CD media brought about its demise, as well as that of most other forms of removable media.

Iomega Clik! drive

Cited by Jim Louderback as one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever". Iomega later renamed the drive "

PocketZip", as "Clik!" reminded people of the infamous "click of death" plaguing Iomega's Zip drives

.

INMOS Transputer

This attempt at a different way of computing is now largely forgotten.

iAPX 432 microprocessor

Introduced in 1981 as the next great computer architecture after Intel's x86 line. Considered one of the most complicated microprocessors ever built, it delivered low performance and went nowhere in the market.

Intel i860

Introduced in 1989, this was Intel's second attempt to replace their x86 line with a new VLIW architecture. Like the i432 before, it did not succeed in the marketplace as a general-purpose microprocessor, though it was adopted for use in some embedded controllers.

Itanium

Itanium 2, released a year later, improved the chip in some areas. However timid management at competing companies, scared by the Itanium, abandoned the DEC Alpha and an advanced version of the SPARC, giving Intel less competition; in this sense it may have been a success for Intel. AMD

beat Intel to a 64 bit extension to x86, and Intel was forced to reverse-engineer the chip made by the people that made a living copying Intel instruction sets.

Rambus's RDRAM

RDRAM can arguably be considered a flop. Competitors feared that Intel was trying to control the memory market through Rambus, so they joined together to develop

"Cell" processor

.)

Sony HiFD

Intended to replace the 3.5 inch floppy drive, but was prevented from doing so due to an early recall, compatibility problems, and the rise of cheap recordable CDs. Tecnology is awesome by pakiman

Software flops

Adobe LiveMotion

Adobe's animated vector graphics program, which failed to compete with Macromedia's Flash. Adobe bought out Macromedia in 2005.

IBM's OS/2

re-launched as "OS/2 WARP" around 1994.

Originally developed as a replacement for DOS, in partnership with

Microsoft Bob

This "user-friendly" replacement for the

Windows 3.1x interface was one of the biggest flops to ever come out of Microsoft

.

Microsoft Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0

Microsoft's first two major versions of the Windows

Intel 386

.