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|__________________________|
/____________________________\
/______________________________\
» dig up a name « search the catacombs
» wander by decade · the most mourned · the wake · visitors log
rest in peace, signed off
:: the digital graveyard ::
« back to all categories · 547 graves in this section, sorted newest first
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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HP Pavilion 📖 1995 - 2026 a 75 mhz pentium and a pair of altec lansing speakers in a beige tower, sold on 14 august 1995 as the first computer hewlett-packard ever built for a living room rather than a lab. the pavilion name then spent thirty-one years on the machine that families, students and small offices bought when they |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Mac Pro 📖 2006 - 2026 wwdc, 7 august 2006, and the mac pro arrived as the last mac to leave powerpc, wearing the power mac g5's aluminum case with a couple of extra drive bays in it. the 2013 cylinder made it smaller and made it impossible to upgrade, and that cost apple six years of the professional market. the 2019 lat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Belkin Wemo (cloud) 📖 2012 - 2026 belkin wemo was the smart-home line that launched at ces 2012 with a wifi smart plug and a motion sensor. it ran on belkin's own cloud for fourteen years across smart plugs and switches with a long tail of cameras and kitchen gear. belkin (owned by foxconn since 2018) announced the end of support on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Asus ZenFone 📖 2014 - 2026 asus announced the first zenfones at CES in january 2014 and spent twelve years never quite getting to scale. the line's best years were 2021 to 2023, when the zenfone 8, 9 and 10 were the only phones left that put a top-end chip in a body you could work with one hand. then asus made it big like eve |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Gumstix 📖 2003 - 2025 gordon kruberg started gumstix in 2003 and had a full linux computer measuring 20 by 80 millimeters on sale by may 2004, which was most of a decade before a hobbyist could buy a raspberry pi. the boards went into robots and research instruments, anywhere the computer had a weight budget, and geppett |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Limitless Pendant 📖 2024 - 2025 limitless was the second life of rewind ai. rewind had shipped a mac screen-recording app in 2022, then in april 2024 the team rebranded as limitless and pre-announced a $99 clip-on pendant that recorded and transcribed every conversation it heard. meta acquired the company on 5 december 2025, stopp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Nest Learning Thermostat (1st and 2nd gen) 📖 2011 - 2025 the nest learning thermostat went on sale on 25 october 2011 and turned a dial on a hallway wall into a consumer electronics category. google bought the company, kept the product line moving, and on 25 october 2025 unpaired the first two generations from the app that made anybody want them. the hard |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Logitech POP 📖 2016 - 2025 the logitech pop kit was a small wireless button paired with a wifi bridge. each button could fire up to three scenes depending on how it was pressed: a tap, a double tap or a long hold. the scenes triggered devices on philips hue lights or sonos speakers, with lutron blinds and nest support added l |
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| RIP |
|1973-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Sinclair Research 📖 1973 - 2025 19 september 1973, a company called westminster mail order is incorporated in cambridge. it changes its name four times, puts the zx81 and the zx spectrum into british houses at prices nobody else could reach, then sells the computers and the sinclair name to amstrad for £5 million in april 1986. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Peloton Guide 📖 2022 - 2025 peloton guide was a machine-learning strength-training camera launched 5 april 2022 in the us, uk, canada and australia at $295 (down from the announced $495). it plugged into a tv and used pose estimation to track reps, match member form to instructor form, and highlight recent muscle-group work. p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Humane AI Pin 📖 2024 - 2025 the screenless ai wearable that was supposed to replace your phone and instead became 2024's most public flop. a small square that clipped to your shirt, with a camera and a laser that projected a tiny green interface onto your palm. you talked to its ai assistant instead of tapping a screen. it shi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Moxie 📖 2020 - 2025 moxie was a small robot that talked with children between five and ten, and for a lot of families with autistic kids it reached something no app had managed. none of the intelligence was in the robot. speech recognition and the conversational model both ran on embodied's servers, so when a lead inve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Magic Leap One 📖 2018 - 2024 magic leap one was the consumer-AR headset that was supposed to make wide-area-tracked goggles a normal thing. it launched in august 2018 after seven years of secret demos and $2 billion of investor money. it cost $2,295. it was sold in six US cities. it never had the hardware capability or the deve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Lilium 📖 2015 - 2024 lilium was a munich-based electric VTOL air-taxi startup founded in 2015 by four engineers out of TU munich. the lilium jet used 36 electric ducted fans in tilting flaps. the company raised over 1.5 billion dollars across a 2021 SPAC merger and follow-on rounds. it never carried a paying passenger. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Microsoft HoloLens (1st Gen) 📖 2016 - 2024 hololens 1 was a self-contained windows 10 ar headset, no tether, no phone, no host pc. microsoft sold it to developers and enterprises for three thousand dollars starting march 2016. hololens 2 replaced it in 2019. final end-of-servicing on the original landed in december 2024. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Spotify Car Thing 📖 2022 - 2024 spotify car thing was a 90 dollar dashboard touchscreen that played spotify in your car. it shipped in february 2022. by july 2022 spotify had stopped production. on december 9 2024 the company turned every unit into a paperweight and offered refunds. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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PlayStation VR 📖 2016 - 2024 five million of these shipped between october 2016 and the end of 2019, which made it the best selling headset of its console generation and also the one least argued about. it needed a separate camera and a breakout box on the floor, and the cable run was long enough to become its own furniture pro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Microsoft Surface Duo 📖 2020 - 2024 surface duo was microsoft's quiet return to phone hardware, four years after microsoft wrote off the lumia line. it was a dual-screen android device with two 5.6 inch oled panels on a 360-degree hinge. it cost $1,399 at launch on 10 september 2020, got a duo 2 successor in october 2021 at $1,499, an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Amazon Astro for Business 📖 2023 - 2024 amazon astro for business was a wheeled patrol-and-monitor security robot for small and medium businesses, sold at $2,350 plus a $60/month astro secure subscription. it launched in november 2023 and was bricked on 25 september 2024, roughly seven months after shipping. amazon refunded the hardware c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Fitbit Versa 📖 2018 - 2024 the fitbit versa was fitbit's mainstream smartwatch, launched 16 april 2018 at $199.95 as the successor to the fitbit ionic. six generations followed over four years: original versa, versa lite, versa 2, versa 3, versa 4, along with a versa special edition. google bought fitbit in january 2021 for $ |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Fitbit Sense 📖 2020 - 2024 the fitbit sense was fitbit's flagship health smartwatch, launched 25 september 2020 at $329.95 as a sibling to the versa but with the medical-adjacent sensor stack that the versa lacked: ecg for heart rhythm, eda for electrodermal stress readings, skin temperature, spo2. sense 2 shipped 23 septembe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Chromecast 📖 2013 - 2024 a thirty-five dollar plastic dongle that plugged into the back of your television and let your phone throw video onto the big screen. google shipped it in 2013 and sold more than a hundred million of them, which makes it one of the most quietly successful gadgets the company ever made. in august 202 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Zilog Z80 📖 1976 - 2024 federico faggin designed the intel 4004 and the 8080, walked out of intel at the end of 1974, and built a better 8080 with masatoshi shima on exxon money. the z80 shipped in july 1976 and went into home computers, cp/m business machines, arcade boards, synthesizers and graphing calculators for the n |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Nest Secure 📖 2017 - 2024 nest secure was the fadell-era nest team's home-security entry. the kit paired a nest guard hub with nest detect door and motion sensors. google stopped selling it in october 2020 without naming a successor. on april 8 2024 the cloud was switched off and every shipped hub stopped responding, the sam |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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DropCam 📖 2009 - 2024 a wifi camera that lived inside someone else's server farm and died when the server farm decided it had moved on. dropcam shipped in 2009, sold to nest in 2014 for 555 million dollars, then kept running quietly under google for nearly a decade before every original dropcam in the world lost cloud se |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Azure Kinect DK 📖 2020 - 2023 microsoft built kinect three times. the first two were consumer products for the xbox, and the third was a four hundred dollar usb-c box aimed at nobody but engineers. azure kinect dk put a one megapixel time-of-flight depth sensor next to a twelve megapixel camera, with a seven microphone array aro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Lululemon Studio Mirror 📖 2018 - 2023 the mirror was a wall-mounted full-length fitness screen founded in 2016 by brynn putnam, launched in september 2018 at $1,495, and acquired by lululemon in june 2020 for $500 million. the hardware sold poorly through the post-covid connected-fitness collapse. lululemon booked a $443 million impairm |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Amazon Halo 📖 2020 - 2023 amazon halo shipped on 27 august 2020 as amazon's late entry into fitness wearables. the band had no screen. it did have a microphone that listened to your voice and rated its emotional tone. it also let you upload three-quarter body photos to render a 3d scan and estimate your body fat. the whole p |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Xilinx 📖 1984 - 2023 ross freeman had an idea in 1984: sell a chip blank and let the customer decide afterward what it does. his company sold that idea for thirty-nine years, and amd finished buying it in february 2022 for a number nobody agrees on. the name came off the packaging in june 2023. the part numbers still sa |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Misfit Wearables 📖 2011 - 2023 misfit wearables was a 2011 san francisco hardware startup that made small coin-shaped fitness trackers, the shine, the ray, the flash. fossil bought it in november 2015 for around 260 million dollars. the app went dark in may 2023 when fossil killed the misfit backend and pulled the apps from both |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Oculus Quest 📖 2019 - 2023 on 5 march 2023 meta switched off the social features on the first oculus quest. no more parties, no more visiting anyone else's home, no more invites. the headset itself kept working, and kept getting security patches until august 2024, and stopped being able to accept new store applications in feb |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Sony LocationFree 📖 2004 - 2023 28 february 2023 is when sony turned off net av, the piece that let a locationfree base station reach you from outside your own house. the last box had gone off sale fourteen years earlier. what died that day was a japanese-only support obligation attached to hardware from the mid-2000s, which is a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Drobo 📖 2007 - 2023 geoff barrall's pitch in 2005 was that raid asked ordinary people to understand raid, and it should not have to. the drobo took mismatched drives in any order, rebuilt itself when one died, and told you what was wrong with colored lights instead of a manual. storcentric bought the company in 2018 an |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Everyday Robots 📖 2016 - 2023 more than a hundred wheeled robots with a single arm each learned to wipe cafeteria tables and sort trash inside alphabet's own buildings. not one of them was ever for sale. the project started inside x in 2016, graduated into its own alphabet company in late 2021, and was closed in january 2023 in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Lego Mindstorms 📖 1998 - 2022 seymour papert wrote a book called mindstorms in 1980 about children learning by building things that think. eighteen years later lego put his title on a yellow plastic brick with a microcontroller in it, developed with the mit media lab, and sold it as a toy. adults bought it and had their own lang |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Slingbox 📖 2005 - 2022 the slingbox plugged into your home cable receiver and let you watch your living-room channels from any laptop in the world. it was invented by two brothers who could not catch their giants game on the road. echostar bought sling media for $380 million in 2007. dish announced shutdown in 2020 and br |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Meta Portal 📖 2018 - 2022 facebook's home video calling device. 2018 to 2022. it was a smart screen with a camera that auto-tracked you around the room while you took video calls. the privacy concerns were obvious from day one. nobody bought it. meta killed the consumer product line in november 2022. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Amazon Scout 📖 2019 - 2022 snohomish county, washington got the first six of them in january 2019, cooler-sized robots in prime blue rolling down suburban sidewalks at walking pace with an amazon employee walking behind. the fleet reached four states and around four hundred people worked on it. amazon ended the field tests on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Amazon Glow 📖 2021 - 2022 amazon glow was a $250 device announced on 28 september 2021 at amazon's fall hardware event and rolled out to the wider public in march 2022. it was aimed at kids five to nine years old and their long-distance grandparents. an 8-inch screen showed the remote person on video call while a projector c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Snap Pixy 📖 2022 - 2022 pixy was the yellow selfie-drone snap launched in april 2022 to make the snapchat-camera experience hover. the device cost $230, was the size of a small palm, took off from the user's hand, followed them around in four preset flight modes, and landed back on the same hand when finished. snap halted |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Intel Optane 📖 2015 - 2022 a thousand times faster than nand was the claim intel and micron made on 28 july 2015, announcing a memory technology called 3d xpoint that would occupy the empty tier between dram and flash. the optane products that came out of it were real and genuinely fast, with latencies measured in single-digi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick 📖 2017 - 2022 intel put a vision processor on a usb stick in july 2017 and sold it for seventy-nine dollars, so that anybody with a raspberry pi could run a trained network without sending a single frame to a data center. it was the first time inference at the edge was something you could just buy. a second versi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
iPod 📖 2001 - 2022 the ipod was the product that turned apple into a consumer-electronics company. it sold roughly 450 million units across all variants over twenty years. then the iphone ate its market from the inside, and apple discontinued the last ipod touch on may 10, 2022. the brand was the longest-running line |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Insteon 📖 2005 - 2022 insteon was a californian smart-home hub-and-switches ecosystem that did the two things revolv did not: it kept selling gear for seventeen years and it wired most of it into the powerline instead of over wifi. then in april 2022 smartlabs pulled every server dark with no email, no press release, no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1963-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Learjet 📖 1963 - 2022 bill lear wanted a small jet that went fast and did not care much for the rest of the brief, which is why the learjet 23 first flew on 7 october 1963 with a wing derived from a swiss ground-attack fighter. the name escaped the product almost immediately and became the generic noun for any private je |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Fitbit Ionic 📖 2017 - 2022 a smartwatch holds a lithium-ion battery against skin for sixteen hours a day, which is the fact underneath everything that happened here. fitbit's first real smartwatch shipped in late 2017 at $299.95, built partly out of what fitbit had bought from a bankrupt pebble. it was aimed straight at the a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry 📖 1999 - 2022 the corporate phone with the physical keyboard. the qwerty made you faster at email than anyone with a touch screen. it died slowly between 2007 (when the iphone shipped) and 2016 (when blackberry stopped making hardware). blackberry the company shut off support for the last devices on 4 january 202 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Smartisan 📖 2012 - 2021 luo yonghao founded smartisan in beijing in may 2012 as a chinese phone brand built around obsessive industrial design. smartisan OS layered on android with hand-redesigned icons and a different navigation grammar than miui or color OS. the T1 shipped in 2014, the T2 in 2015, and the brand never bro |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Centaur Technology 📖 1995 - 2021 glenn henry spent twenty-one years at ibm and then ran research for dell, and in april 1995 he left to prove that a small team in austin could design an x86 processor if it stopped chasing the benchmarks nobody actually ran. idt paid for the first three chips before via bought the company in 1999. c |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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10.or 📖 2017 - 2021 huaqin technology builds phones that leave the factory wearing other companies' names, and in september 2017 it put its own name on one and sold it in india, on amazon and nowhere else. the name was 10.or, pronounced tenor, and it was the opening entry in amazon india's crafted for amazon program. f |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Sphero Disney Droids 📖 2015 - 2021 sphero's licensed star wars droids were rolling app-controlled toys built off the sphero ball platform. bb-8 launched alongside the force awakens, r2-d2 and bb-9e followed for the last jedi. the disney deal ended in december 2018. on 1 october 2021 sphero pulled the controlling apps from the app sto |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
LG Mobile Communications 📖 1995 - 2021 lg was the third korean phone brand. the one that was not samsung, and was not the government's htc-adjacent bet either. it made the chocolate, made the g-series, made the wing, and then in april 2021 the board voted to stop making phones at all. six years of losses. by july the doors were closed an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Itanium 📖 2001 - 2021 4 october 1999, intel announced the name, and somebody on usenet had it as itanic before the day was out. the chip was supposed to retire x86 with a new instruction set that moved the hard scheduling work off the silicon and onto the compiler. it arrived two years late in 2001, ran existing code bad |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Logitech Harmony 📖 2001 - 2021 harmony began in 2001 as easy zapper, a canadian remote that could control your entire home theater stack from one wand. logitech bought it in 2004 for $29 million and turned it into the high-end universal remote that av forums recommended by default. on april 9 2021 logitech announced it would stop |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
LG Wing 📖 2020 - 2021 the wing was the last swing of a phone business that had already stopped believing in itself. a t-shaped swivel with a small square screen underneath the main slab. an idea nobody asked for, built by a team that already knew it was probably the goodbye product. released in october 2020, effectively |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Oculus Rift 📖 2012 - 2021 palmer luckey was nineteen when the kickstarter went up on 1 august 2012 and roughly 2.4 million dollars came back for a headset built out of a phone screen and a pair of lenses. facebook paid two billion for the company in march 2014, before one consumer unit had shipped to anybody. the rift reache |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Apple HomePod (1st generation) 📖 2018 - 2021 the homepod sounded better than any speaker at its price, costs more than anyone wanted to pay for siri, and arrived a year late. apple discontinued it in march 2021 and shifted attention to the smaller homepod mini, which had quietly outsold it. a redesigned 2nd-gen homepod came back in 2023, which |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Google Cardboard 📖 2014 - 2021 google cardboard was a fold-up viewer made of literal cardboard, with two cheap plastic lenses and a slot for a smartphone. you opened the google cardboard app on android or ios and picked a vr demo, then pressed your face to the viewer. it launched at google i/o on 25 june 2014 as a free giveaway t |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Halo Sport 📖 2016 - 2021 headphones with foam spikes in the headband that pushed two milliamps through the motor cortex for twenty minutes before training, on the theory that a primed brain learns movement faster. olympic sprinters wore them into rio, five nfl players put their names to them, and cognitive neuroscientists s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Motiv Ring 📖 2017 - 2021 april 2020, in a blog post and an faq on its own site: the current generation of rings will continue to function, and yes, the app will remain available through the app store and google play. by february 2021 the company had closed and its own apex was serving a notice saying so. the ring on your fi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1856-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Holden 📖 1856 - 2021 a saddlery opened in adelaide in 1856 and ended up building the car australia thought of as its own. general motors bought the company in 1931 and sold holdens for ninety years. the elizabeth plant built its last commodore on 20 october 2017, gm announced on 17 february 2020 that the badge was finis |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
TiVo (the cultural product) 📖 1999 - 2020 dormant the DVR that taught a generation of americans that you could pause live TV. launched march 1999. peak around 2006 with about 4 million subscribers. cable companies built their own DVRs and took most of the market. cord-cutting and streaming finished off the use case. tivo brand is still around in 20 |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Logitech Harmony Express 📖 2019 - 2020 the harmony express was logitech's alexa-driven universal remote. you held a button, you said "watch netflix", a hub on the tv stand fired the right ir blasts and switched the inputs. it launched april 25 2019 at $250. logitech killed the cloud connection on september 30 2020. without the cloud the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Samsung Gear VR 📖 2015 - 2020 samsung gear vr was a mobile vr headset built with oculus, launched to consumers in november 2015. you dropped a galaxy phone into the front and the phone became the screen and the brain. samsung shipped several million and gave many away with phone preorders, which briefly made it the most-owned vr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Pepper 📖 2014 - 2020 on 5 june 2014 masayoshi son walked a four foot humanoid onto a stage in tokyo and said it could read how people felt. the first thousand consumer units sold out in sixty seconds the following june, at 198,000 yen plus three years of monthly fees. about twenty seven thousand were built before softba |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Focals by North 📖 2019 - 2020 north spent eight years and close to two hundred million dollars getting a display into a pair of glasses that still looked like glasses, and it worked. you walked into a room in toronto or brooklyn, had your head scanned, and waited weeks for frames built around your own face. google announced the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Echo Look 📖 2017 - 2020 $200 camera with alexa, sold as the device that would help you decide which outfit to wear. you stood in front of it, took a full-length photo, then the style check feature compared two outfits and rated them with a confidence score. launched april 2017 invite-only, general availability june 2018, t |
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|2001-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Segway PT 📖 2001 - 2020 the self-balancing scooter that was supposed to remake the way cities were built. dean kamen unveiled it in december 2001 with a level of secrecy and hype almost nothing has matched since. nineteen years later it had sold around 140,000 units, mostly to mall security and tour operators, and ninebot |
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|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Oculus Go 📖 2018 - 2020 the cheap door into standalone vr, and the one that got left behind fastest. the go needed no pc and no phone, just the headset and $199, and for a moment it was how you got someone their first taste of virtual reality. then the quest could do everything it did plus walk around, and facebook stopped |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Automatic 📖 2011 - 2020 siriusxm paid around a hundred and fifteen million dollars for automatic labs in 2017 and switched the whole thing off at 11:59pm pacific on 28 may 2020, giving owners twenty seven days' notice. the adapter still fit the port under the dashboard afterward. it just had nothing to talk to, and the com |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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JUMP Bikes 📖 2010 - 2020 jump started in 2010 as social bicycles, a brooklyn startup that built dock-free bike share with a lock built into the rear wheel. it rebranded to jump in january 2018 and added a 250-watt electric motor. uber bought it in april 2018 for around 200 million dollars and built it into the uber app. in |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Wink Hub 📖 2014 - 2020 wink shipped in 2014 as quirky's cloud smart-home hub with ge's z-wave gear behind it. by 2017 it had been sold twice, ending up under will.i.am's i.am+ holding company. by 2020 the operating cash was gone and the only lever left was to demand a monthly subscription from existing owners with seven d |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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UA HealthBox 📖 2016 - 2020 under armour spent something like seven hundred million dollars buying other people's fitness apps, then decided it also needed hardware of its own to feed them. the reviews were poor, the company was out of the hardware business inside two years, and the devices went on working anyway because nobod |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Boosted 📖 2012 - 2020 the electric skateboard that made the category feel real, then could not survive a tariff. boosted started as a stanford kickstarter in 2012 and shipped belt-driven electric longboards you steered with a handheld trigger, the board that every silicon valley demo video and youtube reviewer seemed to |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Makani 📖 2006 - 2020 most of a wind turbine is tower. makani started in alameda in 2006 on the argument that a tethered wing flying tight circles does the same work with a fraction of the material, and google funded it, then bought it outright in may 2013 and ran it inside x. the 600 kilowatt prototype flew in december |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Essential Phone 📖 2017 - 2020 the phone android's co-founder built to out-android google. andy rubin left google, started essential, and in 2017 shipped the ph-1: a titanium and ceramic slab with a tiny camera notch before notches were common, and a little magnetic port for snap-on accessories. it was a genuinely nice phone almo |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Palm Phone (2018) 📖 2018 - 2020 tcl rented the palm name and stuck it on a 3.3-inch phone you were meant to buy in addition to your real phone. verizon-exclusive, 349 dollars, a companion to a device you already owned. it was small and well built and answered a question nobody asked. by 2020 it was quietly gone. |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Ambient Orb 📖 2002 - 2019 a hundred and fifty dollars bought a frosted glass ball in 2002 that glowed a color instead of showing a number. green for a market going up and red for one going down, or you could point it at the weather. it worked with no wifi and no setup because ambient devices leased capacity on fm radio subca |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Light L16 📖 2015 - 2019 sixteen small camera modules behind one piece of glass, fused by software into a 52-megapixel file, sold for $1,699 from july 2017. support ended at the end of 2019 and the company told photographers so directly. by june 2020 light had left consumer imaging for automotive depth sensing, and in may 2 |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Coolest Cooler 📖 2014 - 2019 coolest cooler was a cooler with a built-in blender and a bluetooth speaker, funded on kickstarter in 2014 for over $13 million from 62,000 backers, a record at the time. the costs and delays it never priced in piled up, so early backers waited years while the company sold the same cooler on amazon |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Insignia Connect 📖 2016 - 2019 best buy put its house brand on a line of smart plugs, a light switch, a wifi camera and a freezer, ran the cloud for them for about a year and a half, and shut that cloud off on 6 november 2019. the plugs survived as plugs because the button on the side still worked. the camera did not survive at a |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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RED Hydrogen One 📖 2018 - 2019 a cinema-camera company decided to make a phone and priced it like a luxury object. the pitch was a 3D screen that added a little depth to a little content and impressed almost no one. it shipped late on two us carriers to flat reviews, and it never got the camera modules that were supposed to justi |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Koubachi 📖 2009 - 2019 zurich, 2009: an ETH spin-off decided a houseplant should be able to ask for water. the sensor it built worked for ten years, sold through Apple stores across europe, and then the company that had bought it switched off the cloud it reported to. the farewell notice told owners to take the batteries |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google Daydream 📖 2016 - 2019 daydream was google's second swing at mobile vr after cardboard. you slid a compatible android phone into a soft fabric headset called daydream view and paired a small wand controller to launch vr apps from inside the daydream app. it launched on 10 november 2016 with the pixel as the lead phone. go |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google Clips 📖 2017 - 2019 a small camera you were supposed to set down and forget, so an algorithm could pick out the moments it judged worth saving. the idea was that you would stop missing your kid's face because you were fumbling for a phone. what people actually got was a couple of decent clips out of hundreds and a $249 |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Human Headphones 📖 2016 - 2019 twenty-four days after the headphones reached the public, the board handed the company to a receiver and laid off twenty-five of its thirty staff. human inc had spent five years and twenty-six million dollars on a pair of over-ear wireless headphones shaped like ears, priced them at three hundred an |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Daqri 📖 2010 - 2019 daqri sold a $9,000 ar helmet to industrial customers and burned $275m trying to make the unit economics work. the demos were always impressive. the budget cycles on construction sites never were. it ended in september 2019 with no chapter 11 filing and no orderly wind-down for the customers still h |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Handy (Tink Labs) 📖 2012 - 2019 terence kwok dropped out of school in chicago and spent the next seven years giving away phones in hotel rooms. at the end of 2018 handy sat in 600,000 of them and the company was valued above a billion dollars. on 2 july 2019 he told staff on a conference call that operations would stop, and hotels |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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OUYA 📖 2013 - 2019 ouya was the kickstarter darling of 2012, a 99-dollar android microconsole that promised to break the console oligopoly. it raised 8.6 million dollars in a month, shipped to backers in 2013, and never made the jump to mass retail. razer bought what was left of the company in 2015 and finally killed |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Leap Motion 📖 2013 - 2019 leap motion built a small usb hand-tracker that the demos always made look like the future. holz had started the optics in 2008. the controller shipped in july 2013, sold through best buy, peaked around half a million units, then ran into the wall every gesture-input company runs into. by 2016 the p |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Anki 📖 2010 - 2019 three carnegie mellon robotics phds founded anki in 2010 and raised about 182 million dollars to build cute home robots. they shipped overdrive (a phone-controlled racing track), then cozmo and vector as 179 and 249 dollar home robots that did on-device computer vision. they sold roughly 3.5 million |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Anki Cozmo 📖 2016 - 2019 a small robot with treads and a little animated face, made by a startup that hired pixar and dreamworks animators to give it a personality. cozmo used a camera and on-device vision to recognize your face and the cubes it played with, and it acted like it had moods about all of it. anki sold millions |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Laundroid 📖 2015 - 2019 a machine the size of a refrigerator needed five to ten minutes to fold one t-shirt, and that was the demo. seven dreamers showed it in tokyo in october 2015 and raised sixty million dollars on it with panasonic and daiwa house alongside, then filed for bankruptcy on 23 april 2019 owing about 2.2 bi |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Bragi Dash 📖 2014 - 2019 bragi was a danish-german hardware startup founded by nikolaj hviid in 2013. the dash launched on kickstarter in february 2014 and hit its $260,000 goal in under 48 hours, ending the campaign at around $3.4 million. the earbuds shipped in late 2015 with on-board music playback and heart-rate sensing |
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|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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YotaPhone 📖 2013 - 2019 fifty million dollars bought a phone with a screen on each side, one of them electronic paper that kept showing you things after the battery died. it came out of a russian company that had spun off a mobile operator, won the prizes at barcelona in 2013, and got handed from putin to xi jinping on tel |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Iris by Lowe's 📖 2012 - 2019 a home-depot-shaped retailer decided the connected home was a next-decade category and launched a hub of its own two years before amazon put a microphone in your kitchen. it hit the seven-year mark, could not find a buyer, and cut the cloud with prepaid visa cards for anyone still connected. |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Apple AirPower 📖 2017 - 2019 airpower was a wireless charging mat with around twenty coils that apple showed off on stage at the iphone x event and then could not actually build. it stayed listed on apple's website for 18 months while engineers tried to make the thermals work. eventually dan riccio sent a one-paragraph email ca |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Keecker 📖 2012 - 2019 pierre lebeau left a product manager job at google in 2012 to build a robot that followed you from room to room and projected films onto the ceiling. it took five years to reach buyers, arrived in 2017 at one thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars, and sold somewhere over a thousand units to peop |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Jibo 📖 2014 - 2019 the home social robot that announced its own death. jibo was a swiveling white robot about the size of a desk lamp, with a single round face-screen and a head that turned to look at you when you spoke. cynthia breazeal raised more than 70 million dollars to build it, and it shipped in 2017 as the fr |
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|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Amazon Dash Button 📖 2015 - 2019 amazon's five-dollar reorder button. it shipped the year of the first echo and died the year alexa got reorder built in. germany ruled it illegal for hiding the price at purchase. the api lived on inside printers and washing machines, which is where the idea actually belonged. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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PlayStation Vita 📖 2011 - 2019 the vita was sony's bet that you could still sell a dedicated three-hundred-dollar handheld in the year of the iphone 4s. it shipped with a 5-inch oled and dual analog sticks, sold somewhere around 16 million units in seven years, and watched sony's own first-party teams quietly drift to the ps4. pr |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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ZX Spectrum Vega+ 📖 2016 - 2019 £513,000 from around 4,500 backers in early 2016, and roughly 400 handhelds ever reached anybody. retro computers ltd missed every delivery date it set across three years and had its lawyers threaten the bbc for reporting the delays. sky pulled the sinclair license in august 2018, so the few console |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Norton Core 📖 2017 - 2019 it was shaped like a geodesic dome and designed to be left out in the open, because symantec's theory was that people would trust a router they could see. time magazine put it on the 25 best inventions of 2017 list. its only australian retailer sold under twelve percent of the launch stock, and nort |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Osterhout Design Group 📖 1999 - 2019 ralph osterhout spent twenty years building night vision for soldiers before he tried to sell augmented reality to everyone else. microsoft paid him around $150 million for eighty wearable patents in 2014 and used them for hololens. two years later his company was worth $258 million and had a two-st |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Chromecast Audio 📖 2015 - 2019 a thirty-five dollar disc with a headphone jack on one side and a micro-usb port on the other. you pushed it into the back of whatever amplifier or powered speakers you already owned and those speakers joined your network as a cast target, so any phone in the house could send music to them without p |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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CogniToys Dino 📖 2015 - 2019 three developers out of a new york app shop won ibm's watson mobile developer challenge in 2014 and cashed the prize in on a toy instead of an enterprise contract. the cognitoys dino shipped in november 2015, answered a five-year-old's questions in a five-year-old's vocabulary, and remembered what i |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Google Search Appliance 📖 2002 - 2018 the google search appliance was a literal yellow 1u rack server that ran google search inside a company's own data center. it shipped in 2002 on rebadged dell poweredge hardware running a hardened centos image. you bought it on a two-year contract and plugged it into your own closet. google sent a c |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Google Contact Lens 📖 2014 - 2018 brian otis announced the lens on google's blog in january 2014 and shelved it himself, as verily's chief technical officer, in november 2018. between two layers of soft lens material sat a wireless chip and a glucose sensor, reading the tear film once a second and reporting out over an antenna thinn |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Kuri 📖 2015 - 2018 kuri was a mayfield robotics home robot. wheels and eye-cameras with no arms, a vocabulary of burbles instead of words. unveiled at ces 2017 as the cute side of the home robot wave. began shipping in limited numbers december 2017 at $699. bosch paused production july 25 2018 citing no business fit, |
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|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Myo 📖 2013 - 2018 myo was a gesture-control armband from thalmic labs, a startup in kitchener, ontario. it read the faint electrical signals your forearm muscles make when your fingers move, and turned them into input, so you could clench a fist or flick a hand and scroll a slide or steer a small drone. it shipped in |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Airware 📖 2011 - 2018 jonathan downey was the son of two pilots and he raised a hundred and eighteen million dollars from kleiner perkins and caterpillar to put an operating system on commercial drones. four days before the end airware opened a tokyo office with mitsubishi money behind it. on 14 september 2018 the compan |
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|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Lumo Lift 📖 2014 - 2018 an assignment for the benefit of creditors ended lumo bodytech on 29 june 2018, and with it a seven-year attempt to sell posture as a product. the lift was a magnetic clip you wore on your collarbone that vibrated when you slumped. seismic, a powered-clothing startup that announced its own new name |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Roku SoundBridge 📖 2003 - 2018 roku made a network music player in 2003 before it made the streaming stick. m1000 and m2000, vacuum fluorescent display and ethernet in the back, reading itunes shared libraries on the LAN over daap. the hardware was discontinued in 2008 when sonos was already carving up the category. roku ran the |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Apple AirPort 📖 1999 - 2018 apple airport was the home wifi router that mac households bought because it looked like apple hardware and worked with the rest of the apple stack. it ran from july 1999 through april 2018, moving from the white dome through the flat square 802.11n model and the time capsule with the built-in backu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Apple Time Capsule 📖 2008 - 2018 time capsule was apple's wifi router with a backup drive built in. you plugged it in once and time machine started shipping hourly snapshots over the air. it ran from january 2008 through april 2018, when apple killed the whole airport line in one announcement and walked out of the home router busin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Casio Exilim 📖 2002 - 2018 eleven point three millimeters was the number. that was the thickness of the ex-s1 in june 2002, when every other digital compact was closer to thirty, and casio sold it as a wearable card camera you kept in a shirt pocket. the whole industry copied the form factor within two years. casio kept going |
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|2018-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Intel Vaunt 📖 2018 - 2018 a class-one laser in the rim of an ordinary-looking pair of glasses painted a small red display onto the wearer's retina. no camera, no speaker, nothing for anyone else to see. intel showed it to one publication on 5 february 2018 and told the 200 people of its new devices group on 18 april that the |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Lytro 📖 2006 - 2018 $140m and a stanford phd that turned into a product almost nobody bought. ren ng's plenoptic math was a real shift in how cameras could think about a scene. the consumer camera built around it never had a use case that justified its existence next to a phone. |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Nextbit Robin 📖 2016 - 2018 the robin was a $399 android phone with 100 gb of cloud storage bolted into the OS. built by ex-android engineers who thought they could kickstarter their way past the samsung and apple duopoly. razer bought the company in january 2017, halted sales the same week, and shut the cloud servers on 1 mar |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Wileyfox 📖 2015 - 2018 wileyfox sold cheap unlocked android phones in britain from august 2015, and its one distinguishing feature was cyanogen os running out of the box instead of being flashed on by the owner. when cyanogen stopped being an operating system company during 2016 that feature evaporated and left a budget h |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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GoPro Karma 📖 2016 - 2018 the karma was gopro's drone. announced september 19 2016, on shelves october 23. on november 8 the company recalled every single unit it had sold (roughly 2,500) because the battery was decoupling from its connector mid-flight and the drone was falling out of the sky. shipments resumed february 1 20 |
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| RIP |
|1952-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Crypto AG 📖 1952 - 2018 the cia and west germany's bnd bought this swiss company in june 1970 for 5.75 million dollars and spent the next fifty years selling compromised cipher machines to governments that trusted switzerland precisely because it was neutral. more than 120 countries bought the hardware. the company was wou |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Cidco MailStation 📖 1999 - 2017 the mailstation was a battery-powered email-only countertop appliance, shipped by cidco in late 1999 at around a hundred dollars plus an annual service fee. it ran a custom firmware on a zilog z80-derived processor, dialed out over the regular phone line and pulled email through a proprietary cidco |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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CloudPets 📖 2015 - 2017 a mongodb holding 821,000 accounts sat on a public ip with no password on it, and shodan indexed it on christmas day 2016. the voice messages themselves, 2.18 million of them, lived in an amazon bucket that would hand over any file to anyone who knew its path. two separate extortionists wiped the da |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Doppler Labs Here One 📖 2013 - 2017 doppler labs was a new-york-based hearables startup founded in 2013 by noah kraft and fritz lanman. it raised over $50 million from universal music, live nation, and the chernin group. the here one shipped in february 2017 at $299 as a pair of in-ear "augmented-listening" buds that could tune parts |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Emberlight 📖 2014 - 2017 270 target stores carried the emberlight socket, a threaded adapter that sat between a lamp and an ordinary bulb and made the bulb dimmable from a phone. atif noori's company raised around $300,000 on kickstarter in july 2014 and emailed its customers on 17 november 2017 to say it could not keep goi |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Doppler Labs 📖 2013 - 2017 doppler labs wanted to put a computer in your ear, a way to edit the live sound of the world the same way you edit a photo. it raised over fifty million dollars and shipped the here one in early 2017 at 299 dollars, with a battery that barely lasted two hours. airpods arrived cheaper and longer-live |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Kinect 📖 2010 - 2017 the depth-sensing camera bar for xbox 360 and xbox one. shipped november 2010, hit 8 million units in 60 days, the fastest-selling consumer electronics device on record at that point. then microsoft welded it to the xbox one in 2013, made it mandatory in the box at $499, and the device that had been |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Nokia OZO 📖 2015 - 2017 eight lenses in an aluminum ball, each with a 195 degree field of view, eight microphones, sixty thousand dollars. nokia built it in 2015 for the professional virtual reality boom everybody was certain about, and disney was shooting with it by the spring of 2016. eighteen months later the price had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Phone 📖 2010 - 2017 microsoft's mobile OS that came after iphone and android were already entrenched. the live tile interface was genuinely interesting. nobody made apps for it because nobody bought the phones. nokia bet the company on it and the bet failed. microsoft killed development in 2017 and ended support in 202 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Lumia 📖 2014 - 2017 microsoft lumia was the post-acquisition phase of the nokia lumia line that microsoft inherited when it closed the $7.2B nokia devices deal on april 25 2014. the first device under the new name was the lumia 535 in november 2014, the last one was the lumia 650 in february 2016. by mid 2016 sales had |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Mattel Aristotle 📖 2017 - 2017 january 2017: mattel walks into ces with a $299 speaker for the nursery, a camera to sit over the crib, and a pitch about a machine that would follow your child from newborn to grade school. nine months later a petition has fifteen thousand signatures, two congressmen want to know where the recordin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Snapchat Spectacles (1st gen) 📖 2016 - 2017 the first time anyone heard "vending machine for sunglasses" was also the last time anyone wanted one. snap built 800k pairs and sold around a quarter of them. the $40 million write-off in 2017 is the canonical lesson on what happens when you confuse a 24-hour viral spike for product-market fit. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Juicero 📖 2013 - 2017 the 400 dollar wifi juicer. a beautifully built aluminum press that crushed proprietary single-serving produce packs with four tons of force, connected to wifi, and refused to work if a pack was past its date or the company's servers said no. then bloomberg filmed someone squeezing the same pack by |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
KANOA 📖 2015 - 2017 twenty five pairs is the number the contract manufacturer actually built, against two years of pre-orders taken at a hundred and fifty dollars a time. a reviewer kanoa had paid to look at the product said in public that it was the worst he had used, the investors walked within the week, and the stor |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Sony Dash 📖 2010 - 2017 a firmware update on 12 july 2017 turned every connected sony dash into a flashing logo, and there was no way to decline it. the box had arrived at ces in january 2010 as a seven-inch touchscreen for a bedside table, running a modified build of chumby's operating system so it could wake you up and t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Jawbone 📖 1999 - 2017 jawbone shipped a bluetooth headset that cleaned up call audio with noise gating, then a jambox speaker that defined the portable bluetooth shape for half a decade. the up fitness band came later and arrived two years late to a market fitbit had already taken. they raised over nine hundred million d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Intel Edison 📖 2014 - 2017 intel told its purchasing channel first. pcn115579-00 went up on a document server on 16 june 2017, set last orders at 16 september and last shipments at 16 december, and gave no reason of any kind for the decision. edison's own product page did not mention it for roughly two months. the board had b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Hello Sense 📖 2014 - 2017 hello sense was a kickstarter-era bedside orb that tracked your sleep through a sound and light sensor on the nightstand plus a little pill you clipped to the pillow. james proud raised $40 million on top of the kickstarter, valuation hit $300 million, then series-c failed and the company switched o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Recon Jet 📖 2015 - 2017 a computer on your face, aimed at cyclists, priced like a bike component. the screen sat below your right eye and told you how fast you were going while the battery quietly died. intel bought the company, then closed it two years later when it walked away from wearables. the idea was early and the h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Asus ZenWatch 📖 2014 - 2017 three watches in three years, then nothing. asus put the zenwatch on sale in november 2014 as the cheap way into android wear, a steel rectangle with a leather strap at two hundred dollars when everyone else wanted more. the third one went round in november 2016 and by may 2017 the supply chain pres |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Scanadu Scout 📖 2012 - 2017 an fda rule about investigational devices is what finally switched it off. the scanadu scout was a white puck you held against your forehead to read your pulse and blood oxygen, funded by 8,800 indiegogo backers who believed they were buying a product. they had been enrolled in a study instead, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
LeEco 📖 2011 - 2017 leeco was a chinese consumer-electronics conglomerate founded by jia yueting in september 2011 around an internet TV business called LeTV. the brand pitched itself as an ecosystem play across smart TVs, phones, streaming content, electric cars. it sold over a million units of the le superphone withi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Swyp Card 📖 2014 - 2017 swyp was the qvivr programmable payment card from santa clara, opening pre-orders in 2014 for a device that stored every card in your wallet on one piece of plastic. qvivr raised roughly $6.76 million led by khosla ventures, hit repeated manufacturing delays, shipped only a small number of units, an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Plastc Card 📖 2014 - 2017 plastc was a palo alto smart-card startup founded in 2012 by ryan marquis and mark stubbs. it opened pre-orders at $155 per card on 7 october 2014 and took over $5.2 million in the first week and about $9 million in total, self-funded by the pre-orders instead of by a venture round. it kept promisin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Pono Player 📖 2014 - 2017 neil young's high resolution portable audio player. the kickstarter raised $6.2 million in march 2014 and shipped the device to backers in october 2014, with general retail in february 2015 at $399. the triangular yellow toblerone-shaped player ran flac files up to 24-bit 192 kilohertz. the ponomusi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Igloo 📖 2012 - 2017 $199 for the receiver and $24.99 for thirty days of eleven channels, no contract and no installer on your roof. sky and tvnz built igloo in 2012 for the new zealanders who would not sign a sky subscription, wanted fifty thousand boxes sold in the first year, and were looking at nineteen thousand sub |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Triggertrap 📖 2011 - 2017 £290,386 came in for a modular camera trigger called ada, against a £50,000 goal, and no ada was ever built. haje jan kamps told the backers on 2 march 2015 and sent back what was left of the money, about a fifth of it. triggertrap went on selling cables and phone dongles for two more years with a t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Lily Camera 📖 2013 - 2017 you were supposed to throw it in the air and it would follow you and film. the promo video showed it doing exactly that. the promo video was shot on a gopro mounted to a dji inspire. sixty thousand people preordered. nothing shipped. the san francisco district attorney filed fraud charges the same d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Sony SmartWatch 📖 2012 - 2016 sony got to the smartwatch market three years before apple did, shipped three generations on three different operating systems, and then quietly walked away. the smartwatch 3 in 2014 was the best of them and the last of them. by 2017 a sony executive was telling techradar that the smartwatch problem |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Basis Peak 📖 2014 - 2016 intel's fitness watch, launched november 2014, killed by an overheating recall in august 2016 and finished off when the sync service went dark on new year's eve. one of the shortest lives for a mainstream wearable that was not sold under a startup brand. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Basis B1 Watch 📖 2012 - 2016 the first-generation continuous heart-rate wristband from basis science, launched late 2012 for two hundred dollars, discontinued after intel bought the company for a hundred million in 2014, and finished off when the mybasis.com backend went dark new year's eve 2016 alongside its peak successor. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Pebble 📖 2012 - 2016 (resurrected 2025) the kickstarter-funded smartwatch from 2012. the original kickstarter raised 10.3 million dollars when 100,000 was the goal. shipped to backers in 2013. outpaced apple watch on battery life and developer ecosystem. fitbit bought it for scrap in december 2016. then in 2024 the original founder eric m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 📖 2016 - 2016 the samsung galaxy note 7 was the flagship android phone of 2016 for about seven weeks. batteries began igniting in september, samsung ran a formal recall and then a second recall of the replacement units, then discontinued the model on 11 october. credit suisse estimated the loss at $17 billion, th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Google Nexus 📖 2010 - 2016 nexus was google's reference phone, contracted out to a different manufacturer almost every year, running android with nothing added on top and priced close to what it cost to build. the nexus 4 went out at 299 dollars and the nexus 5 at 349, which is why the people who cared about phones bought the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Band 📖 2014 - 2016 microsoft band was the wearable everyone forgot. it shipped on 30 october 2014 with a sensor stack that beat fitbit on paper: heart rate, gps, skin temperature, galvanic skin response, uv. it sold out in a few hours. a year later band 2 came with a curved screen and barometric altimeter. then nothin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
3DR Solo 📖 2015 - 2016 dji announced the phantom 3 on 8 april 2015 and 3d robotics announced the solo five days later, which is most of the story right there. the solo carried a linux computer in the airframe and a second one in the controller, and it shipped without the gimbal that was supposed to justify the thousand do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Narrative Clip 📖 2012 - 2016 a photograph every thirty seconds, roughly two thousand a day, and no shutter to press. memoto raised five hundred and fifty thousand dollars on kickstarter in november 2012 for a 36-millimeter square you clipped to your shirt, renamed itself narrative the following year, and shipped the clip and th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1957-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Fairchild Semiconductor 📖 1957 - 2016 the planar process came out of this company in 1959 and made the integrated circuit manufacturable, which is most of the reason there is a silicon valley at all. what left mattered more than what stayed, since intel and amd were both started by people who quit. by the end it was a power switch busin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Eye-Fi 📖 2005 - 2016 the wifi sd card that let a digital camera upload to a desktop server without a usb cable. founded in 2005 in mountain view by yuval koren, ziv gillat, eugene feinberg and berend ozceri. peaked 2008-2010 with macworld best of show and a cnet best of ces award. shut its x1/x2 server on september 16 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Project Ara 📖 2013 - 2016 project ara was google's modular smartphone. the pitch was an aluminum frame called an endo with slots for swappable parts: a different camera, a bigger battery, a louder speaker. motorola announced it on 29 october 2013 with paul eremenko leading. google held two developer conferences. a pilot in p |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Chromebook Pixel 📖 2013 - 2016 google built a 1,299 dollar laptop around chrome os and then said out loud that it was a proof of concept. the 2013 screen ran 2,560 by 1,700 at 239 pixels per inch, sharper than the retina macbook pro of the same year, on a machine whose entire software surface was a browser. the 2015 model shipped |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Scion 📖 2003 - 2016 173,034 cars in 2006 was as good as it ever got. toyota built scion because its own buyers were getting old and it wanted a badge that twenty-somethings would accept, sold everything at one printed price with no haggling, and put the marketing money into music nights and car meets rather than televi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Coin 📖 2013 - 2016 coin was the kickstarter-style smart card that promised to consolidate every magstripe in your wallet into one bluetooth-connected piece of plastic. kanishk parashar, ex-paypal, launched the campaign november 14 2013 and hit $50k in 40 minutes. coin 2.0 shipped in 2015. fitbit bought the assets on m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Revolv 📖 2013 - 2016 revolv shipped a $300 hub with seven radios that promised to be the brain of your house. nest bought the company in october 2014 and shelved the product. in february 2016 nest announced the cloud service would go offline on may 15, turning every shipped hub into a dead puck. customers who paid for a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Atmel 📖 1984 - 2016 george perlegos left intel in 1984 and built a company around putting flash memory on a microcontroller, which sounds like nothing until you remember that every chip before it had to be erased under ultraviolet light. the avr line came out of a design office in trondheim in 1996 and ended up inside |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
PlayStation TV 📖 2013 - 2016 playstation tv was sony's microconsole take on the vita, a hdmi puck that played vita and psp games on a television through the dualshock 3. it launched as vita tv in japan in november 2013 and reached the west the next year. shipments halted in japan on february 28 2016 after the western markets ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BodyMedia 📖 1999 - 2016 astro teller co-founded it, more than a decade before he was running google's moonshot lab. bodymedia spent fourteen years in pittsburgh building an armband whose sensors estimated calorie burn accurately enough that the fda classed it as a medical device, and it held 87 patents by the end. jawbone |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Jolla Tablet 📖 2014 - 2016 jolla was built by people nokia released when it chose windows phone over meego, and the tablet was their attempt to prove that an independent european mobile platform could still exist. the indiegogo campaign cleared its $380,000 goal in about two hours and finished above $2.5 million from more tha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
HP TouchSmart 📖 2007 - 2015 hp's touchsmart line started at ces 2007 with the iq770, a 19-inch all-in-one desktop you were supposed to poke at like a kiosk. it ran windows vista at launch and topped out with windows 8 touch builds on the 600 and 900-series. by 2015 hp had stopped pushing the brand and the touchsmart name disap |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Stratos Card 📖 2012 - 2015 stratos was the ann arbor bluetooth smart card founded in 2012 by thiago olson and chris bartenstein. across three funding rounds it raised about $6.63 million and launched to consumers in may 2015 at a subscription price. six months later the next round fell through and the company sold itself to a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Zano 📖 2014 - 2015 zano was a palm-sized autonomous drone that promised to follow you around and film in hd, all steered from a phone. torquing group raised over 2.3 million pounds on kickstarter for it in 2014, the biggest european campaign the site had seen. the hardware could not do most of what the video showed. t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amazon Fire Phone 📖 2014 - 2015 amazon fire phone was bezos's bet that he could turn a phone into a shopping terminal and sell it at flagship prices. it shipped on 25 july 2014 as an at&t exclusive in the us, with a four-camera dynamic perspective gimmick that tilted the ui as you moved your head, and a firefly button that scanned |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Amplify Tablet 📖 2013 - 2015 rupert murdoch's news corp put something close to a billion dollars into selling technology to american schools, and the amplify tablet was the hardware half of that bet. a $299 android device, unveiled at sxswedu in austin on march 6, 2013, aimed at districts buying one screen per child. guilford c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Samsung Gear Live 📖 2014 - 2015 june 2014: google put two watches on one stage at i/o and said android ran on wrists now. samsung's lasted eleven months in the store and then went away without a successor, because tizen was already shipping and there was no reason to keep building hardware for somebody else's platform. it took unt |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Little Printer 📖 2012 - 2015 berg made a palm-sized thermal printer that woke up and printed you a little newspaper, your weather and a note from a friend, all on a curl of receipt paper. it needed berg's cloud to work, and when berg ran out of money in 2014 the cloud went with it. the printers fell silent on 31 march 2015 and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Karotz 📖 2011 - 2015 18 february 2015 is the day the ears stopped moving. karotz was the third and last of the french internet rabbits, a plastic bunny with wi-fi, a swiveling webcam and an rfid reader in its nose, launched on 1 april 2011 by mindscape after violet went bankrupt and sold it the design. aldebaran robotic |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Surface RT 📖 2012 - 2015 surface rt was microsoft's debut consumer tablet. it shipped on windows rt, an arm port of windows 8 that could only run windows store apps and a desktop microsoft office. critics hated the slow performance and the empty app store. microsoft took a nine-hundred-million-dollar write-down in july 2013 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Google Glass 📖 2013 - 2015 google glass explorer edition went on sale in april 2013 to a hand-picked group of $1500 early adopters. the device was a head-mounted camera with a tiny display you wore over one eye. wearing one in public got you called a glasshole within a year. google halted the explorer program on january 15 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Nokia Memories 📖 2012 - 2015 microsoft bought nokia's phone business in april 2014 and spent the following year switching off the parts with nokia written on them. memories.nokia.com was one of the smaller casualties, a server that existed only because facebook and email would show just the first frame of an animated gif. the l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
iRiver 📖 1999 - 2014 dormant the geeky korean mp3 player brand. it was what you bought when the ipod was too expensive, or when you wanted something that played ogg vorbis without complaining. the company technically still exists as Astell&Kern, but the iriver i remember was already gone by 2010. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Portable 📖 2004 - 2014 the psp was sony's bet that a handheld could be both a gameboy competitor and a portable media player. it sold 76 million units across ten years, lost most of the generation to the nintendo ds, and went out of production region by region through 2014. its successor the vita then died smaller. the fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Looxcie 📖 2008 - 2014 a button on the side saved the last thirty seconds of whatever you had just been looking at, and that was the entire pitch. looxcie built a bluetooth headset that recorded continuously into a rolling buffer, sold the first one in september 2010 for a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and made time's |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Microsoft SideWinder 📖 1995 - 2014 microsoft sidewinder was the brand microsoft tried twice on pc gaming peripherals. first as joysticks from october 1995 to around 2003, then again as gaming mice and keyboards from 2007 to 2014. force feedback 2 was the artifact people kept. by the time the second run emptied out of stores in octobe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sony Reader 📖 2006 - 2014 sony shipped an e-reader before amazon did. the librie launched in japan in 2004 and the prs-500 reached the united states in september 2006, more than a year before the first kindle. it lost on store catalog and drm format, plus the lack of an integrated bookstore that worked outside the english-la |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sifteo Cubes 📖 2011 - 2014 the mit media lab prototype was called siftables and it played at ted in february 2009. david merrill and jeevan kalanithi turned it into a shipping product, small screens you shuffled around on a table while the game watched where you put them. two generations went out at roughly a hundred and fift |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Nokia X 📖 2014 - 2014 the nokia x was nokia's brief detour into android. the x and the xl handsets (plus the slightly upgraded x+ on the same chassis) were unveiled at mwc on february 24 2014 with a forked aosp build that stripped out google services and put a tile-style nokia launcher on top. the line was aimed at emerg |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Sony VAIO 📖 1996 - 2014 sony's pc brand. launched july 1996 with the pcv-90 desktop series in japan, became famous worldwide for the pcg-505 superslim laptop in 1997 and the c1 picturebook with integrated webcam in 1998. ran the high-end consumer pc segment for fifteen years on industrial design alone. on february 4 2014 s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry PlayBook 📖 2011 - 2014 rim's ipad answer, launched april 19 2011 in north america at $499 for the 16gb model. it shipped without a native email client because the email had to come from a paired blackberry phone, which the reviewers noticed immediately. fire-sale pricing arrived by christmas, with a $485 million writedown |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Wii Speak 📖 2008 - 2014 wii speak was a microphone bar you hung off the television so an entire room could talk to an entire other room, which is not how anybody else was building voice chat in 2008. thirty dollars, fourteen compatible games, and a free channel that let you talk to friends with no game running at all. nint |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Nike+ FuelBand 📖 2012 - 2014 nike+ fuelband was the wrist tracker that converted accelerometer data into a made-up unit called nikefuel and showed it back on a black-bracelet LED dot-matrix display. nike sold it from february 2012 and killed the hardware in april 2014 after disbanding most of the digital sport team. the backend |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Fitbit Force 📖 2013 - 2014 fitbit force was a wristband activity tracker released in october 2013 at $129.95 as the upgrade from the fitbit flex. by late january 2014 there were a few thousand reports of skin irritation tied to the stainless steel casing, the strap material, or the adhesives inside the band. fitbit started a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
OLPC XO-1 📖 2007 - 2014 the xo-1 was the first hardware shipped under the one laptop per child initiative announced at davos in 2005 by nicholas negroponte. the device had a green and white sealed-rubber case, an amd geode lx-700 cpu, a sunlight-readable transflective screen, and the sugar interface running on a fedora lin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
AIBO 📖 1999 - 2014 sony put the first aibo out on may 11 1999 at two hundred and fifty thousand yen and the japanese run of three thousand sold out online in twenty minutes. the models that followed sold in the tens of thousands to people who kept them the way you keep an animal. sony cancelled the line on january 26 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
INQ Mobile 📖 2008 - 2014 a small london outfit inside hutchison whampoa built the phone everyone else was still writing rumor pieces about. the inq1 shipped in december 2008 with facebook and skype wired into the address book instead of sitting in a menu, cost almost nothing on contract, and took phone of the year at the 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Symbian OS 📖 1998 - 2014 the OS that ran every nokia smartphone from about 2000 to 2011. peak market share over 60 percent globally in 2007. then iphone, then android, then the burning platform memo. nokia abandoned symbian for windows phone in 2011. microsoft bought nokia phone in 2014. anna and belle updates bricked some |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Gateway Computers 📖 1985 - 2014 gateway 2000 was started in 1985 in a sioux city farmhouse by ted waitt and mike hammond, sold mail-order pcs in boxes printed with holstein cow markings, and grew into one of the largest us pc makers of the late nineties. acer acquired the company on october 16 2007 for seven hundred ten million do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
3Com 📖 1979 - 2013 3com was the network-hardware company robert metcalfe started in 1979 to sell ethernet adapters to anyone who wanted computers to talk to each other. for two decades it shipped the network card that came in the same box as the pc, the same etherlink iii that ended up in every beige tower in the 90s. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Surface Table 📖 2008 - 2013 the surface table was a 30-inch rear-projection touchscreen built into a coffee-table cabinet, announced by steve ballmer at the all things d conference on 29 may 2007 and shipped to commercial customers on 17 april 2008 at a starting price of about $10,000. the bet was that the surface name would m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
OCZ Technology 📖 2002 - 2013 ryan petersen ran an overclocking store and turned it into a memory brand in august 2002, back when the ram in your machine was a thing you argued about on a forum. the pivot to solid state after 2009 was the right call taken too fast, with drives failing in the field while the revenue was being boo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AlphaSmart 📖 1993 - 2013 alphasmart made a keyboard with a narrow lcd strip above it and nothing else. no browser and no notifications. american schools bought them by the cartload through the nineties and the 2000s because they were cheap enough to hand to a whole class and tough enough to survive being dropped by one. ren |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
HTC First 📖 2013 - 2013 the htc first was the phone built to launch facebook home, the skin that turned your whole android screen into a facebook feed. it lasted about a month. at&t sold fewer than fifteen thousand, then dropped the price from ninety-nine dollars to ninety-nine cents and quietly pulled it. it is remembered |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Sony Tablet S / Tablet P 📖 2011 - 2013 the sony tablet line was a two-device run. the tablet s was a 9.4 inch wedge that landed september 16, 2011, and the tablet p was a dual-screen folding clamshell that shipped october 28, 2011. neither sold well enough to justify keeping the sub-brand alive. by august 2012 the xperia tablet s had rep |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Creative Zen 📖 2004 - 2013 creative's nine-year attempt to take the mp3 player crown from apple. it won a $100m patent settlement against apple in 2006 and lost the market anyway, with north american share falling from 3.6% in 2005 to roughly 1% by 2009. every zen model was end-of-life by march 2013. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Compaq 📖 1982 - 2013 compaq started in 1982 with three texas instruments engineers building a portable ibm-clone in a houston garage. by the mid 1990s it was the world's largest pc vendor. hp paid $25 billion for it in 2002 and gradually folded it into the pavilion brand. the compaq nameplate held on as an entry-level s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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eMachines 📖 1998 - 2013 emachines sold a whole computer for 399 dollars in 1998 and was the fourth largest pc seller in america six months later. the box was never really the product. the money sat in the three year dial-up contract stapled to the rebate, which is why the offers looked impossible and were not. gateway boug |
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|2012-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Nexus Q 📖 2012 - 2013 the nexus q was a 300 dollar bowling-ball-sized android-powered media streamer that google announced at i/o 2012, gave away to conference attendees, then indefinitely postponed in july 2012 after critical reviews called it overbuilt for its limited function set. the consumer launch never happened. g |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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ASUS Eee PC 📖 2007 - 2013 the netbook that started the netbook category. launched october 16 2007 in taiwan, the 701 model shipped with a 7-inch screen, a 900 mhz celeron, 512 mb of ram, a 4 gb ssd, a custom xandros linux build, for around $250. asus moved 300,000 units in the first three months and a million by mid-2008. th |
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|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Nokia N9 📖 2011 - 2012 the n9 was nokia's only meego harmattan phone. it shipped 23 september 2011 in a small set of european and latin-american markets, never reached the us, and never got a successor because stephen elop's burning-platform memo from february of that year had already committed nokia to windows phone. the |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Barnes & Noble Nook Color 📖 2010 - 2012 the nook color was the device that almost made barnes and noble a hardware company. seven inches, color ips screen, customized android 2.2, $249 at launch in november 2010. three million units sold in the first four months. retail discontinuation came in december 2012 when the nook hd took over. ser |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Microsoft Zune 📖 2006 - 2012 microsoft's iPod competitor. arrived in 2006, five years after the iPod had won. brown was a launch color, which became the joke. the hardware was actually good. the social features (zune-to-zune wifi sharing) were ahead of their time. nobody bought it. microsoft cancelled the product line in 2011. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Motorola Atrix Lapdock 📖 2011 - 2012 the atrix lapdock was the cleanest version of the phone-as-laptop pitch. you slid an atrix 4g into the back of a thin clamshell, the lapdock booted motorola's webtop, an ubuntu-based desktop with firefox running off the phone. it shipped in february 2011 at $499 on at&t and never sold in the numbers |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Chumby 📖 2006 - 2012 chumby launched at o'reilly foo camp on 25 august 2006 as a small wifi-connected bedside appliance with a touchscreen wrapped in leather, running a modified linux kernel and embedded adobe flash player. owners chose widget channels through a web dashboard, and the device cycled them on the screen as |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Logitech Squeezebox 📖 2001 - 2012 squeezebox was the slim devices networked audio player that streamed your local music library to a wall-warted box plugged into a hi-fi receiver. logitech bought slim devices in october 2006 for $20 million and ran the brand for six more years before pulling the plug in august 2012. the audiophile c |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Xperia Play 📖 2011 - 2012 xperia play was the only playstation-branded smartphone ever shipped. sony ericsson built it as a slide-out gamepad android phone with the dpad and playstation face buttons, plus a pair of analog touchpads sitting where thumbsticks should have been. it launched in europe on april 1 2011 and got sony |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Cisco ūmi 📖 2010 - 2012 cisco announced umi on october 6, 2010 and shipped it on november 14 the same year as a consumer telepresence product for the living room. the box was a $599 hd camera plus console that plugged into your tv and your broadband connection, with a $24.99 monthly service fee for unlimited video calling. |
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| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Video Toaster 📖 1990 - 2012 newtek shipped a full-length card for the amiga 2000 in december 1990 that did most of what a hundred-thousand-dollar grass valley switcher did, for two thousand three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. it came bundled with lightwave 3d, which is how babylon 5 got its space battles and how a cottage i |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Motorola Xoom 📖 2011 - 2012 google's chosen flagship for android 3.0 honeycomb, the first android version built specifically for tablets. 10.1 inch screen, $799 on verizon 3G at launch, $499 for the wi-fi model that shipped a month later. superseded by the motorola xyboard eight months in. shipments trailed off through 2011 an |
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| RIP |
|1947-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sanyo 📖 1947 - 2012 1947, osaka. toshio iue borrowed a disused matsushita plant from his brother-in-law and started building bicycle lamps. by 2003 the company was turning over about 2.5 trillion yen and making more rechargeable cells than anyone alive. panasonic bought it in december 2009 for the battery patents and t |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sony Ericsson 📖 2001 - 2012 sony ericsson had its turkish moment around 2005-2008. the k750i with the sliding lens cover was the phone people put on the table at the cafe; the w800i was the one with the orange face. sony bought ericsson's half in 2012, and the green logo on the back of the phone disappeared. what came after wa |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Moxi DVR 📖 2000 - 2012 kirkland, washington, 1999: paul allen started a set-top company, and down in palo alto steve perlman started another one in secret. digeo bought moxi digital in 2002 and spent six years selling the result to cable operators before putting it in front of the public in december 2008, exclusively thro |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Kodak EasyShare 📖 2001 - 2012 chapter 11 on 19 january 2012, and three weeks later kodak announced it was leaving the camera business entirely. easyshare had started in 2001 with the dx3600 and a plastic cradle you dropped the camera into, and for a few years it was the answer to the only question ordinary people actually had ab |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
TwitterPeek 📖 2009 - 2012 peek inc launched the original email-only peek in 2008 to surprisingly warm reviews. the twitterpeek arrived in november 2009 at 100 dollars with six months of service, or 200 dollars for promised lifetime access. it could read and send tweets, plus send direct messages. that was all it could do. cn |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Peek 📖 2008 - 2012 peek was a small orange handheld that only did email. it cost 99 dollars on an at&t data plan and won time magazine's gadget of the year in 2008. the company pivoted to cloud software for feature phones in 2011 and shut off the network for every remaining peek device on 1 february 2012. |
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| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Trident Microsystems 📖 1987 - 2012 a cheap pc in 1994 came with a graphics chip nobody had asked for, and more often than not the writing on it said trident. the company sold slow svga parts at a price the board makers could live with, which was a real business until intel put graphics into its own chipsets and took the bottom of the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft SPOT Watch 📖 2004 - 2012 the spot watch was microsoft's first try at a smartwatch, four years before the iphone existed and almost a decade before the apple watch. bill gates announced it at comdex 2002. fossil and suunto shipped the first models in january 2004, and msn direct beamed news and weather to the watch over leas |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Sony Bloggie 📖 2008 - 2012 the bloggie was sony's pocket-camcorder answer to the flip video, launched as the webbie hd in 2008 and rebranded at ces 2010. the line had three years of relevance before the iphone 4s shipped 1080p video for free with every contract. sony discontinued the bloggie in early 2012, around the same tim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
S3 Graphics 📖 1989 - 2012 s3 spent the mid-1990s as the graphics chip almost nobody chose, because it came in whatever machine the shop had put together. by 1996 it held about half the 3d accelerator market with a part that was slower at 3d than doing it in software. the company was folded into diamond multimedia and renamed |
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| RIP |
|1945-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Saab Automobile 📖 1945 - 2011 general motors owned the intellectual property underneath the cars and would not let it cross to a chinese buyer, which is the short version of why trollhättan stopped. saab automobile filed for bankruptcy on 19 december 2011, twenty-two months after spyker had taken it off gm's hands. nevs bought t |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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JooJoo 📖 2009 - 2011 joojoo was the tablet that came out of the crunchpad implosion. michael arrington had pitched a $200 web tablet on techcrunch in 2008. his hardware partner fusion garage cut him out at the last minute in november 2009 and shipped the device alone as the joojoo at $499. they took 90 pre-orders. the i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Logitech Revue 📖 2010 - 2011 logitech bet on a set-top box that would put the open web on the living-room tv. the open web's tv networks decided no. by the time the revue dropped from 299 to 99 dollars in a fire sale, logitech had already taken a 34 million dollar writedown and the ceo was on his way out. google tv 1st gen kept |
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| RIP |
|1959-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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National Semiconductor 📖 1959 - 2011 danbury, connecticut, may 1959, which is not where anybody remembers this company being. it moved west and took charlie sporck off fairchild's payroll in 1967. two decades of winning on price made it the first chip firm past a billion dollars a year, and then the digital side stopped working. the an |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
HP TouchPad 📖 2011 - 2011 hp paid $1.2 billion for palm in 2010 to get into tablets. the touchpad shipped in july 2011 and got discontinued 49 days later. the $99 fire-sale that followed sold more touchpads in a weekend than the device had moved at full price its entire life. it is the cleanest case study of a hardware compa |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Palm Pre 📖 2009 - 2011 the palm pre launched on sprint on june 6 2009 as the showpiece for palm's new webos operating system. the slide-out portrait keyboard on a pebble-shape chassis plus the synergy contact-merging system were the product details that made it a credible iphone alternative on launch. hp acquired palm for |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Dell Streak 📖 2010 - 2011 five inches was the wrong number in 2010 and the right number by 2013, and dell was holding it at the wrong end of that. the streak ran android 1.6 on a screen nobody had a word for yet, sold through one carrier in britain and one in america, and got marked down from three hundred dollars to ninety |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Nabaztag 📖 2005 - 2011 dormant the wifi-connected rabbit. a small white plastic stationary rabbit that sat on your desk. it had moving ears, a glowing belly, a small speaker. it connected to a server in france that pushed weather, news, email notifications, and stupid little voice messages. it died when violet went bankrupt in 20 |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Apple Cinema Display 📖 1999 - 2011 the Cinema Display was the external monitor Apple sold to the people who already owned a Power Mac. it started september 1999 as a 22-inch polycarbonate panel, moved through aluminum, then to LED and glossy glass, and was discontinued on july 20 2011 when the Thunderbolt Display took its place. Appl |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Amstrad E-m@iler 📖 2000 - 2011 alan sugar built a telephone with a screen for people who did not want a computer. it launched in march 2000 at £79.99, below what it cost to build, and made its money by charging you every time you collected your mail while running advertisements on the screen at the same time. fifteen pounds bough |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Danger, Inc. 📖 1999 - 2011 danger built a phone that could not think without a server, in 2000, back when that was a strange thing to want. the hiptop shipped in the us as the t-mobile sidekick and handed a generation a thumb keyboard on an always-on data plan. microsoft bought the company in february 2008 for a rumored 500 m |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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enTourage eDGe 📖 2010 - 2011 the entourage edge was a dual screen android device that hinged a 9.7 inch e-ink reader to a 10.1 inch color lcd, so you could read on one side and write on the other. it shipped in early 2010 at 490 dollars, weeks before the ipad arrived at 499. the content store closed on 21 may 2011 and the compa |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Flip Video 📖 2006 - 2011 the flip was a pocket camcorder for a window of about three years between the death of the camcorder and the camera phone becoming good enough. cisco bought pure digital for $590 million in 2009 and shut the product line down 23 months later. nobody who owned one is angry. very few who owned one sti |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Palm Pilot 📖 1996 - 2011 the personal digital assistant. before smartphones, you carried a palm pilot for your calendar, contacts, and notes. graffiti was the handwriting input system that you actually had to learn. palm did not survive the transition to phones. HP bought the company in 2010 and killed it nine months later. |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Modu 📖 2007 - 2011 dov moran sold the company that made the usb flash drive for one point six billion dollars and spent the next four years on a phone the size of a credit card that you pushed into a shell to turn it into a different phone. the module weighed forty grams and guinness certified it as the lightest in th |
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|2002-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Apple Xserve 📖 2002 - 2011 apple's nine-year experiment in selling rack-mount servers to companies that already owned a lot of macs. the xserve launched at wwdc 2002 with a powerpc g4 inside it, moved to g5 in 2004, switched to intel xeon in 2006, then was discontinued in november 2010 with last orders taken january 31 2011. |
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|1928-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Motorola, Inc. 📖 1928 - 2011 two brothers named galvin incorporated it in chicago in 1928 to sell a box that let battery radios run off wall current. eighty-two years later it had made the first handheld cellular call and the chip inside both the amiga and the mega drive, and it had a handset division that lost money for most o |
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|1938-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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Mercury 📖 1938 - 2011 edsel ford drew a brand to fill the price gap between a ford and a lincoln, and for forty years that gap was real enough to sell cars into. by 2010 mercury held about one percent of the american market and everything it sold was a ford with a different grille on it. ford announced the end on 2 june |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Compaq iPAQ 📖 2000 - 2010 the compaq ipaq was a line of pocket pc handhelds launched in april 2000, running microsoft's windows mobile stack and aimed at business users who wanted a calendar and email in their jacket pocket. hp acquired compaq in 2002 and continued the line, eventually shipping the final ipaq glisten in dece |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Sony Mylo 📖 2006 - 2010 the mylo was a wifi-only pocket device with no cellular radio, marketed at american teenagers in 2006 who could lean on free t-mobile hotspots for a year. it shipped with skype and google talk built in. the iphone arrived ten months later. by 2010, when the bundled wayport hotspot deal expired, sony |
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| RIP |
|1926-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Pontiac 📖 1926 - 2010 the presidential task force on the auto industry read general motors' first survival plan in early 2009 and sent it back for deeper cuts. pontiac was in the second draft. gm announced the wind-down on 27 april 2009. the last car was a g6 sedan built on 4 january 2010, and the dealer franchise agreem |
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| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Saturn Corporation 📖 1985 - 2010 spring hill, tennessee got a multi-billion dollar plant and a union contract written from scratch, because general motors wanted to find out whether it could build a small car the way a smaller company would. the answer was yes for a while: 286,003 sold in 1994, at a sticker price nobody at the deal |
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|1979-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Sony Walkman 📖 1979 - 2010 dormant the original portable cassette player. invented personal music in 1979. it ran the world's listening habits for thirty years. sony stopped making cassette walkmans in october 2010, although they kept making mp3-based walkmans for years after. the brand still exists technically. the cultural meaning |
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|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Sharp Mebius 📖 1995 - 2010 sharp put the mebius name on laptops in 1995 and spent fifteen years making them thinner than anybody else was willing to try. the muramasa machines got a 12 inch notebook down to 16.6 millimeters in 2001, and most of the range never left japan. on 21 october 2010 sharp confirmed it had already stop |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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BlackBerry Storm 📖 2008 - 2010 the storm was research in motion's iphone-killer for verizon, the carrier that did not yet have the iphone and wanted a touchscreen flagship of its own. it shipped november 21 2008 with surepress, a clickable glass touchscreen that required physically pressing the screen down like a giant button. th |
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|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Apple TV (1st generation) 📖 2007 - 2010 the first apple tv was a small intel-based mac-mini-shaped silver box. it had a hard drive, a syncing relationship with itunes, and a clear job: get content off your computer onto your television. it never broke out of the hobby framing apple gave it at launch. the 2nd gen in september 2010 redesign |
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| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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ATI Technologies 📖 1985 - 2010 ati was the canadian gpu company that fought nvidia for the consumer 3d-graphics market for fifteen years, then got bought by amd in 2006 and had its name turned off in 2010. for an entire generation of pc gamers and hobbyists the radeon brand was the alternative to geforce, with the radeon 9700 pro |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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T-Mobile Sidekick 📖 2002 - 2010 the phone with the screen that swiveled open to a full qwerty keyboard underneath. built by danger inc, sold by t-mobile in the US, made famous by paris hilton. microsoft bought danger in 2008. microsoft's cloud lost everyone's contacts in october 2009. the service died in july 2010 and the servers |
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| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Palm, Inc. 📖 1992 - 2010 minus twenty two billion dollars. that is what the stock market said 3com was worth without palm on the first day palm traded on its own in march 2000, and the arithmetic was simple enough that the newspapers walked their readers through it the next morning. the company that produced that number spe |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Microsoft Kin 📖 2010 - 2010 the kin one and kin two were two phones microsoft built for teenagers in 2010, by way of buying the danger sidekick team and then making them rebuild the os on windows ce. they shipped on may 14, 2010 and were dead by june 30. forty-eight days. verizon sent the unsold inventory back. nobody inside m |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Dash Express 📖 2008 - 2010 dash navigation shipped a car navigator in march 2008 with a cell modem and wi-fi inside it, so every unit sent its own speed and position home, then the network told the rest of the fleet where the jam was. it cost 599 dollars plus a subscription in the year plain navigators started falling in pric |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Intel Larrabee 📖 2008 - 2010 one teraflop out of a single chip, demonstrated on stage at supercomputing in november 2009. that was about a fifth of what you could already buy in a graphics card that year. intel had spent two years telling the industry that a gpu should be dozens of small x86 cores running a rasterizer written i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Nokia N900 📖 2009 - 2010 the n900 was a debian-flavored linux desktop with a phone glued to the bottom of it. it shipped 11 november 2009 with maemo 5 on a slide-out keyboard, and seven months later nokia announced it would be the last maemo 5 device the company ever made. the platform got merged with intel's moblin into me |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Microsoft Courier 📖 2008 - 2010 i never owned a courier. nobody did. it never shipped. microsoft killed it on april 29 2010 after gizmodo leaked the prototype videos in september 2009 and the internet wanted it more than anything microsoft was actually planning to sell. the company chose the path of windows-on-tablet instead, and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Origami (UMPC) 📖 2006 - 2010 origami was a microsoft and intel platform initiative for ultra-mobile pcs, formally revealed at cebit on 9 march 2006. the spec called for a touchscreen of 7 inches or less at 800x480 minimum, running windows xp tablet pc edition. the launch models included the samsung q1 and the amtek t700. asus, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Xbox Live Vision 📖 2006 - 2010 xbox live vision was a small usb camera that clipped to the top of a television and mostly took your photograph. thirty nine dollars ninety nine bought the camera with a headset and a copy of uno, which is the game the accessory ended up being remembered for, and not for reasons microsoft put in an |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Toshiba Libretto 📖 1996 - 2010 toshiba shipped the libretto 20 in japan on 17 april 1996, a full windows pc that weighed 840 grams and fit in a coat pocket, years before anything else did. most of the range never left japan. the west lost the line in 1999 and then watched the same idea come back in 2008 as the netbook at a fifth |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Sirius Stiletto 📖 2006 - 2010 a satellite radio you could carry, running linux underneath and a portable .net runtime on top, with wi-fi as a fallback for when the sky was blocked by a ceiling. sirius shipped the stiletto 100 in october 2006 as its answer to the ipod and killed the whole line in early 2010, more than two years b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
VCR Plus+ 📖 1990 - 2010 a number between one and eight digits long, sitting in the corner of a newspaper listing, encoded the channel and the start time and the length of a program well enough that a $60 handheld could reproduce all three and tell your vcr about them. henry yuen and daniel kwoh worked the math out at gemst |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Intel Turbo Memory 📖 2007 - 2010 one gigabyte of nand flash on a little card inside the laptop, sitting between the hard disk and windows vista, promising faster boots and a disk that stopped spinning more often. intel shipped it in may 2007 as part of santa rosa. the benchmarks showed almost nothing, hp and sony refused to fit it, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Psystar 📖 2008 - 2009 apple filed in the northern district of california on 3 july 2008, weeks after the first machines went out, and never lost a round of it afterwards. psystar was two brothers in miami selling an ordinary beige pc with mac os x already on the drive, and the defense was that a license agreement cannot |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Nokia Internet Tablets 📖 2005 - 2009 nokia internet tablets were a four-device line of small linux web tablets, sold from late 2005 to late 2009. the 770, then the n800 and n810. they were not phones. they were wifi-only handheld computers that ran maemo, nokia's debian-based linux, with a small finger-or-stylus touchscreen and an oper |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Apple Mighty Mouse 📖 2005 - 2009 apple shipped the mighty mouse on august 2, 2005. it was the first apple mouse with more than one button after twenty-two years of one-button orthodoxy, and it hid that fact behind a smooth white shell with capacitive sensors and a tiny scroll ball where the wheel should be. the ball became its own |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Verizon Hub 📖 2009 - 2009 the verizon hub launched on february 1, 2009 as a $200 tabletop touchscreen phone with a $35 monthly service charge. it was a 7 inch lcd device built around voip calling, with widgets for traffic plus weather plus calendar plus messaging to other verizon phones. verizon pulled it from stores within |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Coupon-Eligible Converter Box 📖 2008 - 2009 thirty-three and a half million forty-dollar coupons, mailed to american households as bank cards that would buy one thing and nothing else. the tv converter box coupon program existed because congress switched off analog broadcasting and did not want to strand every working television set that had |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Everex 📖 1983 - 2009 in 1988 everex sold half the tape backup drives on earth, and in 1990 it did 436 million dollars of business with 2,200 people on the payroll, and almost nobody remembers the name. it filed for bankruptcy on 5 january 1993 and was bought out of it by formosa plastics, which ran it for sixteen more y |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Palm Treo 📖 2002 - 2009 the treo was the smartphone before the iphone was the smartphone. handspring built the first one, palm bought handspring, and for six years the treo was the device that bankers and consultants checked email on. then january 2007 happened, then june 2009 happened, and palm rebooted itself onto webos |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Concord Camera 📖 1982 - 2009 this is the company whose name was almost never on the camera. concord built cheap film bodies and single-use cameras in china and sold them under other people's brands, polaroid and argus and keystone among them, into every drugstore chain and supermarket in the western world. the cameraphone remov |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
OQO 📖 2000 - 2009 oqo built the smallest fully-functional windows pc on earth for most of the 2000s. the model 01 shipped in 2004 at under a pound, with a slide-out keyboard and a 1ghz transmeta crusoe. the model 02 ran vista in your jacket pocket. in may 2009 the company ran out of money and shut down, the umpc cate |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Pleo 📖 2007 - 2009 pleo was a 349-dollar robot dinosaur toy from ugobe, co-founded by furby's caleb chung. it shipped in december 2007 with skin sensors, microphones, a camera, motors in every joint, and software that let it learn behavior over time. ugobe filed chapter 7 in april 2009 after laying off all staff. a ho |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Openmoko 📖 2006 - 2009 openmoko was a taiwanese motherboard company's attempt to build a phone with nothing hidden inside it. the neo 1973 shipped in july 2007 and the neo freerunner in june 2008, both running linux, both sold to people who were expected to replace the bootloader before the week was out. the hardware arri |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Silicon Graphics (SGI) 📖 1981 - 2009 silicon graphics inc was founded in november 1981 by jim clark and a group of stanford engineers, ran the unix workstation market for two decades on the back of the iris and onyx and indigo lines, then was undercut by linux on commodity x86 hardware through the 2000s. it filed chapter 11 a second ti |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Transmeta 📖 1995 - 2009 transmeta stayed quiet for five years and came out in january 2000 with a chip that had almost no x86 logic on it. a software layer translated intel instructions at runtime and the entire pitch was battery life. it worked, but not by enough, and when intel shipped the pentium m the reason to buy a s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Qimonda 📖 2006 - 2009 infineon moved its memory business into a separate company in 2006 and listed it in new york three months later, arriving just as dram prices fell eighty five percent in one year and another fifty eight percent in the next. qimonda built good chips on a deep trench cell nobody else used, which count |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
QuickCam 📖 1994 - 2009 connectix shipped a hundred-dollar camera in 1994 that plugged into a macintosh serial port and produced sixteen shades of gray at 320 by 240. it was the first webcam an ordinary person could actually buy, and it looked like a golf ball sitting on a small metal triangle. logitech bought the line in |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sharp Zaurus 📖 2002 - 2008 sharp shipped the sl-5500 zaurus in march 2002 as the first mass-market linux pda. you could log in as root and ssh into your machine over a cf wifi card. later clamshell sl-c models stayed japan-only. sharp officially killed the line in december 2008. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Casio Cassiopeia 📖 1997 - 2008 casio's cassiopeia was the first hardware partner microsoft used to ship windows ce to a wide audience. the a-series handheld pcs of 1997 had small keyboards and grayscale screens. the e-series palm-size pcs followed in 1998 and lasted into the pocket pc era. casio pulled out of the western market i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
ABIT 📖 1989 - 2008 abit was the taipei motherboard company that moved the cpu multiplier off a row of jumpers and into the bios, which is the single change that turned overclocking from a hardware modification into something you scrolled to. a bh6 with a celeron 300a on it was the cheap machine that ran like an expens |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Motorola Razr V3 📖 2004 - 2008 one hundred and thirty million units, and hardly any of them bought for what the phone actually did. the razr v3 went on sale in september 2004 with the internals of the year-old v600 folded into a 13 millimeter aluminum body, and it held the top of the us market for twelve consecutive quarters. mot |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Yugo 📖 1980 - 2008 kragujevac took a fiat 128, cut the back off it, and built the result for twenty-eight years. malcolm bricklin brought it to the united states in 1986 at three thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars, which made it the cheapest new car on sale there, and americans bought 141,651 of them before deci |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Sony EyeToy 📖 2003 - 2008 the eyetoy was a usb webcam for the playstation 2 that read color and motion from a couch, three years before nintendo's wii remote and seven before the xbox kinect. sony sold 10.5 million units between july 2003 and november 2008. it was replaced by the playstation eye on the ps3 and gradually fold |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Amstrad 📖 1968 - 2008 alan sugar was twenty one in 1968, selling car aerials and cheap electrical goods out of a van, and the company he registered that year spent two decades asking one question about every product: what is the cheapest way to build this and still put it on a shelf. it worked on hi-fi and then on home c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Nintendo e-Reader 📖 2001 - 2008 the e-reader was a scanner that plugged into a game boy advance and read paper cards. you pulled a card through the slot and got a minigame, or sometimes a whole nes game rebuilt out of ink. nintendo shipped it in japan on 1 december 2001 and in north america in september 2002, where almost nobody b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Akimbo 📖 2004 - 2008 akimbo was a video-on-demand set-top box launched in october 2004 by former replaytv exec steve shannon, paired with a $200-300 thomson-built device and a per-show download catalog from about 200 content partners. it raised $56 million from at&t, cisco, and disney over its lifetime, shifted to a med |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Trinitron 📖 1968 - 2008 trinitron was sony's picture tube, and for most of forty years it was the one you wanted. it was announced in april 1968 with a single electron gun and a grille of vertical wires where everyone else had a perforated metal mask, which is why the picture came out brighter and why two faint horizontal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Ageia PhysX 📖 2006 - 2008 ageia sold an add-in card whose only job was physics. it reached shops in may 2006 at around two hundred and fifty dollars, from asus and bfg, and the launch title was ghost recon advanced warfighter, where reviewers found that adding the card could make the frame rate worse. nvidia bought the compa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Intel Viiv 📖 2005 - 2008 two years after intel announced it, viiv was a sticker on a computer that nobody in the shop could explain. the plan was centrino for the living room: certify a bundle of parts plus a media server stack, then let the badge do the selling. it never named anything a buyer could not already get, and on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Nokia Communicator 📖 1996 - 2007 nokia's eleven-year keyboard-clamshell line. an attempt to make the phone a small computer for business users. it ran from the 9000 in 1996 through the e90 in 2007, moved through pen/geos and four versions of symbian, and was the closest thing the pre-iphone world had to a pocket computer. the e90 w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
MovieBeam 📖 2003 - 2007 moviebeam was disney's answer to video on demand before broadband was ready, and the answer was a box that pulled films out of the blank lines of a public television signal. it arrived preloaded with a hundred movies and swapped about ten of them a week, whether you wanted those ten or not. disney s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Apple iPod Hi-Fi 📖 2006 - 2007 the ipod hi-fi was apple's home-stereo speaker for the 30-pin ipod dock. steve jobs announced it at a february 2006 town hall, called it audiophile-grade, and sold it at $349. the thing was heavy and could run on six d-cell batteries if you wanted it portable. it hit retail right when the third-part |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
|
Palm Foleo 📖 2007 the palm foleo was announced by jeff hawkins on 30 may 2007 as a 10-inch linux subnotebook meant to be a bigger screen for the treo smartphone. it weighed about two and a half pounds and ran a custom linux build by access. the target price was $499 with a summer ship date. on 4 september 2007 ceo ed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Fingerprint Reader 📖 2004 - 2007 "the fingerprint reader is not a security feature and is intended to be used for convenience only." that sentence was sitting in microsoft's own getting started manual in april 2006, under a product whose entire advertising promise was that it replaced your passwords. it shipped in september 2004, n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Motorola ROKR E1 📖 2005 - 2006 the rokr e1 launched september 7 2005 in a steve jobs special-event keynote, a motorola candybar handset running a version of itunes on its small color screen. it was the first apple-itunes-licensed mobile device and the visible product of an 18-month motorola-apple partnership. the catch was a firm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Apple iSight 📖 2003 - 2006 the small aluminum cylinder that clipped to the top of a powerbook lid via a magnetic mount and ran video over a single firewire cable. announced june 23 2003 at wwdc beside ichat av, killed quietly in december 2006 once every new mac shipped with a built-in camera. the brand name "isight" survived |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Exabyte 📖 1985 - 2006 boulder, colorado, 1987: engineers out of storagetek worked out that the helical scan head sony had built for camcorders could write 2.3 gigabytes onto an 8mm video cassette, and shipped the result at two thousand dollars a drive. for the next six years exabyte was simply what backup meant in any ma |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Siemens Mobile / BenQ-Siemens 📖 1985 - 2006 siemens made phones for twenty-one years and was fourth in the world at the start of the decade, behind nokia and motorola and whoever was third that quarter. it shipped the first color screen and the first phone with an mp3 player in it. then the share slid, siemens paid benq 350 million euros to t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
VK Mobile 📖 2001 - 2006 vk mobile was a south korean handset maker that began life in 1997 importing batteries for other people's phones and was selling its own by 2001. sales hit nearly 400 billion won in 2004. an expensive purchase of the french manufacturer vmts turned 2005 into a 65 billion won loss, and after missing |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Maxtor Corporation 📖 1982 - 2006 the first drive out the door in 1983 was designed to hold 190 megabytes and shipped at 140, because the heads were not ready and the company took what it could get. that is roughly how the next twenty three years went. maxtor bought miniscribe's assets out of bankruptcy in 1990, came close to going |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Videoway 📖 1989 - 2006 illico took the subscribers one neighborhood at a time from 1999 onward, and the last videoway terminals were collected in april 2006. what videotron had put in quebec living rooms in the autumn of 1989 was a cable decoder that was also a games console, with four selectable camera angles on a canadi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Sony AIBO (original line, 1999-2006) 📖 1999 - 2006 the first aibo, the ers-110, shipped on may 11 1999 in japan at 250000 yen and at 2500 dollars in the us. the line ran through several generations, ers-210, ers-220, ers-7. sony announced the program's end on january 26 2006 as part of howard stringer's cost cutting. the last unit shipped in march 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1928-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Minolta 📖 1928 - 2006 minolta started in osaka in 1928 as a japanese-german camera shop and spent most of the twentieth century as one of the names that mattered. the maxxum 7000 in 1985 was the first 35mm slr with the autofocus motor built into the body, and every manufacturer copied the arrangement inside a few years. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
Nokia N-Gage 📖 2003 - 2006 the n-gage was nokia's phone-and-game-boy hybrid. it had a side-mounted speaker that made you hold it sideways against your face to take calls, which became the meme that buried it. nokia had projected six million units in three years and shipped roughly half that. the qd revision fixed the obvious |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
3Dlabs 📖 1994 - 2006 3dlabs spent the late 90s and early 2000s building the gpus that ran professional cad and 3d animation. the wildcat line lived in solidworks and maya workstations. the permedia chips tried to bring the same technology down to gamer price points. neither line could keep pace with nvidia and ati's vol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2006|
|_____|
|
QRIO 📖 2000 - 2006 qrio was sony's second robot and the one that never got a price tag. it stood 60 centimeters and weighed 7.3 kilos. on 18 december 2003 it became the first self-contained biped to run, meaning both feet left the ground at once with the batteries and the controller riding along inside it. it conducte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Diamond Rio PMP300 📖 1998 - 2005 the diamond rio pmp300 was the first mass-market portable mp3 player. 32 megabytes of internal flash, with a smartmedia slot for another 32. the riaa sued to stop it and lost, which is the reason every later mp3 player legally exists. the pmp300 itself sold around 200,000 units before diamond got ou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Rio Karma 📖 2003 - 2005 the 20gb audiophile mp3 player rio shipped in august 2003 with proper gapless playback, ogg vorbis and flac decoding in firmware, a 5-band parametric eq plus ethernet sync through its dock. the closest a hard drive jukebox ever got to a hi-fi component in the ipod generation. the rio brand ended in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
ReplayTV 📖 1999 - 2005 replaytv shipped a dvr that skipped commercials automatically and let you send recorded shows to other replaytv owners over the internet. hollywood sued it out of business. tivo, which kept skip manual and sharing offline, survived. the brand was finally retired in december 2005. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1932-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Contax 📖 1932 - 2005 contax started in 1932 as zeiss ikon's answer to leica and came back in 1975 as a japanese body with german glass in front of it, styled by porsche design and built by yashica. kyocera inherited the whole arrangement when it bought yashica in 1983 and used it to ship the first full-frame digital slr |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Storage Technology Corporation 📖 1969 - 2005 the whole company rested on one bet: a tape drive fifteen percent cheaper than ibm's would sell against ibm. that arithmetic worked for a decade, and then $250 million spent on a mainframe and an optical disk that never shipped put it into chapter 11 on 31 october 1984, owing creditors around $700 m |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Tapwave Zodiac 📖 2003 - 2005 the tapwave zodiac was the palm os handheld that wanted to be a console. it shipped on 1 november 2003 with twin analog controls and a 480x320 color screen, priced between $299 and $399. about 50,000 units sold across both skus. by 31 july 2005 tapwave had stopped production, killed by sony's psp ar |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sendo 📖 1998 - 2005 a birmingham handset maker that built cheap phones for operators and then bet its future on being first out with microsoft's smartphone platform. microsoft paid for a tenth of the company and took a board seat in february 2001, the software never arrived in a state anyone could ship, and the z100 wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
FingerWorks 📖 1998 - 2005 wayne westerman could not type without pain, so his doctoral work at delaware became a flat surface that read all ten fingers at once and turned gestures into commands. he and his advisor sold it as a keyboard with no moving parts, mostly to other people with repetitive strain injuries, at $339 a un |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1878-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Rover 📖 1878 - 2005 ten pounds is what bmw charged the phoenix consortium for mg rover in may 2000, and it was not a bargain. the company had started as a coventry bicycle works in 1878 and built its first car in 1904, and it spent its last five years running down an old model line with no money for a new one. administ |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Sony Clié 📖 2000 - 2005 the clié was sony's palmos pda line. it launched in japan in september 2000 and reached north america in 2002, running palm os over sony's own jog dial interface with memory stick storage. the nx and nz models from 2002-2004 had rotating screens, vga displays, and built-in cameras at a time when no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
HitClips 📖 2000 - 2005 a portable player that played one minute of one song, in mono, off a removable plastic chip you bought separately at target. the songs were the radio edits of the late-90s teen pop block. hasbro sold thirty million units in three years and discontinued the line as soon as a cheap mp3 player cost und |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
nCUBE 📖 1983 - 2005 cable television is where the hypercube ended up. five intel engineers left for beaverton, oregon in 1983 to build parallel machines wired as binary n-cubes, and by 1989 the ncube 2 could hold 4,096 processors in one frame. larry ellison took control in 1988 and stayed the majority shareholder for s |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Xelibri 📖 2003 - 2004 in january 2003 siemens announced it would sell mobile phones the way a clothing label sells clothes, in seasonal collections that were supposed to go out of date on schedule. the first four models were designed in house and came out looking like star trek props. the second four went to ideo and rea |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1897-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Oldsmobile 📖 1897 - 2004 thirty five million cars over one hundred and six years, from a curved-dash runabout built on a moving assembly line a decade before ford used one, to a red alero that factory workers signed before it was driven to a museum. general motors announced the phase-out on 12 december 2000, when a division |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2004|
|_____|
|
Castlewood Orb 📖 1999 - 2004 ex-syquest engineers founded castlewood in 1996 and shipped the orb in 1999 with a 2.2 gigabyte removable hard disk cartridge. a 5.7 gigabyte version followed in 2001. iomega had bought the syquest remains and sued castlewood over patents. the cd-r blank and the cheap external hard drive were alread |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Imation SuperDisk LS-120 📖 1996 - 2003 imation launched the superdisk ls-120 in 1996, a 120 megabyte diskette format from 3m's storage spinoff with panasonic manufacturing the drive. it read regular 1.44 megabyte floppies in the same slot. the iomega zip had three years of head start and most pcs that shipped with a third drive shipped w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Sun Cobalt Qube 📖 1998 - 2003 the cobalt qube was a small blue cube that ran red hat linux as a turnkey web server. you plugged it in, opened a browser to an ip on your lan, ran through a setup wizard, and the box was hosting email and a website by lunch. cobalt networks shipped the first qube in march '98. sun acquired cobalt i |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Sony Mavica 📖 1981 - 2003 every digital camera of the late 1990s had the same unsolved problem, which was getting the picture out of it. sony's answer was to put a 3.5 inch floppy drive in the body and write plain fat12 files to it, so the transfer step was walking across the room. the mavica name went back to a 1981 prototy |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Smart Display 📖 2003 - 2003 microsoft smart display, codenamed mira, was a battery-powered wireless touchscreen monitor that ran windows ce and acted as a remote thin client for the pc on your desk. viewsonic shipped the v150 in january 2003. it required the host pc to be unlocked the entire time the screen was in use, allowed |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Handspring 📖 1998 - 2003 priced at twenty dollars on 20 june 2000, open at twenty seven the following morning, and worth 3.6 billion dollars by the closing bell. two years and two months later the company's public float was valued at 93 million. the people who had invented the palmpilot walked out in 1998 and built a handhe |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
MSN Companion 📖 2000 - 2003 $199 on the shelf, $790 in mandatory dial-up before you got there. microsoft unveiled the msn companion at comdex in november 1999 and the first unit, compaq's ipaq home internet appliance, reached buyers on 15 august 2000. it ran windows ce and internet explorer 4 on a 10-inch screen with no hard d |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
NEC PC-9800 Series 📖 1982 - 2003 nec shipped the pc-9801 in october 1982 and then spent a decade owning japanese computing, past sixty percent of the market by 1991. the reason was writing. an ibm clone in the eighties could not put japanese text on a screen at a size you could read, and the pc-98 had the character rom and the disp |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Rocket eBook 📖 1998 - 2003 nuvomedia shipped the rocket ebook in late 1998, five years before the kindle, out of a two-person palo alto startup founded by martin eberhard and marc tarpenning. lcd screen, ten books of onboard storage, $499. gemstar bought them in 2000 for $187 million and rolled the design into the rca reb 110 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
New Internet Computer 📖 2000 - 2003 larry ellison spent the second half of the nineties insisting that the personal computer was too complicated and too expensive and that the network would do the work instead. the new internet computer was his last swing at proving it: 199 dollars, no hard disk, linux booted off a cd, plug it into a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Archos Jukebox 📖 2000 - 2003 archos put a six gigabyte hard drive inside a plastic brick and shipped it on 9 december 2000, ten months before the ipod was announced. it mounted as an ordinary usb disk, so you dragged mp3s onto it and that was the entire workflow. the firmware was bad enough that three swedish developers wrote a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
HP Jornada 📖 1998 - 2002 hp shipped the jornada 820 in 1998 as a clamshell windows ce handheld pc with a real keyboard for execs and field engineers. the line ran through the 720 clamshell and the 568 pocket pc, with the rare 928 as a british-only phone variant. when hp merged with compaq in 2002, the surviving pda was the |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Poo-Chi 📖 2000 - 2002 ten million of them went out the door in eight months at $24.99 each, which is how a plastic dog with red led eyes for a face became the toy that saved hasbro's christmas in 2000. poo-chi was sega toys' answer to the aibo, and it got there by undercutting sony by about two thousand four hundred doll |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
PocketStation 📖 1999 - 2002 the pocketstation was a playstation memory card with a tiny screen and an infrared port, released in japan on 23 january 1999 for 3,000 yen. compatible games wrote a small program onto it, and you carried the save around and played it on a coin cell. doko demo issyo sold over a million and a half co |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
ICL 📖 1968 - 2002 the british government built a computer company in 1968 by merging what was left of the domestic industry into a single firm, then pointed it at ibm. it worked for about twelve years. thirty three thousand people by 1980, running an operating system of its own under a good share of the british publi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Microsoft UltimateTV 📖 2001 - 2002 ultimatetv was microsoft's dvr-and-internet box for directv satellite, released march 2001 with sony and rca hardware partners. it had a dual satellite tuner that let you watch one show while recording another and web access wired to the webtv stack underneath. storage was up to 35 hours. tivo was a |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Iomega Jaz 📖 1995 - 2002 iomega launched the jaz drive in december 1995 with a 1 gigabyte removable cartridge that read and wrote at hard drive speeds. it was the high end of the zip family, marketed at video editors and small businesses that needed real portable storage. the 2 gigabyte version arrived in february 1998. by |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Netpliance i-Opener 📖 1999 - 2002 the i-opener was a $99 kitchen-counter internet appliance from netpliance, a texas startup that shipped the device in november 1999 at a loss-leader price meant to lock you into a $21.95 monthly subscription. inside was a 180mhz winchip socket-7 pc with a sandisk flash chip and a dial-up modem. with |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Handspring Visor 📖 1999 - 2002 the people who made the palmpilot walked out of palm and built a better palm. the visor was cheaper and it synced over usb while palm was still on a serial cable. it also had a slot in the back that turned the organizer into a modem or a camera with no driver anywhere in sight. over a million shippe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
E-mu Systems 📖 1971 - 2002 seven thousand nine hundred dollars was a lot to ask for a keyboard in 1981 and a bargain for a sampler, because the machine everybody compared it to cost thirty thousand. the santa cruz company that built it spent a decade putting samplers within reach of people who were not studios, then sold itse |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CueCat 📖 2000 - 2001 the cat-shaped barcode reader. dotcom-era brain product. you would get one free with your wired or forbes magazine. you scanned a barcode in a print ad. your computer opened a related URL. the company died in 2001. the device is a cult object now. cracked firmware turned it into a regular barcode sc |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1937-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Polaroid Corporation 📖 1937 - 2001 polaroid was edwin land's 1937 cambridge optics company that built the instant camera as a consumer product after his daughter asked in 1944 why she could not see a photo right away. the sx-70 in 1972 was the design peak. the original corporation filed chapter 11 on october 11 2001, sold its assets |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Sony eVilla 📖 2001 - 2001 the sony evilla was a kitchen internet appliance with a vertical crt and a beos-derived operating system, priced at $499 plus $21.95 a month for the bundled internet. it lasted ninety one days on the market before sony recalled every unit from every retailer. that makes it the cleanest case of a maj |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
SportBrain 📖 2000 - 2001 thirty-six thousand people bought a ninety-nine dollar pedometer that phoned a website every night, and when the company ran out of money they wrote in offering to start paying for the service they had been getting free. it was already too late. sportbrain shipped in october 2000 and posted its out- |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Psion Series 5 📖 1997 - 2001 psion shipped the series 5 in 1997 with a slide-out keyboard better than any pda before or since. it ran epoc32, the os that would later become symbian. by 2001 psion was out of the consumer hardware game entirely, leaving its os to nokia and ericsson and quietly ending its own product line. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Power Mac G4 Cube 📖 2000 - 2001 apple announced the cube on july 19 2000 and suspended production on july 3 2001. somewhere around 150,000 units shipped against an internal projection of three times that. it had no fan and no expansion bays. there was no audio-in jack either. jonathan ive's team designed it as art and tim cook lat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1928-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Plymouth 📖 1928 - 2001 973,000 cars in the 1973 model year, 108,546 in 2000. chrysler launched the brand in 1928 to take the cheap end of the market off chevrolet and ford, held third place in american sales for three decades, and then spent thirty years turning it into a dodge with different badges. daimlerchrysler annou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
3Com Audrey 📖 2000 - 2001 the audrey was 3com's $499 kitchen internet appliance from the ergo brand, a touchscreen tablet with qnx underneath and five pastel color options designed to sit on a countertop. it shipped october 17 2000 and 3com pulled the plug june 1 2001 after seven and a half months, killed by the dot-com cras |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Micron Electronics 📖 1995 - 2001 micron electronics was the pc company micron technology assembled around zeos in 1995 and stopped wanting by 2001. it sold desktops over the phone out of nampa, idaho, in the direct order style dell had proved and gateway had copied, and for a few years it was one of the larger american brands nobod |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
CrossPad 📖 1998 - 2001 a pen company and ibm built a clipboard that watched you write. the pen had ink in it and a radio transmitter in the barrel, so the pad underneath knew where the nib was and you docked it later to get your notes into windows. the hardware did what it promised. ibm ink manager, the software that turn |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Sega Dreamcast 📖 1998 - 2001 the dreamcast was the console that introduced built-in modems and online matchmaking to a living-room audience, two years before microsoft and sony figured out the same idea. ps2 hype combined with electronic arts skipping the platform killed it in march 2001. sega has not shipped console hardware s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Sega VMU 📖 1998 - 2001 the vmu was a dreamcast memory card with a 48 by 32 pixel screen, four buttons and a speaker, and it slotted face-out into a window in the controller so you could read it while you played. it went on sale in japan on 30 july 1998, four months ahead of the console. games used it as a second display f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Kerbango 📖 1998 - 2001 a california startup built the first stand-alone internet radio. it took best of show at ces 2001 with an amazon pre-order page already waiting. 3com had bought them for eighty million dollars the summer before. then 3com cancelled the internet audio division before a single kerbango box ever left t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Xircom 📖 1988 - 2001 thousand oaks, california, 1988: dirk gates and kirk mathews worked out how to get a laptop onto an office network through its printer port, which nobody else had bothered to solve. ten years on, xircom was a two billion dollar company selling credit card sized ethernet and modem cards to every busi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
iSmell 📖 1999 - 2001 ismell never shipped, so there was nothing to have used. digiscents raised around twenty million dollars to build a usb fin that would puff coded smells at you when a page loaded. it got a scratch-and-sniff wired cover and a lot of press, then ran out of money in 2001 with no product behind it. it l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
InfoGear iPhone 📖 1998 - 2001 at ces in early 1998 a startup out of redwood city showed a telephone with a seven inch touchscreen and a keyboard that slid out from underneath it. it ran a browser. it cost 499 dollars plus 19.95 a month and sold about a hundred thousand units across two generations, which was enough to be interes |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 2001|
|_____|
|
Creative Micro Designs 📖 1987 - 2001 commodore went bankrupt in april 1994 and a small company in east longmeadow, massachusetts kept building new hardware for its machines for another seven years. jiffydos, the ramlink, the fd-2000 floppy drive, scsi hard drives up to four gigabytes, and a 20 mhz accelerator cartridge that came out in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
3dfx Interactive 📖 1994 - 2002 3dfx invented the consumer 3d accelerator as a category and then handed the category to nvidia inside five years. voodoo cards and the glide api were the standard from 1996 to 1999. the api became a trap when microsoft's direct3d caught up. the stb acquisition broke the oem channel. nvidia released |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Diamond Multimedia 📖 1982 - 2000 diamond multimedia was the brand on a generation of mid-90s pc hardware. monster 3d voodoo graphics boards. stealth and viper svga cards. monster sound. and the rio pmp300, the first mass-market mp3 player, which won the lawsuit that made every later portable music device legally possible. diamond m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Virgin Webplayer 📖 2000 - 2000 ten thousand of them went out free to people who agreed to be monitored. the webplayer was a 200mhz pc in a flat white shell that could dial exactly one isp, with advertising on screen for as long as you stayed online, and for fifty dollars you got the hardware plus three years of unlimited dial-up |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Daewoo Motors 📖 1983 - 2000 kim woo-choong started with a textile trading office in 1967 and built korea's second largest conglomerate out of it, and when the group went down in 1999 it was owing something near eighty billion dollars. the car division was the part with factories on four continents and a badge people outside ko |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Aureal Vortex 📖 1996 - 2000 the pc sound chip line that pushed 3d positional audio in late-90s games. aureal semiconductor bought crystal river engineering in may 1996 for the head-related transfer function research and built the vortex chips around it. creative labs sued for patent infringement in march 1998. aureal countersu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Quantex 📖 1984 - 2000 quantex sold pcs by mail order out of somerset, new jersey from 1984 and spent the nineties winning build-quality awards against companies with far bigger advertising budgets. the machines came off a production line it did not own: fountain technologies built them, and built the pionex and cybermax |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
The Panda Project 📖 1992 - 2000 boca raton, 1992. stanford crane took over don estridge's old offices and built a workstation around a 256-bit backplane and a connector that put 1,100 contacts in a square inch. byte put the machine on its october cover under the headline the pc is dead. the pc was not dead, the archistrat sold in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
JavaStation 📖 1996 - 2000 no hard drive, no removable media of any kind, and an operating system that could only run java. the javastation-1 arrived in november 1996 at 699 dollars under the internal codename mr. coffee, and the krups model followed on 26 march 1998 at 599. javaos was sluggish, hotjava could not render half |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1923-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
General Instrument 📖 1923 - 2000 motorola closed the largest acquisition in its history on 5 january 2000 and the name on the cable box changed. general instrument had been going since 1923, made the chip inside a whole generation of pong clones, bought the company whose descramblers sat on top of american televisions, and then tal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
Microsoft ActiMates 📖 1997 - 2000 actimates was a line of interactive plush dolls released by microsoft kids starting september 1997. the first character was barney. arthur and his sister d.w. followed in 1998. teletubbies arrived in 1999. the toys had a tv pack accessory that fed a signal from a coded vhs tape to the doll so it wou |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
MPMan F10 📖 1998 - 2000 the mpman f10 was the first mass-market portable mp3 player. saehan information systems shipped it in march 1998 in south korea, six months before the diamond rio. it had 32 megabytes of flash memory and a parallel-port docking cable. eiger labs imported a rebranded version into north america for 25 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2000|
|_____|
|
ePods 📖 1999 - 2000 a twenty two year old chief executive in belltown, funded by the company that sold the george foreman grill. what they were building was a two pound windows ce slab for households that had never owned a computer, wanting a phone line and about twenty five dollars a month, and it was supposed to reac |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Tamagotchi (the cultural fad) 📖 1996 - 1999 dormant the bandai virtual pet keychain. you fed it, played with it, cleaned its poop. if you ignored it for too long, it died. peak fad was 1996 to 1999. schools banned them because kids would not stop checking. bandai still makes new versions in 2026, so the product is technically alive. the cultural mome |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
HP 200LX 📖 1994 - 1999 hp shipped the 200lx in august 1994: a palmtop running ms-dos 5.0 with a tiny qwerty keyboard and lotus 1-2-3 in rom. it ran on two aa batteries for weeks. hp killed it in december 1999 to push the windows ce line, but the dos cult never moved. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Number Nine Visual Technology 📖 1982 - 1999 seventeen years of graphics cards, and the part people still repeat is the boot screen. number nine took its name from a beatles track and printed a matching lyric on your monitor before the operating system had loaded. the engineering ran ahead of the room too, from the first 256-color card up to t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Packard Bell 📖 1986 - 1999 packard bell bought a dead radio trademark for under a hundred thousand dollars in 1986 and turned it into the best selling home computer in america by 1995. it did that by selling through stores instead of catalogs, which meant its customer was a first time owner who wanted the box to work out of t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Data General 📖 1968 - 1999 edson de castro's design for a new machine was turned down inside digital, so he left with two colleagues and built it somewhere else. the nova shipped in 1969 and data general spent the seventies as digital's most aggressive rival, past a billion dollars of annual sales by 1984. then the money move |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Rise Technology 📖 1993 - 1999 1998 was a terrible year to arrive with a cheap x86 processor, which is the year rise technology arrived with one. the mp6 was a clean small design, three pipelines with mmx on all of them, built to run cool and sell for very little in the segment nobody at intel wanted to defend. intel then decided |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Real3D 📖 1995 - 1999 more than 200,000 sega arcade boards carried graphics hardware from a lockheed martin subsidiary in orlando, out of a line of work that began with a docking simulator for apollo. real3d was set up in january 1995 to sell that expertise to civilians. its one consumer chip, the intel740 of 1998, was o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Sequent Computer Systems 📖 1983 - 1999 eighteen people walked out of intel in 1983, most of them off a processor project that had just been cancelled, and built a machine that ran unix across thirty processors at a time when the rest of the industry was still arguing about two. sequent sold those cabinets out of beaverton, oregon for six |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Cyrix 📖 1988 - 1999 cyrix built processors that beat intel on the work people actually did and lost to intel on the one benchmark everyone printed. it never owned a factory and never fixed its floating point unit, and by 1997 it had sold itself to a company that only wanted the cheap integrated chip. national semicondu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1977-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Hayes Communications 📖 1977 - 1999 hayes built the smartmodem in 1981 and the AT command set with it. every modem after that, including the cheap clones, spoke hayes. the company itself missed the dsl shift, filed chapter 11 in 1994 and again in 1998, and the brand was sold to zoom in mid 1999. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Practical Peripherals 📖 1981 - 1999 a patent fight over the hayes at command set ended in august 1989 with hayes owning the company it had been fighting. practical peripherals spent the 1980s selling the cheaper modem next to the expensive one on the same shelf, and it kept doing that as a hayes subsidiary until hayes ran out of money |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
AST Research 📖 1980 - 1999 ast started in 1980 selling expansion cards that fixed what ibm had left out of its own pc, and spent the eighties turning that into a computer company of its own. by 1990 it was the third largest pc maker in the world. samsung bought 46 percent of it for 378 million dollars in 1995 and the rest in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Encore Computer 📖 1983 - 1999 an american rule against foreign control of defense suppliers is why a parallel computing startup from massachusetts ended up owning a flight simulator business in florida. nippon mining bought gould in 1988, could not legally keep the part that made computers for the military, and effectively paid |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Radius Inc. 📖 1986 - 1999 burrell smith drew the digital board of the first macintosh, left apple in 1986 and spent the next twelve years selling the parts apple would not: a screen big enough to hold a whole page, and cards that made the machine faster than apple had shipped it. radius was first in line when the clone licen |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Sharp X68000 📖 1987 - 1999 march 1987, and only in japan. sharp put arcade-grade sprite and scrolling hardware into a home computer, charged 369,000 yen for it, and never exported a single unit. for twelve years it was the machine that got arcade ports nobody else could run properly, and konami's gradius came in the box. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Acorn Computers 📖 1978 - 1999 by 1999 acorn's holding in arm was worth more than every share in acorn put together, so the market was pricing twenty years of computers at less than nothing. a morgan stanley subsidiary took the group in order to release that shareholding, and the name came off the company in january. the cambridg |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
Sony Ruvi 📖 1998 - 1999 124 millimeters long and 380 grams, which in 1998 was small enough to be the entire pitch. sony got there by building the record head into the tape cartridge, so thirty minutes of hi8 and the mechanism that read it arrived as one sealed part with no loading gear around it. the price of that was a ca |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Philips CD-i 📖 1991 - 1998 philips cd-i was a 1991 multimedia console aimed at the living room. it was too expensive, underpowered for games, and saddled with the worst zelda spinoffs nintendo ever licensed. philips spent close to a billion dollars on it and discontinued the format in 1998. the only thing it left behind was a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1999|
|_____|
|
SyQuest Technology 📖 1982 - 1999 syquest sold removable hard-disk cartridges to mac desktop publishers from 1982 to 1998. the sq400 44mb cartridge was the way you handed a project file to your printer for most of the early 90s. iomega's zip drive in 1995 then cd-r recorders took the market away. syquest laid off half its staff in a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Hercules Computer Technology 📖 1982 - 1998 fifty percent of the monochrome graphics market by march 1986, and the card that won it existed because a berkeley doctoral student wanted to type thai on an ibm pc. the hercules graphics card gave you mda-quality text and a 720 by 348 addressable graphics mode on the cheap monitor you already owned |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1957-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Digital Equipment Corporation 📖 1957 - 1998 dec was the company that made minicomputers a category. ken olsen and harlan anderson founded it in maynard massachusetts in 1957 with seventy thousand dollars of venture money from american research and development. the pdp-8 in 1965 was the first commercially successful minicomputer. the vax in 19 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
UMAX SuperMac 📖 1996 - 1998 umax supermac was a line of macintosh clones built in taiwan from 1996, apple motherboards with ordinary pc parts arranged around them. when steve jobs came back and shut the clone program down, umax was the one licensee left running, because it sold under a thousand dollars and apple wanted a macin |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh 📖 1997 - 1998 the twentieth anniversary mac was apple's 20-year commemorative computer. it had a 12.1 inch lcd in a slim vertical case and a separate floor base unit holding a bose subwoofer, with a leather palm rest on the detachable trackpad keyboard. it launched on 20 march 1997 at $7,499 with concierge delive |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Apple eMate 300 📖 1997 - 1998 the emate 300 was apple's last attempt to put the newton in a useful form. it had a real keyboard, a 480x320 grayscale touchscreen, an arm cpu at 25 mhz, twenty-eight-hour battery life, and a translucent green clamshell case meant for kids dropping it onto classroom floors. it shipped march 7 1997 a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Apple Newton MessagePad 📖 1993 - 1998 the newton was apple's stylus-driven personal digital assistant, launched in august 1993 and discontinued by steve jobs five months after he returned to apple. the famous handwriting bug got it on the simpsons in 1994 and stuck. apple put roughly $100 million into the platform and killed it in febru |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Power Computing 📖 1993 - 1998 steve jobs returned to apple in 1997 and one of the first things he did was end the macintosh clone program, which meant ending this company. stephen kahng had started it in november 1993, got a mac os license in early 1995, and spent the following two years selling machines that were faster than an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Chips and Technologies 📖 1984 - 1998 the chipset is the reason a taiwanese board maker could sell you a pc compatible in 1987 at a fraction of ibm's price, and this company invented the category. gordon campbell and dado banatao started it in milpitas in december 1984 and shipped a four-chip ega part in 1985 that did the work of about |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Ensoniq 📖 1982 - 1998 the sid chip in the commodore 64 was bob yannes's design, and this was the company he started after it. the mirage put a working sampler on a music shop counter for 1,695 dollars in 1984, when the professional alternative cost thirty thousand. then the money moved to pc audio, and the audiopci chip |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1998|
|_____|
|
Amstrad PCW 📖 1985 - 1998 alan sugar sketched it on a napkin somewhere over the south china sea in february 1985, after seeing an odd electronic typewriter in a tokyo shop. six months later the pcw 8256 went on sale in britain for 399 pounds with a printer included, and it sold to people who had never wanted a computer and s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Apple LaserWriter 📖 1985 - 1997 the apple laserwriter was the first laser printer most people had ever seen paired with a personal computer. it shipped on 1 march 1985 at $6,995, ran a built-in adobe postscript interpreter, and was the output side of the macintosh-and-pagemaker stack that invented desktop publishing inside one yea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Tseng Labs 📖 1983 - 1997 newtown, pennsylvania is not where you expect the fastest graphics chip of the early nineties to have come from, but that is where jack hsiao nan tseng put his company in 1983. the ET4000 arrived in 1990 alongside windows 3.0 and beat everything on the market at the one thing that mattered then, whi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Micropolis 📖 1976 - 1997 four hard drive companies were worth counting when singapore technologies bought micropolis in march 1996, and seven by the time it gave up. the chatsworth company had been going since 1976, starting with floppy subsystems for s-100 hobby machines and ending with drives sold for video work. what was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1974-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Tandem Computers 📖 1974 - 1997 jimmy treybig was running marketing for the hp 3000 and could not get hewlett-packard interested in a computer that never went down, so in 1974 he left and built one himself. the nonstop systems shared nothing, not even main memory, and no single failing part could stop them or lose a transaction, w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
McDonnell Douglas 📖 1967 - 1997 a cargo door latch on the dc-10 could read as locked while the pins sat short of their stops. american airlines flight 96 survived that failure over windsor in june 1972. turkish airlines flight 981 did not, and went into a forest near ermenonville on 3 march 1974 with 346 people aboard. the company |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Microcom 📖 1980 - 1997 mnp was printed on the side of nearly every modem box sold in the 1990s, and it stood for microcom networking protocol, which is the name of a company in norwood, massachusetts that almost none of those buyers could have identified. microcom could not beat hayes on raw modulation speed, so it compet |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
XBAND 📖 1994 - 1997 catapult entertainment sold a modem hidden in a cartridge shell. you slotted your genesis or snes game on top of it and it dialed a local number. what came back was a ranking and an opponent inside your own phone rate band. twenty dollars at blockbuster, five a month for fifty connections. it peaked |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Apple QuickTake 📖 1994 - 1997 the apple quicktake 100 was one of the first consumer digital cameras anyone could buy, launched on 20 june 1994 at $749 in partnership with kodak. it captured 640 by 480 images at 0.3 megapixels in 24-bit color, with no preview screen and storage for eight pictures internally. apple released two fo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
NeXT 📖 1985 - 1997 a one foot magnesium cube with no floppy drive, priced at six thousand five hundred dollars in 1988. it was built for a university market that mostly could not afford it, and the volume never arrived, so the hardware was killed in february 1993 and the company spent four more years selling the opera |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Leading Edge 📖 1980 - 1997 leading edge sold printer ribbons and floppy disks out of canton, massachusetts before it put its name on a computer daewoo built in korea. the model d undercut ibm by around half and moved 125,000 units in thirteen months, which was enough to take the company into chapter 11 three years later once |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
Gravis UltraSound 📖 1992 - 1997 a red circuit board out of british columbia, sold into a market where every other card was green and said sound blaster on the box. the gf1 chip did sample playback in hardware across 32 voices with patches loaded into ram on the card, which made tracker music sound better than it had any right to a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1997|
|_____|
|
FM Towns 📖 1989 - 1997 charles townes shared the nobel prize in physics in 1964, and fujitsu had a habit of code-naming computers after nobel laureates, so this one was Townes until somebody dropped the e so people would say it correctly. announced on 28 february 1989, it was the first computer anywhere sold with a CD-ROM |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Weitek 📖 1981 - 1996 intel killed weitek by moving the math coprocessor onto the same piece of silicon as the processor. for most of the 1980s a weitek floating-point chip was the fastest way to make a 386 do real arithmetic, and the people who cared about that, cad users and workstation builders, paid what it cost. the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1961-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Memorex Corporation 📖 1961 - 1996 laurence spitters and three other ampex men set up in santa clara in 1961 to make computer tape, and by 1968 memorex was shipping the first ibm compatible disk drive anybody outside ibm had built. the consumer tape line arrived in 1971 and the ella fitzgerald commercial a year later handed the compa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Nintendo Virtual Boy 📖 1995 - 1996 the virtual boy was gunpei yokoi's last full hardware project at nintendo. red led arrays, oscillating mirrors, parallax stereoscopy, a tabletop tripod, a 32-bit nec v810 processor. it shipped july 1995 in japan and august 1995 in north america. by august 1996 it was gone. 770,000 units sold worldwi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Escom AG 📖 1986 - 1996 escom was a german computer retailer that grew from a side business into eleven percent of the german pc market, then spent 1995 buying things it could not carry. it took over a chain of british electrical shops in february and the remains of commodore in april, mostly for the amiga name. it set up |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
MasPar 📖 1987 - 1996 digital equipment sold this machine under its own name and called it the decmpp, which tells you most of what you need to know about maspar's position in its own market. jeff kalb left digital's chip division in 1987 to build a single instruction stream driving up to 16,384 small processors in one c |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1912-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Fokker 📖 1912 - 1996 schiphol-oost had been assembling aircraft since 1951, and the netherlands had been building them under the fokker name since 1919. daimler-benz walked away from its majority stake on 22 january 1996 and eight weeks of talks with avic and samsung produced nothing. the court declared bankruptcy on 15 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Zeos International 📖 1981 - 1996 zeos sold computers out of minneapolis by telephone, on a promise that somebody would pick up at three in the morning. fortune called it the fastest growing public company in america in 1991. micron technology folded its own pc business into it in april 1995 and renamed the result micron electronics |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Conner Peripherals 📖 1985 - 1996 one hundred and thirteen million dollars of sales in the first year, which was a record for a manufacturing startup in the united states, and 1.337 billion by 1990, which was another one. finis conner co-founded seagate and then walked out to build the company that beat it to the 3.5-inch drive, usi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
NexGen 📖 1986 - 1996 thampy thomas took money from compaq and kleiner perkins in 1986 to build an x86 processor without asking intel for a license, and spent eight years doing it. the nx586 arrived in 1994 as the first chip aimed squarely at the pentium, and it needed its own motherboard, which is most of the reason alm |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1996|
|_____|
|
Meiko Scientific 📖 1985 - 1996 nine weeks is how long it took, according to the company's own telling, to go from six resignation letters at inmos to a working parallel machine on a show floor in san francisco. the argument was about whether the transputer was ready to ship, and the six who thought it was left bristol's chip comp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Apple PowerCD 📖 1993 - 1995 the powercd was apple's first consumer product you could use without a mac next to it. inside it was a rebadged philips cdf-100, the same portable cd-rom drive philips sold under its own brand. on its own it played audio cds off a battery. plugged into a mac through scsi it became a generic cd-rom d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Convex Computer 📖 1982 - 1995 richardson, texas is where the affordable supercomputer got built. bob paluck and steve wallach started convex in 1982 and sold vector machines to sites that wanted cray arithmetic on a departmental budget, and for about a decade it was the most successful company in that trade. the c series ran fro |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Symbolics 📖 1980 - 1995 the mit ai lab put out two companies in 1980 to build computers that ran lisp all the way down to the microcode, and symbolics got most of the hackers and most of the money. for a few years in the middle of the eighties it sold the best software development environment anybody had. then the ai winte |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Cray Computer Corporation 📖 1989 - 1995 seymour cray had already walked out of one company to keep building the machine he wanted, and in 1989 he did it again. cray research handed the colorado springs lab and the cray-3 project to its own shareholders on 15 november 1989 and kept ten percent of the result. the cray-3 was to be twelve tim |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Pyramid Technology 📖 1981 - 1995 berkeley unix or at&t unix was a real commercial question in the mid 1980s and buying the wrong one could cost you your software. pyramid's answer was to ship both on the same machine, in one operating system, with the programs from each side running unmodified. a group of ex hewlett packard enginee |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Macintosh TV 📖 1993 - 1995 the macintosh tv was apple's one and only black all-in-one mac. inside the case sat what amounted to a performa 520 with a built-in cable-ready tv tuner driving the same 14-inch sony trinitron crt. it shipped on 25 october 1993 at $2,097. you could capture still frames to pict files but you could no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Acorn Archimedes 📖 1987 - 1995 june 1987, cambridge: a british company shipped the first reduced-instruction-set personal computer anyone could actually buy, running a processor it had designed itself because nobody would sell it one it liked. it went into british schools by the thousand and almost nowhere else. production of the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Kendall Square Research 📖 1986 - 1995 william koch won the america's cup in 1992 and put sixty-five million dollars into a supercomputer company in cambridge. kendall square research had a genuinely original machine, a thousand processors sharing one flat address space with no fixed home for any piece of memory, and it sold barely any o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Apple Interactive Television Box 📖 1994 - 1995 about 2,500 of these went into homes around ipswich for a british telecom video-on-demand trial, and that is as close as apple ever got to selling a television box in the nineties. inside the case was a macintosh lc 475 running system 7.1 out of rom, decoding mpeg video off a phone line. when the tr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1995|
|_____|
|
Prológica 📖 1976 - 1995 brazil spent the eighties under a law that kept foreign computers out, so brazilian companies built their own versions of machines the rest of the world could simply buy. prológica was the largest of them in the home market. the cp-500 was a trs-80 model iii and the cp-200 was a zx81, and for a gene |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Inmos 📖 1978 - 1994 £211 million of british government money went into a semiconductor company set up to give the country a chip industry it did not otherwise have. what it produced was the transputer, a processor designed to be bought by the dozen and wired together, which is roughly how every machine works now and wa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Metaphor Computer Systems 📖 1982 - 1994 two of xerox parc's senior people walked out in 1982 and built the machine xerox would not sell properly. the metaphor workstation shipped in september 1984 with infrared cordless input and a graphical interface aimed at business analysts rather than programmers, and by 1987 it was pulling $39.7 mil |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Thinking Machines Corporation 📖 1983 - 1994 danny hillis wanted a computer built from sixty-five thousand tiny processors instead of one large fast one, and thinking machines turned that thesis into a black cube whose front panel blinked red while it worked. for a few years around 1990 it held the top of the supercomputer list, with richard f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Northgate Computer Systems 📖 1987 - 1994 northgate sold beige towers by post out of eden prairie, minnesota, and the only part of it anybody still argues about is the keyboard. the omnikey used alps switches and put the function keys where people who typed for a living wanted them, so it got bought on its own by people running dell and gat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Orchid Technology 📖 1982 - 1994 lan is the vietnamese word for orchid, which is where the company name came from, and the first product was a one megabit local network card for the ibm pc in 1982. le nhon bui spent twelve years building orchid technology in fremont into a board house that shipped graphics adapters and sound cards. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Votrax 📖 1971 - 1994 a screw manufacturer in detroit owned the first cheap speech chip. federal screw works licensed richard gagnon's synthesizer design in 1970 and ran it as a vocal division, and by 1980 that division was selling the sc-01, a 22-pin part that turned phoneme codes into audible english for about seventy |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Commodore International 📖 1976 - 1994 commodore was jack tramiel's typewriter and calculator company that pivoted into home computers in 1977 with the pet, then shipped the commodore 64 in 1982 and turned it into the best-selling personal computer ever made. tramiel walked out in january 1984 after losing a board fight with irving gould |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Commodore 64 📖 1982 - 1994 595 dollars in august 1982 for 64 kilobytes and a sound chip nobody else was shipping. commodore owned the fab that made its own silicon, so it could cut the price faster than texas instruments could follow, and it kept cutting until ti walked out of home computers altogether. somewhere between 12.5 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Media Vision 📖 1990 - 1994 paul jain ran a company whose sound card was better than the one that won. the pro audiospectrum 16 shipped ahead of the sound blaster 16 and sounded better doing it, while media vision spent 1993 losing ninety nine million dollars and telling shareholders it had made twenty. the stock went from $46 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
Poqet PC 📖 1989 - 1994 fujitsu bought poqet computer in 1992 and had production stopped by 1994, which is the least interesting thing about a machine that ran ms-dos on two aa batteries. it came out in october 1989 at two thousand dollars with an 80c88, a cga-capable lcd and two card slots whose connector became the pcmci |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1994|
|_____|
|
BBC Micro 📖 1981 - 1994 in april 1981 a broadcaster awarded a computer contract to a cambridge company that had turned an unfinished design into a working prototype in four days to win the meeting. the bbc micro went on sale that december, the model b at £335, and by 1985 roughly eight out of ten british schools had one. a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Atari Portfolio 📖 1989 - 1993 atari shipped the portfolio in june 1989 at $399.95: the first palmtop pc that ran dos and the first machine most people saw a child use on screen, when john connor pulled atms apart with one in terminator 2. dip research designed it and atari sold it. the line ended around 1993 when dos palmtops mo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1885-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Ferranti 📖 1885 - 1993 the deptford power station opened in 1890 to a design by a man of twenty six, the first station built to push high voltage alternating current across a whole city rather than a street. the company he founded lasted another hundred and three years after that and sold the world's first commercially av |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Tandon Corporation 📖 1975 - 1993 forty tracks instead of thirty-five is what the tm100 had over shugart's sa-400, and it was enough to put tandon inside the ibm pc as the only floppy supplier until 1985. jugi tandon had learned read/write heads at memorex and then built his own in india, where the labor cost less. the drive busines |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1959-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Elwro 📖 1959 - 1993 a state electronics works in wrocław that built the first computer made in poland and then kept building them for thirty years, mainframes for institutions and one small machine for classrooms. at its height it employed around six thousand people. privatization arrived in 1993 and siemens bought the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
MSX 📖 1983 - 1993 kazuhiko nishi wanted a vhs for home computers, one hardware specification that every manufacturer could build against so software would run everywhere. two dozen companies signed up, from sony and philips to daewoo and yamaha, and nine million machines were sold in japan. the standard never crossed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Electronika BK 📖 1985 - 1993 600 roubles at a time when the average monthly wage was about 150, so the machine cost four months of work. what you got for it was a pdp-11 in a home case, and the only soviet home computer design mass produced with official approval and a line in the economic plan. it arrived fully documented and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1961-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Signetics 📖 1961 - 1993 around a billion 555 timers a year still come off production lines somewhere in the world, which is a strange afterlife for a company you have not been able to buy anything from since 1993. four men walked out of fairchild in august 1961 and incorporated signetics in mountain view on 12 september, t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Agat 📖 1984 - 1993 3,900 roubles, about twenty times a monthly wage, for a machine that was an apple II underneath and not reliably compatible with one on the surface. the soviet union built it from 1984 at half a dozen electromechanical plants and sold it almost exclusively into school computer rooms, because a class |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1988-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Supercomputer Systems, Inc. 📖 1988 - 1993 more than three hundred people in eau claire, wisconsin spent five years building a machine that no customer ever received. steve chen had designed the cray x-mp and the y-mp, and ibm put over $100 million behind him to do it again outside cray. the money stopped in january 1993 with the ss-1 close |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1993|
|_____|
|
Elektronika BK 📖 1985 - 1993 600 to 650 roubles at a time when the average soviet monthly wage was about 150. that was the price of the elektronika bk, and people bought it anyway. developed in 1983 at npo scientific center and in serial production from 1985, it was the only soviet home computer design that was both officially |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1967-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Norsk Data 📖 1967 - 1992 three engineers started building minicomputers in oslo in august 1967. by 1987 norsk data was the second most valuable company on the oslo exchange behind norsk hydro, with four and a half thousand employees and two and a half billion kroner of revenue, selling machines to cern by the rack. it did n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1972-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Prime Computer, Inc. 📖 1972 - 1992 334 on the fortune 500 in 1988, and four years later there was no computer company left. prime built minicomputers in natick that ran an operating system written mostly in fortran, and for fifteen years it sold them to engineering departments and universities that wanted a machine sitting between a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Kaypro 📖 1982 - 1992 a company that had been making digital voltmeters since 1952 decided in 1982 to sell a computer, packed it in an aluminum case you could carry by the handle, and gave away a full office software suite with every one. it worked immediately. by mid 1983 kaypro was moving over ten thousand machines a m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1957-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Control Data Corporation 📖 1957 - 1992 sixty thousand people worked here in 1981 and the machines had been the fastest in the world for most of the previous decade. seymour cray designed the 6600 with a team of about thirty and left in 1972 to build the same thing under his own name. what followed was a slow bleed out of the supercompute |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Microdigital Eletrônica 📖 1981 - 1992 two brothers in são paulo spent eleven years building british computers that could not legally be imported into brazil. the tk line followed sinclair machine by machine, roughly at first and then very closely, and by 1985 microdigital had three plants and around four hundred people turning them out. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
SAM Coupé 📖 1989 - 1992 swansea, december 1989. two engineers who had left sinclair research built the machine the zx spectrum was supposed to grow into, with a spectrum compatibility mode and a real floppy drive. it was an 8-bit computer arriving in a 16-bit year, and miles gordon technology went into receivership six mon |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
New England Digital 📖 1976 - 1992 cheap hardware killed it, not a competitor. new england digital sold the synclavier out of white river junction, vermont, for sums that ran past two hundred thousand dollars a system, and for about a decade that was a defensible price because nothing else could sample at sixteen bits and record to a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1987-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
AdLib 📖 1987 - 1992 a music professor at université laval built the first sound card the pc industry ever agreed on. from 1987 an adlib card was what a game box meant when it said sound support, until creative labs shipped a board that did everything adlib did plus digitized audio, for less money. ad lib inc answered t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
ZX Spectrum 📖 1982 - 1992 cambridge, 1982. clive sinclair's small team built a color home computer cheap enough that british parents would actually buy one, £125 for the 16K model with a rubber keyboard nobody has ever described kindly. over five million sold and more than 24,000 software products were written for it, most o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Maťo 📖 1989 - 1992 a state agricultural enterprise in závadka nad hronom put an eight bit computer into serial production in august 1989, because one of the people working there had designed one in his own time. ivan urda's prototype was called bapo, after the director of the works. the shipped machine was a modified |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1992|
|_____|
|
Alliant Computer Systems 📖 1982 - 1992 the attack of the killer micros was a phrase going round the supercomputing conferences at the turn of the 1990s, and alliant is one of the companies it was about. two men out of data general started it near boston in may 1982 to sell scientists a machine costing a fraction of a cray that ran their |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1970-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Floating Point Systems 📖 1970 - 1991 the sun ultra enterprise 10000, the big server of the dot com years, started life in a beaverton warehouse full of array processors. norm winningstad left tektronix in 1970 to sell math boxes that bolted onto somebody else's computer, and for fifteen years the ap-120b and the machines after it made |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1986-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
PrairieTek 📖 1986 - 1991 $18 million is what conner peripherals and alps electric paid in 1992 for the patents of a company that had only ever raised $14 million. prairietek built the first 2.5 inch hard drive in longmont, colorado, and had it inside sharp's laptops before anybody else had the part. it turned its first prof |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1957-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Trabant 📖 1957 - 1991 3.7 million of them came out of zwickau between 1957 and 1991, and for most of that run the car barely changed at all. a 601 ordered in the late seventies arrived around the end of the eighties, which is why a used trabant cost more than a new one: the used one existed. the wall opened in november 1 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1926-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Eastern Air Lines 📖 1926 - 1991 frank lorenzo's texas air corporation bought eastern in february 1986 and began moving pieces of it into other companies he controlled. the machinists walked out on 4 march 1989, the pilots and the cabin crew refused to cross, and the airline filed for chapter 11 five days later. a bankruptcy judge |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Rodime 📖 1979 - 1991 glenrothes in fife, 1983: a company almost nobody outside the trade can name shipped the first hard disk built to the size of a 3.5 inch floppy, which is the size the desktop machine then kept for the next twenty five years. rodime never turned that into money. manufacturing stopped in 1991 and the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1966-|
| 1991|
|_____|
|
Anadol 📖 1966 - 1991 fiberglass was the trick. nobody in turkey could justify the press tooling for a steel body in 1966, so otosan licensed a design from reliant in england and molded the shells instead, which is why an anadol never rusted and why everybody called it the plastic car. the first one came off the line in |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Power Glove 📖 1989 - 1990 the power glove was mattel's licensed nes controller that read how far your fingers were bent and where your hand was sitting in the room, out from october 1989 at seventy-five dollars. it worked badly enough that only two games ever supported it, and both of them played better with the normal pad. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Squarial 📖 1990 - 1990 a flat plate the size of a placemat, bolted to the wall where a dish would have gone. british satellite broadcasting built an entire advertising campaign around it before anyone had made one that worked, and the object shown to the press was wood and plastic with nothing inside. it went on sale in m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1952-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Nixdorf Computer AG 📖 1952 - 1990 heinz nixdorf started a lab in essen in 1952 with borrowed money and built it into the fourth largest computer company in europe on one idea, which was that a small machine belongs in the office doing the work instead of in a rented machine room somewhere else. by 1985 the company turned over four b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
VEB Robotron 📖 1969 - 1990 east germany's largest electronics combine, sixty eight thousand people in dresden and twenty other towns, building mainframes that were reimplementations of ibm machines and office computers running a processor that was an unlicensed copy of the zilog z80, faithful down to the undocumented instruct |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Multiflow Computer 📖 1984 - 1990 trace scheduling was a compiler technique before it was a company. josh fisher worked it out at yale in 1978, then took two of his people to connecticut in 1984 to build hardware that only that compiler could usefully feed. the trace machines shipped about 125 units in six years and the compiler was |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
VPL Research 📖 1984 - 1990 jaron lanier founded this in 1984 and spent six years building the first commercial virtual reality hardware anyone could actually buy, assuming they had the budget of a research lab. the dataglove read your hand, the eyephone put a screen in front of each eye at five or six frames a second, and rea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
MiniScribe 📖 1980 - 1990 twenty-six thousand bricks were weighed, packed into hard disk cartons and shipped to singapore so that a warehouse full of nothing would count as inventory on an audit. that is the detail everyone remembers about miniscribe, a colorado drive maker that had been a real company with real IBM contract |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Priam Corporation 📖 1978 - 1990 october 1989 is when the chapter 11 filing went in, and the year that followed was spent selling the company off in pieces rather than saving it. priam had been founded in san jose in 1978 by two men out of memorex to build fourteen-inch winchester drives for minicomputers, and it was good at that f |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Amstrad CPC 📖 1984 - 1990 alan sugar looked at the home computer market in 1984 and decided the problem was not the machine, it was the wiring. the CPC464 arrived that june with its tape deck built into the keyboard and its own monitor in the same carton, so a buyer carried home one box and plugged in one mains lead. about t |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
KC 85 📖 1984 - 1990 in 1985 two unrelated east german computers, from two different factories, were both renamed on the same grounds. the mühlhausen machine had shipped a year earlier as the hc 900, heimcomputer, and became the kc 85/2, kleincomputer, because the plan had reassigned it away from living rooms. about 45, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Pravetz 📖 1980 - 1990 a town of a few thousand people in the balkan foothills, an hour north of sofia, ended up building more personal computers than anywhere else in the eastern bloc. the machines were apple II clones at first and ibm pc clones later, developed by ivan marangozov at the bulgarian academy of sciences and |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1990|
|_____|
|
Supertek Computers 📖 1985 - 1990 mike fung left hewlett-packard in 1985 to build a cray you could plug into a wall socket. the supertek s-1 ran cray x-mp code and fit in a room with no chilled-water loop, at about a quarter of a million dollars. ten of them sold. cray research bought the company in 1990 and shipped the design under |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
NEC PC-8800 Series 📖 1981 - 1989 about 940,000 machines shipped and almost nobody outside japan has ever seen one. nec announced the pc-8801 on 22 september 1981 and put it on sale that december, and for most of the decade it was the computer japanese games got written on before anything else. ys and thexder both started here. nec' |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
North Star Computers 📖 1976 - 1989 the first name over the door was kentucky fried computer, a mail-order operation in a berkeley garage, and it lasted until the chicken company noticed. what came after mattered more. a $700 floppy disk system in 1977 was the first one hobbyists could actually afford, and the horizon that followed it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
ETA Systems 📖 1983 - 1989 control data could not sell enough cyber 205s to stay in the supercomputer business, so in august 1983 it pushed the whole effort out into a company of its own and told it to reach ten billion floating point operations per second by 1986. eta systems got there in the silicon. the eta10 put a process |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
Apollo Computer 📖 1980 - 1989 hewlett-packard paid $476 million in cash for a company that had been the largest engineering workstation vendor on earth thirty months earlier. apollo built better machines than sun and kept the operating system to itself, which was the normal way to run a computer company right up until the year i |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1985-|
| 1989|
|_____|
|
IQ 151 📖 1985 - 1989 a display terminal designed for the army at the czech technical university in 1982 turned into the computer czech schoolchildren learned to program on. zpa nový bor put it into production in 1985 around a tesla-made copy of the intel 8080, shipped it with the expansion hanging off the back in module |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Sharp X1 📖 1982 - 1988 two divisions of the same company built two incompatible home computers and sold them against each other for six years. sharp's electronics equipment division had the mz series. sharp's television division shipped the x1 in november 1982 anyway, in a cabinet you could order in red, with a monitor th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
MASSCOMP 📖 1981 - 1988 the smaller company bought the bigger one for 241 million dollars, mostly borrowed, and then took the bigger one's name along with its new jersey headquarters. what disappeared in the transaction was the buyer. massachusetts computer corporation had spent seven years building the first machine anybo |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Convergent Technologies 📖 1979 - 1988 on 8 august 1988 unisys took over a company most of its own customers had never heard of, and that was the arrangement working as designed. convergent technologies built office workstations in silicon valley and sold hardly any of them with its own name on the front. the same machine went out as a b |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1954-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
American Motors Corporation 📖 1954 - 1988 george mason merged nash-kelvinator and hudson on 1 may 1954 to build something large enough to survive beside general motors, then died five months later without finding out whether it had worked. it worked for about twenty years, on small cars the big three could not be bothered to make. renault t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
PMD 85 📖 1984 - 1988 roman kišš built it out of whatever was on the shelf at tesla piešťany, using telephone keys from another tesla plant for the keyboard, and it became the first personal computer designed in slovakia. the state took it seriously enough that an official told him his work was over and the matter was no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Spectravideo 📖 1981 - 1988 a stand at winter ces in las vegas in january 1983 held the sv-318, a home computer with a rubber keyboard and a small joystick built into the case. microsoft and ascii took the shape of that machine and turned it into msx, a standard that ran across japan and europe for a decade afterward. the comp |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1988|
|_____|
|
Celerity Computing 📖 1983 - 1988 the ncr/32 was a 32-bit chipset sold by a company best known for cash registers, and a san diego startup bet its whole architecture on it. celerity computing shipped a risc unix machine in november 1984, at a point when risc was still mostly a word in research papers. the money ran out partway throu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Oric 📖 1983 - 1987 a french company bought oric out of receivership in 1985 and buried it two years later. the oric-1 had gone on sale in january 1983 at £129, aimed directly at the zx spectrum, and sold roughly 210,000 units across britain and france in its first year, which was enough to top the french charts and no |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Vector Graphic 📖 1976 - 1987 a spare bedroom in westlake village, $6,000 of capital and an 8k memory board for the altair is the entire origin of vector graphic, incorporated on 23 august 1976. lore harp and carole ely had no background in electronics and took it to $36 million in annual sales and a public listing anyway, which |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Betamovie 📖 1983 - 1987 sony shipped the betamovie in may 1983 and it was the first camcorder anybody could buy, a camera and a recorder welded into one body at 2.5 kg instead of the two-piece rig it replaced. it could not play anything back. there was no screen and no playback head, so the tape had to be carried to a beta |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Dragon 32/64 📖 1982 - 1987 kenfig, near port talbot, is where the welsh development agency put its money in 1982, into a computer company owned by the toy firm that made corgi cars. the dragon 32 shipped that august at £199.50 with a motorola 6809 and a keyboard you could actually type on, and with graphics that lost to the z |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Sharp MZ 📖 1978 - 1987 the model number came off a bath buzzer. sharp had a registration code sitting unused for a bathroom product in 1978 and spent it on a 4-bit trainer kit called the mz-40k, which is where a nine-year computer line begins. the machines shipped with no programming language in rom, not out of philosophy |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 1987|
|_____|
|
Lisp Machines, Inc. 📖 1979 - 1987 the mit ai lab had one lisp machine design and two companies that wanted to sell it. richard greenblatt took the half that refused outside investors and tried to grow on customer orders, which worked until it did not. lmi sold around 200 lambdas and started a risc successor called the k-machine. it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1910-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Sperry Corporation 📖 1910 - 1986 burroughs, an adding machine company out of detroit, came for it twice and got it on the second attempt. the sperry board approved $4.8 billion on 27 may 1986, the largest deal the computer industry had done to that point, and the merger closed on 16 september under a new name, unisys, so that neith |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Apple Lisa 📖 1983 - 1986 apple announced the lisa in january 1983 at a price nobody outside fortune 500 could pay. it shipped with a gui and a mouse plus protected memory the mac would not get for another decade. the macintosh shipped most of those ideas a year later for a quarter of the price. the leftover stock got buried |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1919-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
RCA 📖 1919 - 1986 the united states navy did not want a british-owned company holding america's transatlantic wireless stations, so in october 1919 general electric incorporated a new one to take them over. that company founded nbc in 1926 and bought victor and its dog three years later. it won the fight over the ame |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Sinclair QL 📖 1984 - 1986 a hundred and fifty thousand quantum leaps were sold and one of them mattered more than all the rest. sinclair announced it on 12 january 1984 at £399, with a motorola 68008 and two microdrive tape loops where the disk drives should have been, promised delivery inside twenty eight days and shipped n |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1976-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Morrow Designs 📖 1976 - 1986 a high school dropout who went back to school at 28 and came out of berkeley building the cheapest serious business computers in america. the micro decision put a cp/m machine and a terminal on a desk for under two thousand dollars in 1982, software bundle included, which was less than half what the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
AT&T Sceptre 📖 1983 - 1986 at&t built a set-top box for american videotex and put it on sale in october 1983. it painted naplps pages onto a household television and could do nothing else, no independent computing of any kind. the list price was $900 against a build cost reported at around $1,200, so the hardware lost money o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Memotech MTX 📖 1983 - 1986 two hundred thousand computers for soviet schools was the order that would have saved memotech. moscow gave it to yamaha's msx machines instead in 1985, on delivery schedule. the witney company had made its money selling ram packs for the zx81 and then built its own micro, an extruded aluminum case |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Enterprise 128 📖 1983 - 1986 on 14 september 1983 a london company showed the press a home computer with two custom chips and a word processor in rom, then said it would ship in seven months. it shipped in february 1985, seventeen months late, into a market that had already finished deciding. the enterprise was better specified |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
Thomson MO5 📖 1984 - 1986 laurent fabius stood in front of the french press on 25 january 1985 and announced that the state would put more than 120,000 computers into 50,000 schools at a cost of 1.8 billion francs. most of them were thomson mo5s, a 6809 machine launched in june 1984 at 2,390 francs and picked because thomson |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
British Leyland 📖 1968 - 1986 on 17 january 1968 forty percent of the british car market went into a single company. british motor holdings and the leyland motor corporation merged into the fifth largest vehicle maker on earth. seven years later it was out of money. the government put in 246 million pounds in june 1975 for 95 pe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1986|
|_____|
|
HT-1080Z 📖 1983 - 1986 2364 machines is the entire production run that reached hungarian classrooms, and that number is the whole story of the ht-1080z. the hiradastechnika cooperative won the ministry of education's first school-computer competition with a licensed hong kong clone of a tandy trs-80, added a sound chip an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Mostek 📖 1969 - 1985 eighty five percent of the world's memory chips came out of carrollton, texas at the end of the 1970s, from a company founded in 1969 by engineers who had walked out of texas instruments. mostek decided that a 4k dram belonged in a sixteen pin package instead of a twenty two pin one, competitors cal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Trilogy Systems 📖 1980 - 1985 gene amdahl had already built the machine that beat ibm at its own architecture, so when he said he could put a processor on a single 2.5 inch square of silicon the money arrived without much argument. over $230 million of it. the prototype shorted out and glowed red in december 1983, the mainframe |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Tomy Tutor 📖 1982 - 1985 tomy promised that its documentation would let an eight-year-old use the machine without an adult in the room, and that promise is what killed it. the pyuta went on sale in japan in 1982 with a 16-bit texas instruments processor at a moment when everything else at its price ran 8-bit, and tomy sold |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1980-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Osborne Computer Corporation 📖 1980 - 1985 on 13 september 1983 a company that had gone from two employees to three thousand in about a year filed for chapter 11. adam osborne had built the first commercially successful portable computer, a twenty-four pound box with a five-inch screen and more bundled software than the hardware was worth, a |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Shugart Associates 📖 1973 - 1985 al shugart founded this company in 1973 and was gone from it by 1974, after a fight with his own board, which left his name on a factory he no longer ran for another eleven years. what that factory did in the meantime was decide the shape of storage. the SA400 minifloppy of 1976 made the 5.25 inch d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Acorn Electron 📖 1983 - 1985 one chip in ten came off the ferranti line working, and that single number is most of what happened to the electron. acorn put it on sale in august 1983 at 199 pounds as the cheap bbc micro. orders came in for something like 300,000 units before christmas and about 30,000 reached the shops. by the t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Commodore Plus/4 📖 1984 - 1985 commodore killed this one itself, and it did not take long. jack tramiel showed the 264 series at the january 1984 consumer electronics show and walked out of the company days later, leaving a marketing department holding a machine nobody could explain. the plus/4 shipped that june at 299 dollars wi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Galaksija 📖 1983 - 1985 the full schematic for a working z80 computer went into a special issue of a belgrade science magazine in december 1983, with no patent and no royalty on it, because voja antonić did not want either. the authors guessed a thousand readers might try the build. around eight thousand ordered kits. it h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1978-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Hitachi Basic Master 📖 1978 - 1985 198,000 yen in september 1978 bought the first personal computer sold in japan, a hitachi machine running hitachi's own version of the motorola 6800 with basic burned into rom and a socket for the family television. sharp and nec both arrived after it and both beat it. seven years and eight models l |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1968-|
| 1985|
|_____|
|
Denelcor 📖 1968 - 1985 six machines went out the door between 1981 and 1985, and that is the entire commercial history of the first parallel computer with independent instruction streams that anyone could order. david miller founded denelcor in denver in january 1968 and nasa asked it for a parallel supercomputer in 1973. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
NEC PC-6000 Series 📖 1981 - 1984 four separate teams inside one company were building four incompatible personal computers by 1983, and nec settled it with an org chart. the pc-6001 came out of the television division on 10 november 1981 at 89,800 yen and shipped about 150,000 units. it had better sound than any japanese home compu |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Otrona Advanced Systems 📖 1982 - 1984 the ibm pc went on sale a few months before otrona opened its doors in boulder, which settled the argument before the company had anything to sell. the attache came out in april 1982 at 3,995 dollars: twenty pounds, a monochrome screen and two floppy drives folded into a case you could actually carr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Camputers Lynx 📖 1982 - 1984 richard greenwood founded camputers in cambridge in february 1981 and built a home computer for people who wanted to compute. the lynx appeared at the personal computer world show in september 1982, reached shops the following march, and got as far as 128k and cp/m by early 1984, which was a serious |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Dragon Data 📖 1982 - 1984 june 1984: a receiver walked into a factory at kenfig in south wales that had been building home computers for less than two years. dragon data was set up by mettoy, the firm that made corgi die-cast cars, and refinanced by prudential's venture arm alongside the welsh development agency. it sold for |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Fujitsu FM-7 📖 1982 - 1984 on 8 november 1982 fujitsu put the cheap version of its own flagship on sale and watched it become the real product. the machine was developed under the name fm-8 jr, with the bubble memory holder and the serial port taken out to reach 126,000 yen, and it kept the part that mattered: two 6809 proces |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
TI-99/4A 📖 1981 - 1984 2.8 million machines went out of a factory in lubbock, texas, and texas instruments still left the home computer business at a loss so large that its own share price went up 25 percent on the announcement. the 99/4A was a genuinely advanced design, a 16-bit processor in a home machine years early, w |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Timex Sinclair 📖 1982 - 1984 in the first weeks of 1984 a watch company walked out of the computer business it had entered eighteen months earlier, and took the cheapest machine in america with it. the timex sinclair 1000 was a sinclair ZX81 with an american tuner and two kilobytes of memory, sold for ninety nine dollars and ni |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1984|
|_____|
|
Sord M5 📖 1982 - 1984 takara charged 10,000 yen more for exactly the same hardware, and the difference was the word printed on the lid. sord put the m5 on sale in november 1982 at 49,800 yen, and takara put the same machine into toy shops at 59,800 as the game personal computer m5, working on the theory that a parent who |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
Jupiter Ace 📖 1982 - 1983 richard altwasser and steven vickers had just finished designing the zx spectrum for clive sinclair when they left in 1982 to build their own machine. the jupiter ace went on sale on 22 september 1982 at 89.95 pounds, in a white case that looked like a spectrum, with forth in rom where every other h |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1983-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
Mattel Aquarius 📖 1983 - 1983 mattel's own programmers called it a system for the seventies, and they meant it unkindly. the aquarius was designed and built by radofin in hong kong and then badged by mattel electronics, which put it on american shelves in june 1983 at 160 dollars with four kilobytes of memory and a rubber chicle |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1982-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
Grundy NewBrain 📖 1982 - 1983 the bbc wrote the specification for its computer literacy project around the newbrain and then gave the contract to acorn, because newbury laboratories could not deliver on time and acorn could. the design had already passed through clive sinclair's radionics and a government holding board before gr |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1964-|
| 1983|
|_____|
|
IBM MT/ST 📖 1964 - 1983 every time somebody says word processor they are using a phrase ibm attached in 1964 to a selectric typewriter built into a desk, wired to a magnetic tape deck and a bank of relays. the mt/st had no screen and no idea what a page was, and its manuals taught the operator to listen to the sounds the m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1982|
|_____|
|
DeLorean Motor Company 📖 1975 - 1982 in february 1982 the dunmurry plant went into receivership, and by the end of may nobody was building cars in it. john delorean was arrested on a cocaine trafficking charge that october, hours after the british government said the factory would close, and the company filed for bankruptcy on 26 octob |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1973-|
| 1982|
|_____|
|
SCELBI 📖 1973 - 1982 milford, connecticut, 1973. nat wadsworth and bob findley put an intel 8008 across five circuit boards and advertised the result in the back pages of a ham radio magazine in march 1974, which made the scelbi-8h the first microcomputer kit a person could order through the post. fewer than 150 board s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1954-|
| 1981|
|_____|
|
Datasaab 📖 1954 - 1981 sweden built its own computer industry inside an aircraft company. it started in december 1954 when saab took a license to copy besk, the national vacuum tube machine, and it ended up making the navigation computer inside the viggen fighter and the terminal network the nordic banks ran on. the swedi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1979|
|_____|
|
IMSAI 8080 📖 1975 - 1979 a computer store chain killed the computer company that started it. william millard founded ims associates in san leandro in 1973, shipped the imsai 8080 on 16 december 1975 as a better-built altair, and sold somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 of them. then he moved the attention and the money into |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1975-|
| 1979|
|_____|
|
Processor Technology 📖 1975 - 1979 popular electronics wanted an intelligent terminal for its july 1976 cover and asked bob marsh and lee felsenstein to design one. they handed back a whole computer with a keyboard on the front, a video driver inside and walnut sides, and named it after the editor who commissioned it. about ten thous |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1969-|
| 1977|
|_____|
|
MITS 📖 1969 - 1977 albuquerque, new mexico, where a company that had been selling model rocket telemetry kits and losing a calculator price war put a metal box with switches on the cover of popular electronics in january 1975. ed roberts expected to sell a few hundred altairs and take the company out of debt. a thousa |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1945-|
| 1974|
|_____|
|
Busicom 📖 1945 - 1974 sixty thousand dollars is what intel handed back in may 1971 to own a chip it had designed for a japanese calculator company. the chip was the 4004 and the company was busicom, which had asked for twelve custom circuits for a printing calculator and was talked into the first commercial microprocesso |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1971-|
| 1973|
|_____|
|
Kenbak-1 📖 1971 - 1973 forty-four of these were sold, which makes the owners a smaller group than the staff of most companies that came afterward. john blankenbaker designed it in 1970 out of standard logic chips, before intel shipped the 4004, so there is no processor inside it at all, only a board wired to behave like o |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1852-|
| 1966|
|_____|
|
Studebaker 📖 1852 - 1966 south bend, indiana, where five brothers opened a blacksmith shop in february 1852 and built it into the largest maker of horse-drawn wagons in the world. the cars came in 1902 and the company spent the next fifty years as the strongest of the american independents, peaking at 268,226 vehicles in 19 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1920-|
| 1963|
|_____|
|
de Havilland 📖 1920 - 1963 geoffrey de havilland incorporated the company on 26 september 1920 and buried two sons who died testing its aircraft. the comet carried fare-paying passengers on 2 may 1952, a clear two years ahead of anything american, and by april 1954 two of them had broken up in flight and the fleet was grounde |