Yeah, I too was enamoured of the whole DSP concept for a while. I was quite taken by Apple's 1993-vintage "AV" Macs, with their on-board AT&T DSP3210 running "ARTA" ("Apple Real-Time Architecture").

I think the problem was that there were too many DSP architectures around, and none of them were able to match the sheer popularity of x86. So it made more sense to get rid of the specialist chips, and incorporate their functions into the general-purpose ones.

By the way, Intel's NSP never really went anywhere. It was the later MMX and SSE extensions that were much more successful.

By the way, how come I'm only seeing comments on this article on the "Post Comment" page, not on the article page?

Ah, the memories... of Amiga add-on chassis where the boards plugged in horizontally and 16 MB was really kickin' it. Or the Apple LISA. MIcroChannel and EISA. Or 64K CP/M machines where you could do desktop publishing but it took 4 weeks to produce a form. Man, I've been around too long.

I know by the title you might think I was refering to John Wayne's wife Lorena, but actually Microsoft BOB was their first major has-been. Vista is soon to be the second.

VLB actually offered the same bandwidth of PCI before PCI was available. Today if VLB was still offered with no architectural changes the bandwidth would be 1600MB/s. (400MHz BSB x 32-bit /8) Therefore it was a very forward looking architecture, however PNP killed it. The very first 3D accelerator I bought was based on VLB, the Creative Blaster 2MB.

Internet appliances are catching on in some ways. Working as an electrician in western Canada I am regularly installing internet appliances in "digital" homes. I don't find people use the built in keypads for much, but if they are traveling they can painlessly check everything at home from almost anywhere in the world. That offers peace of mind.

dont forget LG's revolutionary internet fridge
http://www.lginternetfamily.co.uk/fridge.asp

Your Amega 32 link isn't clean. They site tried to install a fake virus scan when I hit the back button from the unreleased games page.

Red flagged by McCaffee yet was unable to view the site stats as that I very little control of firefox at teh time and had to end task from the control panel. Come on guys don't any of you run virus scan here?

CDTV and its competitor CD-I from Philips failed because the multimedia was poor and MAINLY becasue there were no cheap CD-Burner to copy CDs.

Sad to say but these machines failed because there were no pirates to spread their software...

Commodore was also unsure of revealing that into CDTV was an Amiga hidden in its guts, because they positioned CDTV into High HOME and MUSIC listening market, and feared the people could know that it really was an Amiga computer because they were ashamed by Amiga...

How a sad management into Commodore.

CD32 cames when no other CD console was available, but sold more and more machines because people knew they could change it in a fully Amiga, and because at that time there were cheap CD-Burner, so people spreaded the software.

Yes, CD32 was a little success, the most 32bit console ever sold, until 1992, 1993.

ONLY AFTER COMMODORE DEMISE and CD32 disappearing from the market, it was outsold by success of sells of Playstation 1....

But Playstation 1 came out one year after the demise of Commodore...

So the two platforms never entered a real competition...

We can't compare each other, because Playstation 1 had a complete 3D section, while CD32 lacked of it...

CD32 could be changed into a fully functioning Amiga PC computer, and Playstation 1 was just but a console.

But Playstation1 had a great success also like CD32 because people could COPY AND SPREAD with ease its CDs.

It was for the first time a wolrdwide success because of three factors:

1) It has good game software

2) It featured 3D graphics with good speed

3) There were CD burning tolls everywhere at that time to spread the software everywhere

Yes. Playstation1 got success due to worldwide piracy of its game software on CDS.

Sad but true!

We could not know if Commodore had had improved CD32 with AAA chipset, it could had entered a real competition with Playstation1 just because the fact we are talking of an hypotesis and the story it is not made by hypoteses.

And the fact is that Commodore entered BY PRECISE WILL OF THE MANAGEMENT into Chapter 11 to prevent bankruptcy, BUT A REAL PLAN TO RECOVER FROM BANKRUPTCY WAS NEVER MADE... The management just preferred to sold Commodore in pieces, and this is due to matters of covering some bad problems of taxation that management of Commodore did...

(See the Book "On the Edge! The spectacular rise and Fall of Commodore"

Really good effort, I hope to see more like this.

Yeah, there sure have been some stunning failures in the world of technology. But a few of these were great technologies with bad PR or managing. I have to agree also with an earlier comment about vista: sure it isnt doing well but it is new. XP was an extremely solid OS and its gonna be hard for people to make the tranistion. No matter how you cut it vista IS better than XP its just new. I cant recall a single OS release that wasn't next to hirrible at release.

There are so many tech flops, how can you pick ten!

My favorite tech flop is the Tablet PC... Didn't take long for people to realize that it was annoying to input without a keyboard!

Zip drives have kinda died too.

and don't forget all those Sony proprietary formats...can we say mini-disk...and beta max!

Awesome, the blender in the last pic is powered by an Intel Pentium 4. 

Hope it's not a Prescott, or your fruit smoothies will be all hot.

Fun article, but the truth is most of the failures were released at the point where they were rapidly becoming irrelevant.

The technical hurdles and crappy firmware sealed V.92's defeat. The MWave was released too late. Ditto RIP, Internet appliances and the CD32.

The others weren't failures - they just eventually became irrelevant. Overdrive chips were constrained by the motherboard chipset but worked fine. OS/2 was killed off by OS/2 PowerPC (and we all know you shouted/helped as much as the rest of the OS/2 community, at the time :) ).

EISA, VLBus and PhotoCD weren't failures - they just had limited markets. VL Bus was always going to be a failure due to tying the bus speed to the processor frequency (it broke on the 486DX50). EISA enjoyed many useful years in servers.

Vista isn't so much as failure, as not yet a success. SP1 and a few extra fixes, some interface tuning, and less crappy drivers should make it an improved product over XP. Microsoft are damned when they don't improve products, and damned again when they do and vendors whinge about changed driver models and create shit drivers.

My personal vote goes to the tech I bought, and still have installed in one system, but never really used. That next-gen of Floppy technology. The LS-120 Drive.

I never even bought an actual LS120 Disk, and always used it has just a floppy drive. Shame..

Hi,

It's still real sad that OS/2 was (sort off) killed a few years ago.
It's still THE most advanced OS in the world.
Vista is childsplay compared to it.
Linux lacks desktop and configuration ease compared to OS/2.

Nothing compares to OS/2...serious...nothing...

It's a wonder is lasted 20 years already and stil be more advanced then anything else.
But sadly everybody tries to kill it:

M$ (first one!!!), IBM, Linux crowd, Windows crowd, Apple crowd....

But it's a fact, not a single Gui today can do what OS/2 does!!!
Nor is any OS that advanced less memory-1hungry then OS/2 is....
Security? Yep OS/2's only problem....later versions did better, but people moved away from OS/2 already.

If IBM would Open Source OS/2 today, it would have a fair chance of becomming THE OS of everybody....
IBM would do it, if some parts wouldn't be owned by blinking M$ :-(

I think you missed out on the Agea PhysX board. The PPU = Paperweight

Fernando:

Is the mate Intel inside as the other kitchen appliances?

As a comment, I buyed a 27" Dell monitor in arg, the delay in the delivery was the worst, the price, 5 years warranty and customer attention was OK.

Try to get a 5 year warranty from LG or Samsung?

Regards.


HD DVD

Where is PS/2 (IBM's, not I/O port)?