Whatever happened to... - A thread about tech trends and items that died a quiet death.

[Woods0]

They sold 80 million PSPs and it had zero cultural impact whatsoever. Most people knew someone with a DS, I've seen 3 PSPs ever and the last was several years ago.
Nintendo was putting mainline franchise games on the DS along with new IPs like Nintendogs which I think everyone can claim to have an experience with. Meanwhile Sony had some spinoff games for God of War, MGS, Assassin's Creed, other shit, and that was basically it. The only PSP title people still care about is Patapon which I think is getting a spiritual successor or something, a fucking rhythm game.

 

[Don Yagon]

Most people knew someone with a DS

DS never took off here in Russia, all the cool kids had either a (possibly hacked) PSP or any of the GBA SP bootlegs. A friend in Philippines told me the same, I assume that's been the case in pretty much every country that doesn't have as much of a rampant consoomer culture as US or Japan.

 

[Pee Cola]

3D TV. What a gimmicky load of horseshit that was.

 

[Barry Williams]

Another one, on the left wing side, were Solar Roadways, I remember people hyped those things for ages, but all that it amounted to was a patio sized footpath that broke and caught fire after a city invested millions of dollars into it.

lmao is that true? I remember the big deal that solar roadways were making online a decade ago with people arguing for and against them with 20+ minute long YouTube videos. They found an investor for it though? And it just caught fire? How? It's just recycled glass???

I was unfortunate to have Windows Millenium back then.

My mom bought a computer for the home office in 2000-ish and it came with Windows ME. I have "fond" memories of wasting afternoons after school trying to get emulators and games to work on it only for the computer to usually lock up or blue screen after 10 minutes.

They sold 80 million PSPs and it had zero cultural impact whatsoever.

I think the reason why the PSP vanished and the DS lived on is twofold. The DS/3DS had a better library of games with more replay value. The PSP's battery was a piece of shit that ballooned out after several years and nowadays you'll be lucky to find a used PSP that hasn't had its OEM battery replaced. Replacement batteries cost around $20 or so which I guess for a lot of people isn't worth the trouble to just play a trimmed down version of Twisted Metal or something.

My piece of abandoned tech is the Cybiko, the neon colored handheld PDA/computer that was released in around 1999. It was a little handheld device that you could use to chat with nearby people, open email, browse a text only version of the web, and even play a few simple games on. I never had one but a friend did and we used to play around with it. Never got anything interesting to work but it didn't stop me from being intrigued by it.

 

[Retink Retunk]

They sold 80 million PSPs and it had zero cultural impact whatsoever. Most people knew someone with a DS, I've seen 3 PSPs ever and the last was several years ago.
Nintendo was putting mainline franchise games on the DS along with new IPs like Nintendogs which I think everyone can claim to have an experience with. Meanwhile Sony had some spinoff games for God of War, MGS, Assassin's Creed, other shit, and that was basically it. The only PSP title people still care about is Patapon which I think is getting a spiritual successor or something, a fucking rhythm game.

I remember way back a friend had a PSP or one of the Play Station handhelds and he ordered it from Japan or something because that was the only way to get a white one. Turns out all of the discs were region locked so any movies or other shit he bought didn't work on it except games and he was pissed.

lmao is that true? I remember the big deal that solar roadways were making online a decade ago with people arguing for and against them with 20+ minute long YouTube videos. They found an investor for it though? And it just caught fire? How? It's just recycled glass???

Investors, lol, lmao even, no. The evil rich white men will never do anything good, they have weird views about things having to make sense, it was your tax dollars of course that paid for this retarded shit.

I remember people who to this day have this retarded "I love science, now take the retard juice into your veins!" shilling this shit as if it was the most amazing shit ever and every time I asked any practical question the answer was "It's solar freaking roadways man!" I really hate people who larp as anything beyond the retard consoomering they are.

 

[Fcret]

My piece of abandoned tech is the Cybiko, the neon colored handheld PDA/computer that was released in around 1999. It was a little handheld device that you could use to chat with nearby people, open email, browse a text only version of the web, and even play a few simple games on. I never had one but a friend did and we used to play around with it. Never got anything interesting to work but it didn't stop me from being intrigued by it.

I had a couple of these (one I got at launch and another when they were part of fire sales at best buy due to the company going under) and while I never got to experience connecting to another person using a cybiko, I got to mess around with its features a fair bit.

1) The web browsing wasn't 'text only.' It actually used an entirely different standard called WAP. WAP used a bespoke markup language called WML, mostly favoring text but supporting some graphics, and it was completely separate and incompatible with regular HTML. You couldn't browse normal web pages with it - only sites that provided WAP/WML support could be accessed. A lot of major news sites and such did but the majority of the normal web was inaccessible. You could put together WAP gateways that'd convert an HTML site to something a WAP-only device could consume but it was always finnicky in how well it would work.

2) The SDK was freely available and surprisingly simple to use (at least for the time period). Being able to write some C and build it for a completely unique device actually gave me a lot of motivation to keep on learning programming. I never did anything crazy but being able to draw some simple graphics demos and run them on a tiny computer that could fit in my pocket felt really cool as a 12 year-old kid. Nowadays programming knowledge is easier to come by but being able to figure out getting a weird toolchain and SDK running along with basic C concepts consumed almost a full summer of my childhood.

3) The wireless capabilities were bad. I believe it was advertised to work at 300 ft but the custom RF protocol they designed tended to shit itself even at 50 ft. Maybe if you were in a completely empty space with no RF interference it would work. And RF interference was extremely common because the 900-928 MHz band that Cybikos used was also used by cordless phones which were everywhere in the early 2000s. And this was actually a problem because that WAP web functionality I mentioned in point 1 that was already super limited? The only way you could use it was by having a second Cybiko hooked up to your PC and setting it up be the access point - using even the basic shitty mobile web of the time required buying two of the damn things and tethering one to a PC. And even then you were lucky if you could use it on the same floor of your house let alone out in the yard or in the kitchen or whatever.

I'm ranting a ton but I actually have a lot of fond nostalgia for that part of my life where I could spend an entire summer break fucking around with programming some jank Russian gameboy. And even if it was jank, the jankness motivated me to learn some incredibly important skills that I still use even today.

DS never took off here in Russia, all the cool kids had either a (possibly hacked) PSP or any of the GBA SP bootlegs. A friend in Philippines told me the same, I assume that's been the case in pretty much every country that doesn't have as much of a rampant consoomer culture as US or Japan.

When did the PSP catch on in Russia? Around launch, it wasn't even a contest here in the US - the DS had better games, was cheaper, and it was easier to pirate games on (just buy a slot 1 flashcart and you're good to go). If we're talking around 2008 though, then it makes sense because Pandora's Battery would have been out which made hacking PSPs easy and efficient.

 

[Don Yagon]

When did the PSP catch on in Russia?

Around 2007-2008, I think. DS's import was also delayed by a couple years, and by that point PSP already was on the market.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Are you referring to lenticular prints? Those are definitely still around, just not targeted to adults very often. If you want 3-d stickers, a souvenir magnet or a cool animation on your ruler, you're set.
View attachment 5603945

I mostly see them these days on cars as weeb stickers so it shows a guy in a few different forms as you go past, so you get like, Goku, SSJ1, SSJ2, SSJ3, and SSJ4 from GT or one of the Narutos with all his looks

 

[CashMoney!]

MiniDisc. It really is superior to CD for so many reasons, the lack of scratching being the best.

MiniDiscs offered advantages like rewritability, portability, and durability compared to CDs. They were smaller, making them more convenient for portable use, and their re-recordable nature allowed users to edit and update content. Additionally, MiniDisc players were less prone to skipping than portable CD players, providing a more stable listening experience, especially during activities like jogging or commuting.

They were an ENORMOUS hit in Japan for good reason, although the hardware was very expensive. Some artists release special editions on minidisc, in addition to cassette and vinyl.

Here's an in-depth look at the history of MiniDisc.

Also, Silverlight, Microsoft's attempt to get into the Web scene with the likes of Flash before Apple decided to stop supporting plug-ins which meant everyone dropped Silverlight etc like a hot potato. It was a cool name, and developers at the time enjoyed using it. I can't find a whole lot on Silverlight now except for 15 year old YouTube videos hosted by Indians in bare rooms, but there is this one video by a Microsoft employee.

Here's some amusing content around Silverlight.

 

[Whatevermancer]

Tons of tech got killed off by smartphones: PDAs, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, portable consoles, netbooks, the list could go on.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

MiniDisc. It really is superior to CD for so many reasons, the lack of scratching being the best.

MiniDiscs offered advantages like rewritability, portability, and durability compared to CDs. They were smaller, making them more convenient for portable use, and their re-recordable nature allowed users to edit and update content. Additionally, MiniDisc players were less prone to skipping than portable CD players, providing a more stable listening experience, especially during activities like jogging or commuting.

They were an ENORMOUS hit in Japan for good reason, although the hardware was very expensive. Some artists release special editions on minidisc, in addition to cassette and vinyl.

Here's an in-depth look at the history of MiniDisc.

Also, Silverlight, Microsoft's attempt to get into the Web scene with the likes of Flash before Apple decided to stop supporting plug-ins which meant everyone dropped Silverlight etc like a hot potato. It was a cool name, and developers at the time enjoyed using it. I can't find a whole lot on Silverlight now except for 15 year old YouTube videos hosted by Indians in bare rooms, but there is this one video by a Microsoft employee.

Here's some amusing content around Silverlight.

iirc MD had a big disadvantage in the USA in that it didn't hit the streets until shortly before CD-R became common and (relatively) cheap, so "your own digital audio" didn't quite have the same zing when your choice was "a totally new format" or "the thing everybody has"
talk radio loved the fuck out of MD, you can get two hours mono on a single disc and blank it instantly, so it replaced tape cassette and reel-to-reel for a lot of day to day shit work of recordings and replays of shows before everything went computer
but yeah MDs look cool as fuck, very "here is your cyberdata, futureguy" looking

 

[Fascist Kirk]

Blackberry phones, Zune Microsoft Media player,
Zip Drives Jazz Drives. Movies on 4k ultra

Google Glasses
and that stupid standing wheel chair people used to have in the early 2000's

 

[Elysian]

and that stupid standing wheel chair people used to have in the early 2000's

Segways! Or if you were a kid who wanted to be totally radical and XTREME you could get a Dareway, which was like the Segway but kid sized and with ugly decals on.

 

[FailurePersonifiedV2]

For whatever reason something popped into my head today, which was the Freedom Phone. I remember a few years back it was being shilled everywhere and even people like Tim Pool were claiming they'd get real versions of it to test.

A Poaster (who I actually quite enjoy) had this to say. (I believe the screenshot was taken in July of ‘21)

Spoiler: The Chinese Phone And the Freedom Phone

 

[Fcret]

Also, Silverlight, Microsoft's attempt to get into the Web scene with the likes of Flash before Apple decided to stop supporting plug-ins which meant everyone dropped Silverlight etc like a hot potato. It was a cool name, and developers at the time enjoyed using it. I can't find a whole lot on Silverlight now except for 15 year old YouTube videos hosted by Indians in bare rooms, but there is this one video by a Microsoft employee.

Most of what Silverlight did quickly ended up getting obsoleted by new HTML5 tech like the canvas API and video tags. And it kinda made sense to move away from it given its history of absolutely insane vulnerabilities. For my money, the only thing I really ever associated silverlight with was netflix during the first half of the 2010s.

iirc MD had a big disadvantage in the USA in that it didn't hit the streets until shortly before CD-R became common and (relatively) cheap, so "your own digital audio" didn't quite have the same zing when your choice was "a totally new format" or "the thing everybody has"

Early MiniDisc was about as jank to use as recording from cassettes and early ATRAC didn't sound especially great (better than cassettes but still not anywhere close to CD quality). In places where cheap, high-quality cassette recorders as part of Hi-Fi setups weren't common, MiniDisc wasn't a bad option. But from talking to the American boomers I know who were alive when MiniDisc was coming out (my dad mostly), the general opinion seemed to be, "It cost like 5x as much and didn't sound that much better. Plus I already had a good tape deck at home so why buy something new." There was also market confusion due to the introduction of DCC in the US as a competing 'digital replacement for audio cassettes' standard, which just muddied the waters even more for consumers.

MiniDisc eventually did become really good with NetMD which had a newer ATRAC standard and the ability to copy music from a PC, but that came out in 2001 - the same year that the original iPod came out.

I think a lot of retrospectives about tech suffer from this phenomenon where we consider a piece of technology based on what it eventually became rather than what it was, and then we think people of the past were stupid or uninformed for not buying into thing that's going to be totally rad in ten years (trust the plan bros).

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

MiniDisc eventually did become really good with NetMD which had a newer ATRAC standard and the ability to copy music from a PC

yeah that was some bullshit that you couldn't just rip the files from the shit

 

[cybertoaster]

Besides all the other stuff already listed I would say modular phones.


But those never happened, even tho google did get a working prototype going. Still with the insane levels of hype at the time its surprising how fast it petered out.

BTW if we are going with future "whatever happened to" I'm going with that rabbit R1 crap, its literally a $200 app in device form, who the hell gave them the money to do that?

MiniDisc. It really is superior to CD for so many reasons, the lack of scratching being the best.

MiniDiscs offered advantages like rewritability, portability, and durability compared to CDs. They were smaller, making them more convenient for portable use, and their re-recordable nature allowed users to edit and update content. Additionally, MiniDisc players were less prone to skipping than portable CD players, providing a more stable listening experience, especially during activities like jogging or commuting.

They were an ENORMOUS hit in Japan for good reason, although the hardware was very expensive. Some artists release special editions on minidisc, in addition to cassette and vinyl.

Here's an in-depth look at the history of MiniDisc.

Early MiniDisc was about as jank to use as recording from cassettes and early ATRAC didn't sound especially great (better than cassettes but still not anywhere close to CD quality). In places where cheap, high-quality cassette recorders as part of Hi-Fi setups weren't common, MiniDisc wasn't a bad option. But from talking to the American boomers I know who were alive when MiniDisc was coming out (my dad mostly), the general opinion seemed to be, "It cost like 5x as much and didn't sound that much better. Plus I already had a good tape deck at home so why buy something new." There was also market confusion due to the introduction of DCC in the US as a competing 'digital replacement for audio cassettes' standard, which just muddied the waters even more for consumers.

MiniDisc eventually did become really good with NetMD which had a newer ATRAC standard and the ability to copy music from a PC, but that came out in 2001 - the same year that the original iPod came out.

I think a lot of retrospectives about tech suffer from this phenomenon where we consider a piece of technology based on what it eventually became rather than what it was, and then we think people of the past were stupid or uninformed for not buying into thing that's going to be totally rad in ten years (trust the plan bros).

What really killed the MD was that it should've been a data format from the start. With 140MB back in '92 it would have obliterated the portable storage market, a diskette was 1.44MB at best since some people were still stuck with the old IIRC 780KB disks. Imagine having an alternative that's at least 100 times bigger, faster and on a smaller side. More resistant too since diskettes while not as fragile as CDs were still flimsy. By the late 90's you already had 1GB MDs, affordable flash drives wouldn't be that size until the mid to late 2000's. Had they gone with this nobody would've bothered with CD-Rs.

Instead they made MD data a whole separate thing, you couldn't use the same MDs on each system and because the data version never ramped up production it was expensive af, nobody bothered and the CD-R and RW happened. And because sony likes to fuck up not just once but twice they made the UMD which had almost 2GB and was smaller but less resistant and not recordable so again you can't use it for data either.

Also record companies, sony music included, went full-retarded against MD saying it would cause piracy and shit so they barely supported. When it launched there wasn't even an internet and MP3 wouldn't be a thing until 1999 with napster, 7 years later. So in the meantime the only way to get quality music in MD was buying/borrowing a CD and burn it to MD because most albums weren't even released on that format. And like fcret says it was a PITA to do, all the recording was done manually, there was no drag&drop from one folder to another back then.

 

[Gargamel]

Operating System/2
BeOS
100% IBM Compatible computers
good laptop keyboards
attractive user interfaces
Android that don't suck ass
actually good Samsung phones
optical media
AOL Instant Messenger and the Buddy List
MySpace as it existed circa 2006
Google before Gmail
vBulletin and "Please wait while we transfer you (or click here if you do not wish to wait)"
Electric Jews and your local cable company
movies from the 80s
True and Honest IMAX
Digital Equipment Corporation, VAXclusters, and true backwards compatibility
dumb terminals
your brand new modem becoming obsolete every 6 months
Microsoft during the Gates and Ballmer eras and their products being shit instead of flaming horseshit

 

[Power Ranger Monster]

There was talk of a handheld called the Panasonic Jungle being revealed around 2008.

But mainly: screensavers.

 

[Cable 7]

They sold 80 million PSPs and it had zero cultural impact whatsoever. Most people knew someone with a DS, I've seen 3 PSPs ever and the last was several years ago.
Nintendo was putting mainline franchise games on the DS along with new IPs like Nintendogs which I think everyone can claim to have an experience with. Meanwhile Sony had some spinoff games for God of War, MGS, Assassin's Creed, other shit, and that was basically it. The only PSP title people still care about is Patapon which I think is getting a spiritual successor or something, a fucking rhythm game.

I've heard some people boast about how good it was for flights becaes of UMD, but I never heard them talk about how any of the games on it were good.
Aside from Patapon and Gravity Rush, what did the PSP have anyway?