Comment by rezmason
7 days ago
Let's use the clickbait title as a brainstorming prompt: what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
Also, I kind of wish Microsoft Bob failed a little harder— the agentic stuff I'm hearing about these days sounds like the kind of software assistants they tried in the 90s, and I fear they have the same likelihood of poor execution.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
VAX 9000, OS/2 2.0, OS/2 Warp 3, OpenDoc, Kaleida, Apple Newton, Pippin, 3DO, Philips CD-i, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, Amiga CD32…
Oh if we're going through that sort of list....
- Virtual Boy, Atari Lynx,
Hardware:
- AMD Interwave. practically ruined Gravis and left us with years of Creative gobbling up any competitor i.e. Ensoniq, Aureal... FFS we had to wait for VIA to make something competitive to Creative's offerings, outside of 3-ish beautiful Cirrus Logic 4624/4630 cards, before the Envy24 became a thing.
- Speaking of Cirrus Logic, The Laguna CL-GD546X series of chips; those things used RDRAM in the mid-90s and it contributed to Cirrus exiting the video market.
- Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
- (Kinda) the Matrox M3d (and the VideoLogic counterpart). It wasn't a terrible product in and of itself but a Riva 128 was faster (if uglier) for most cases and gave you 2D as well, and they came out around the same time. [0]
- Most 'cartridge disk' drives aside from the Zip[1]. You can possibly throw SuperDisk/HiFD into this category too.
- Intel i820 Chipset (It's 1999!). I'm not referring to the 'lemon' aspect (i.e. when an MTH was used for SDRAM, the RDRAM was reliable... AFAIK with two slots instead of 3) but in general there was almost zero uptake due to the cost of RDRAM and Intel's recalcitrance led to both AMD gaining ground as well as VIA/SiS getting opportunities to be more competitive in the chipset space (SiS 630 was cheaper than 810E and just as good for normal users, Via's Apollo Pro 133A both supported 133Mhz FSB and gave an AGP slot, as well as IDE corruption with an SBLive... I think i815 was 4-6 months after VIA stuff was selling, and remember back then 6 months was an eternity...)
Also I should note that the Saturn was mostly a flop in the US (Can't speak for EU.) but in Japan it held up well thanks to native publishers, the Saturn had a lot of great 2D games we never saw here, (thanks to the same guy that ironically caused the relative dearth of good RPGs for the PS1 before he moved from Sony to Sega...) also the ability to play CD+G (gotta have that karaoke) and I think? it could do VCDs which were bigger over there... all that stuff helped a lot and the Saturn outsold there till around 1997 IIRC.
[0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
[1] - Zip had reliability problems, but certainly was not a flop.
> [0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
And we had VGA passthrough cables, because 2D rendering was still taken care of by a discrete card.
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> Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
I just had to check to see if you meant 3DO Blaster and not just 3D Blaster. I'd imagine both are very rare.
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Then once Creative made a decent UI for an MP3 player, Apple goes yoink, look at this innovative iPod.
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I guess the Rendition Vérité accelerator cards are also contenders.
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The Jaz Drive seemed pretty good, just twice as expensive as needed.
I knew a couple people who had one and it was really handy, nothing comparable (except switching actual hard disks) existed, for a brief moment in time - must have been around 1998-99, no ubiquitous USB sticks, no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).
Us plebs had to make do with 100MB parallel port zip drives.
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I managed to get my hands on a Turbo Graphics 16 console. Zero complaints. Bonks Adventure was so fun. It never took off.
Well didn’t OS/2 HPFS inspire NTFS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#History
They borrowed features from HPFS.
Bigger assistant/agent flop of the nineties was General Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic Packed with smartest engineers and usability people from the valley. Idea was to use smart remote agents "working for the user". Burned $200mil of 1995 money developing absolutely nothing usable.
I recently read the story of the Magic Link: https://commoncog.com/c/cases/general-magic/
> When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends.
There's a documentary too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo
Clippy the Office Assistant. Similar idea to Bob, but more irritating.
Also, The Microsoft Network. This was a competitor to AOL that came out just as the WWW was exploding. It gave us the "MSN" abbreviation that we still see today, but otherwise disappeared without a trace.
Clippy came from Bob. The tech was called Microsoft Agent.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know that.
https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?si=5oUEH0YiwZFCaYO0
Well, almost without a trace. Unfortunately?
I always wonder was MSN ever actually a thing or did Microsoft pull it / replace it before it reached the market? I know plenty of people who used AOL or CompuServe, but never met anyone who used the original MSN.
You mean the full internet experience in one window thing like the aol browser? I’m pretty sure I used to use it, light blue thing and hotmail a more seemless integration?
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I think you might be right that it was pulled before it was available to the general public. I never saw it in the wild.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
The CueCat.
What qualifies as being from the 90s? The CueCat was definitely underdevelopment in the 90s but wasn’t publicly released until 2000.
IBM's Workplace OS was a couple $Billion flop.
I'd also add Network Computers and "push technology" e.g. Pointcast.
It's a weirder sort of flop though.
But it was a flop.
A whole bunch of telecom technologies like WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol), ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN) and ATM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode). Thankfully too since they were ugly, closed and expensive.
Is WAP really considered a failure? Or just a transitional technology for an era of low-powered mobile devices? I downloaded my fair share of games and ringtones from "wap dot" sites.
Similar for ISDN. At least over here it was a successful and important solution for many people, not only for data access, but it was als the way to get multiple lines, caller id, etc. activated.
Of course DSL and other techs took over, but it was far from a failure.
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Hmm.
WebTV might be up there, similar for Monorail PC.
Both fairly quickly got obsoleted and any 'volume' they hoped to reach in consumer space was quickly cannibalized by similar but more profitable models (i.e. E-Machines and their steep internet contract discounts.)
Nx586 was a bit of a flop as a product on its own (even funder Compaq didnt really ship many) but overall the R&D transformed AMD when they acquired NexGen and used the second iteration of the tech for the K6.
Microsoft Mira was a failure with production units shipped by 3rd parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Display
That’s insane they thought a more expensive tablet was a market as opposed to a stand alone tablet.
The remote viewing is coming back though. PlayStation Portal comes to mind which is just a remote controller and screen for a PS5. It’s considerably cheaper than the full device, of course, because that would be insane if it weren’t, _Microsoft_
What's even better is that the Mira tablet simply RDP'ed into a Windows XP Pro machine. Had to be Pro, because RDP. Locks out the local console, because RDP.
It was slow over 802.11b (I beta tested two of the devices).
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I'd think "Synchronys SoftRAM" could be considered a bigger flop in terms of the actual quality of the product, but it was a successful scam.