INQUIRER's Top Ten Evolutionary Technologies That Failed

EVERY FEW years some new technology arrives that promises to evolve a previous one or perform an incremental improvement to the previous generation. Sometimes it's a success. Sometimes it's a monumental failure. Here's my Top Ten list, in no particular order.

1. V.92 Modems: I admit I will get a lot of hate mail by putting this as number one, but confess: do you reallycare if a dial-up modem is V90 or V92?. An enhancement of the old venerable 56K V.90 standard, V.92 gave too little, too late to make anyone excited about dial-up connections. The jump from 14.400 to 28.800 bps was spectacular. The one from 56K to 56K with-better-upstream left you scratching your head.

Released seven years ago, by 2000 most people who really wanted it already had broadband or had already intentions of getting it soon, so nobody in its right mind rushed to throw their perfectly working 56K V90 modems to the trash can and raced to buy a "new" V92 one. Described here as "An enhancement to the current V.90 standard" that " offers a variety of advances in modem technology" it never had its 15 minutes of fame.

Among the new unexciting features it provided "modem on hold" allowing the connected dial-up user to "take an incoming telephone call without losing the modem connection" -I never knew anyone who used it-, a faster "handshake" sequence, shortening the only fun of dial-up connections which was hearing the connection noises-, and an improved theoretical upstream speed of 48Kbps instead of 31.2K of V90 modems.

The latter feature probably allowed a lot of SPAM and chain-letters from AOL users to reach your Inbox faster. Yes if you buy a dial-up modem nowadays [who does?] what you get is probably V92. But really, who cares?.

2. RIP: Probably the only technology that anticipated its demise starting with its name. Before the Internet swallowed the nice hobbyist BBS scene and anything good it had -like its sense of community, very much like the HAM radio folks-, back in 1993 some BBS software makers threw its last few punches to the air, in the form of RIP technology: Remote Imaging Protocol, or simply "RIPscript". It replaced the outdated ANSI graphics and promised true graphical BBSing using vector graphics. It had several drawbacks: first, modems were too slow (think of it like Flash sites on a dial-up connection, only that by that time modems were at best 28800 or 33600 bps -33.6K). It's been [R]esting [I]n [P]eace even since the graphical interweb began killing the BBS scene circa 1995.

3. OS/2: After Microsoft threw a hissy fit to Big Blue, IBM took it on their own to release the successor of DOS and Windows, making it 32-bit and revamping the dull OS/2 1.x desktop with a new Object-Oriented one dubbed The WorkPlace Shell, or WPS for its friends. For a few years it even looked as IBM had a chance of winning the fight against Windows, as it had the technical edge: multi threading, pre-emptive multitasking, OO-desktop, long file names, then built-in web browser and TCP/IP, and more. IBM finally threw the towel in the fight for the x86 desktop space. Everything I wanted to say about this one I said here already.

4. DSP-based multi-function boards: At a time CPUs were slow for the amount of work placed on them, hardware manufacturers including IBM and others looked at DSPs -Digital Signal Processors- as a way to "offload" work from the main CPU, by adding "intelligence" to the peripherals. Not only it allowed -in theory- to add new functionality to peripherals -to some degree it did, for instance by allowing some DSP based 14400bps modems to be updated to new standards- but also allowed packing several functions into a single board.

DSP software updates is the same approach that allowed non-standard 56K-Flex and USR "x2" modems to eventually be software-upgraded (via a DSP firmware upload) to the official V90 standard. On the upside, DSP based boards also offloaded the CPU, like a SCSI controller could do Direct Memory Access without taxing the processor.

Perhaps the biggest example of the DSP based multi-function board idea was the IBM mWave sound card+modem contraption. It worked quite well at the time, but developers quickly found out that the DSP's number crunching power couldn't do anything faster than emulate a 28.800 modem without shutting down the sound card part -or at least that's what I recall of it. Developer Ted Felix has an interesting page on the History of the mWave card.

The whole idea of a DSP-based multi-function card was a big flop if you ask me, not because the idea was bad, but because the software needs for CPU cycles quickly outgrew the fixed processing capacity of the DSP chips. Nowadays, DSPs are far from dead, and are found everywhere from cell phones to MP3/MP4 players, and have even moved inside CPUs, like TI's DM320 for instance which power gizmos like the OSD Linux based digital video recorder and media centre. It's just the idea of the multi-function, DSP-based board that never caught off.

Finally, Intel started promoting just the opposite: overloading the CPU with functionality. In the words of Byte Magazine "But the (DSP) trend was derailed. First Apple, then Intel, claimed its latest CPUs could handle many DSP tasks natively. Apple's GeoPort Telecom Adapter eliminates the need for a modem by connecting the Mac directly to a phone line while using the CPU to emulate a modem in software. Intel is carrying the concept even further by defining an NSP reference platform for PC vendors and extending the functions to include wave-table audio and software-only video playback. Instead of handing off those functions to dedicated chips and special hardware, Intel's NSP approach uses the CPU to perform audio and video tasks."

Of course, it then meant that in order to use a "Winmodem" which stole CPU cycles from your OS and applications, a 66Mhz or even 100 Mhz chip suddenly wasn't enough... Winmodems, Winprinters... all over-loaded your CPU by making processing work then performed inside the hardware a work of the software drivers, overloading the CPU. That brought the need for faster and faster chips, which not surprisingly is what Chipzilla wanted to sell. I'm still not convinced that overloading the CPU was the right approach.

5. Overdrive socket and CPU upgrade boards: Remember Intel's " overdrive socket"?. The idea was simple: keep your existing motherboard and just replace the CPU, by plugging it into a special "overdrive socket", to save on upgrade costs. This illusion was sold to unsuspecting customers as the holy grail of modern computing. I remember buying a 486-66 DX2 board and being told by the vendor "when the 586 arrives, you'll just plug it in this spare upgrade socket". Wow, it sounded so exciting. Like everyone else, however, I got tired of waiting for the elusive Overdrive CPUs and retired my 486 buying a 100Mhz Pentium I which additionally had PCI slots.

Looking back, I reckon this "illusion" might have helped La Intella sell a lot of i486 systems steering people away from AMD's offerings. In the words of this page on 486 CPUs: "The final development of the 80486 chip may be the Pentium OverDrive chip. Some System Boards have been produced that are equipped with a Pentium OverDrive socket. This chip took about two years to actually see the light of day and now the Pentium OverDrive chip has finally arrived it has been discovered not all the boards manufactured with a Pentium OverDrive socket will actually work with the chip.".

The idea of a separate "overdrive socket" was quickly killed, but "Overdrive CPUs" continued for a bit more, and were sold also for Pentium PRO sockets, basically giving you a Pentium II on a slower-bus Socket-8 Pentium PRO motherboard. Other firms also made "586 upgrade boards" that plugged into 486 motherboards. They never had a huge following as the upgrade from a 486 to 586 mobo often gave newer technologies like PCI and Plug and Pray, and a faster bus.

6. Commodore's CDTV and CD32 games console: as an Amiga user at the time, I thought for a few years that Commodore Business Machines would be able to pull this off. After all, the Amiga always had great games, and the CDTV-idea-turned-CD32 games console looked solid enough. This was the evolution of the Amiga 16/32bit computers from the desk to the living rooms.

In the end CBM was so mismanaged that the whole company went under. What is sad is that the idea was very good: lure existing and new games developers to the platform, which would in turn make the Amiga software ecosystem grow even stronger.

Microsoft applied the same idea with Windows games and the XBox console, which proves that The Vole copies others' ideas more often than not. Those interested to learn more should probably check out the book titled "On the Edge" - 'the spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore'.

7. Vista. The "evolution" of Windows XP. Nobody out of Redmondia got excited about it. Even Microsoft admitted it. PC builders like Dell choose to continue offering WinXP. And Microsoft appeasers at Gartner said it will take up to two years for Vista sales to surpass XP. Need we say more?.

Microsoft Vista booth at Expo Dell Buenos Aires 2007.

Wow! Notice the crowd fighting to be the first to buy their copy? Neither did we.

8. The EISA and VLBus:

EISA was designed as an evolution of ISA after IBM annoyed third party vendors with its Microchannel bus, it promised jumper-free boards and you configured boards with an ugly DOS-based utility to assign IRQs and the like. I will spare newer generations with blank stares on their faces as they read this any more information about the joy it was to manually assign IRQs to ISA and EISA boards. I owned a 486-DX2 motherboard with EISA slots. I hated it (EISA) with a passion. After using the EISA setup utils, you screamed for jumpers and a screwdriver. EISA enjoyed some limited success on business servers before the move to PCI killed it for good.

VL-BUS: Vesa Local Bus This was actually a new technology, not an evolution of ISA. But it was sold to consumers as the next upgrade path to get decent video speeds out of 486 and a few early 586 motherboards. It worked quite well, but PCI first -and later AGP- killed it. VL-BUS boards were the longest you could find, and you always thought you had broken something after inserting one in its slot due to the heavy pressure and force that was needed. I'm happy to see it dead. More here.

9. Kodak's PhotoCD and CD-PROM: The evolution of film. Kodak's idea was to mix the then-new CD-ROM technology with photo processing. It never caught a big chunk of the market outside of the U.S. because it was proprietary and you had to take your photos to Kodak centres for digitizing, and as a result you got a CD that you were supposed to play on Photo-CD players hooked to your telly. More here at the whackypedia. CD-PROM was another bright idea by Kodak that never took off.

I read several times that PhotoCD enjoyed some limited success among professional photographers. Perhaps in the U.S. Certainly not in this part of the world (South America). In the words of EMedia: "You almost feel sorry for Kodak sometimes. Photo CD was a failure. Their impressive 6X recorder and Disc Transporter were reliable, but too pricey for most customers who needed them."

10. Late '90s 'Internet appliances' a lot of companies from 3com to Gateway computer sank millions into developing "internet appliances" hailed as the holy grail of low-cost computing, an evolution of the PC, without the fat.

You were supposed to install them in your kitchen, in your bedroom and living room instead of a full-blown PC, most offered almost instant-on and a limited web browser. Clearly this was an idea before its time. I own a few Gateway Internet TouchPad appliances that work very well to this day, they were based on the low-power, x86 compatible Crusoe CPU from chips firm Transmeta, and ran an AOL client ported to Linux, using the Mozilla/Netscape "Gecko" browsing engine.

Alcatel Webtouch One (1999). If it only had an Ethernet port instead of Dial-up, and a 2007 CPU!.

Ironically, the hardware proved too slow and the amount of memory too limited, and the price too high. According to the whackypedia, some have called internet appliances "one of the eight biggest tech flops ever". But nothing prevents the same concepts being applied today. In fact, some say todays' hits like Nokia's pocket Internet Tablet or also the Pepper Pad Web Tablet are a resurgence of the late-90s "internet appliance" concepts.

Linux powered Gateway Connected Touchpad, with IR keyboard and touch-screen

On a related note, I'm still awaiting a Gateway CTP re-edition using today's technology to install in my kitchen. It should ideally feature Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-for peering with other devices-, wired Ethernet -ideally Gigabit-, a decent GPU capable of full-screen MPEG2/MPEG4 video, the same form factor and touch-screen as the GCTP but at a higher-res like 1024x768, a modern CPU -single-core AMD Turion?-, 512MB RAM, a decent Gnome-based current mobile Linux, almost instant-on with Flash based storage the ability to connect to it a nice thermal printer so I can use it to keep track of groceries to buy and print my weekly shopping list. µ