Old Ads for 12 "Dead" Technologies

[Aristotle]

I love articles like these.

12 "Dead Technology" Advertisements

[Rosuav]

An interesting collection!

Most of those technologies are dead, but some (as mentioned in the introduction) only dying. I suspect, though, that we're going to have dial-up internet in the world for a long time yet. Pagers, too, aren't going to die for a while; they're vital to telephony techs (who, for obvious reasons, can't rely on mobile phones to alert them to problems).

Quite a few of them definitely had their place in history, though!

[Pae]

I bet SOMEONE here owned all of those at some point. Probably Etruscan, for some reason I just get that impression.

I owned 6.

[Jyn]

I've never even heard of MiniDisc, Laserdisc, HD DVD, or NeoGeo. WTF is NeoGeo? How can there be a gaming platform so horrible that I've never heard of it? Dreamcast was pretty damn bad, but I at least knew that existed. I've even seen *one*.

I also had a vague knowledge of there being something that had originally tried to compete with VHS. I probably saw it briefly on one of VH1's I Love the 80s segments while flipping channels. Never would have recognized the BetaMax name, though.

[Talsek]

Good stuff!

I really liked my MiniDisc player actually. The thing that pissed me off was how long it took Sony to allow the device to work with mp3 format. If you outgrew CDs but wanted to hold onto removable media, MD wasn't a bad choice. It was also a pretty solid recording device for the casual at-home musician (or maybe concert bootlegger).

My only memory of Laserdisc was watching a dissection in high school. Weird. It's one of few times I remember being annoyed by technology. Why watch what looked like an LP of dissection when we had a ready supply of blades and animals? Luckily videos were only the warm-up.

[kestra]

I had a mini disc player while traveling through Asia. It was super-handy, and about as difficult, even easier than burning a regular CD. This was back in 2002, and it was definitely the rage in Asia at the time. A couple of us were conspiring to take a train down to Malaysia, buy up a bunch and bring them back home to sell in order to make a few hundred bucks! Didn't happen, we drank beer on the beach instead.

[Jidoe]

I had a MD and I remember it being the shit. Although the interface for burning music was slow and crappy, it was still a new generation in the amount of music you can store and energy consumption.

[Jidoe]

Originally posted by Rosuav
An interesting collection!

Most of those technologies are dead, but some (as mentioned in the introduction) only dying. I suspect, though, that we're going to have dial-up internet in the world for a long time yet. Pagers, too, aren't going to die for a while; they're vital to telephony techs (who, for obvious reasons, can't rely on mobile phones to alert them to problems).

You're probably right. Until satellite broadband connections become reliable and cheaper, dial up is certainly not going anywhere.

As for pagers, I had one in the army and I would say that although it has no efficiency for the private user, it is still good for organizations that deal with information. It's a good way to safely and efficiently send something to a very large group of people without the need to call each and every one of them (SMS is very easy to intercept, so it's not only army-like organizations, but also almost any company that has a secret research or patent.

[Aristotle]

Originally posted by Jyn
Dreamcast was pretty damn bad, but I at least knew that existed.

BLASPHEMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope you said this because you never owned or played a Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast is, imho, one of the best consoles ever made. They pioneered so many things for the console. It was, I am pretty sure, the first console able to go online. It had some AMAZING games - Phantasy Star Online, NFL 2K series, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, the list goes on and on.

People who owned them knew how awesome they were. When they announced they were shutting down, people ran out and stocked up on 2 or 3 extras so they would have backups in case the one they had failed.

The only reason it failed was Sony's PS2 vaporware marketing tactics.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Jyn
I've never even heard of MiniDisc, Laserdisc, HD DVD, or NeoGeo.

Most of those technologies are historic, but HD DVD is very recent. It was one of the two competing blue-laser DVD designs, bringing high definition DVD (plus a healthy serving of DRM) to something the size of a CD. Blu-Ray beat it in a fairly full-on battle; effectively, HD DVD died when all the big content providers decided (one by one) that they'd release solely on Blu-Ray.

I'm not sorry that one of the technologies died. There is not room in the market for two competing formats of blue laser disc, unless they can be read in the same players (for instance, DVD-RW and DVD+RW - any given disc is either one or the other, but most players these days will do either). But my wish was that they'd both died, and an open standard, DRM-free plan had come out to squash them both.