Over the years, there has been many peices of hardware that never took off, for whatever reasons, Computer chips, storage devices, memory systems, a type of bus or even a retro-computer system.
Mine would be the Alpha Processor and the old zip drives.
Power line networking is one I can think of. The technology sounded ideal, not having to pull ethernet cables through a house. Unfortunately the speed was never good, they were too expensive, and eventually WiFi took over. You can still get them, but they are overpriced.
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also, SPARC and Alpha. There’s a lot of Alpha to be found in AMD procs, but it’s so much tweaked and abused to fit in x86 that it isn’t funny anymore
ZIP drives were a disaster as they break easily and get polluted easily. I vote for JAZ drives
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/ is what I want with a
Linux driver.
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Kim (7/15/2009 12:26:42 PM Mountain)
Yet more evidence that Kim is secretly preparing himself to take over the world by stocking up on nukes and rocket launchers 
I actually wish 802.11a would have taken off and dominated the wireless world. When it came out, it offered 11g speeds at a time when 11b (11Mbps) was dominate. Because it operated on a less crowded band, there was substantially less interference.
Way back when, my uncle bought an 802.11a router and ran his home network off of it. While the range was poor (as it was with many very early 11a devices), there was virtually no interference. Also, while in range, the connection hardly varied in signal strength. This, as opposed to now as I type this, my 11g connection on my PC is alternating between weak and excellent without anything moving, being 10ft away from my router.
I know you can still get 11a devices, but the selection is slim and they are expensive. With 11n running over the 5GHz band now, I foresee 11a as making a comeback though. 
I need a lot of nurf ammo to do any damage. Kind of like dripping water.
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Kim (7/15/2009 12:52:08 PM Mountain)
Alpha mips and sparc was really good and fast processors. But the trust microsoft - intel killed them when the workstation era was at a crucial point. I still nowadays have an indigo quadra sitting in my working room. Anyway i vote for the zip drives and the steaming tapes. But anyone remember the polaroid palette?
microchip8 wrote:
> ZIP drives were a disaster as they break easily and get polluted
> easily. I vote for JAZ drives
Never tried ZIP drives but persisted far longer with JAZ than was sensible,
given the lousy reliability I encountered.
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Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
“I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
Graham P Davis adjusted his/her AFDB on Thursday 16 Jul 2009 09:13 to write:
> microchip8 wrote:
>
>> ZIP drives were a disaster as they break easily and get polluted
>> easily. I vote for JAZ drives
>
> Never tried ZIP drives but persisted far longer with JAZ than was
> sensible, given the lousy reliability I encountered.
>
Oh you are lucky Graham.
The old Click-Of-Death on zip drives was a PIA, I think I had to return 3 or
4 drives because of this, however I will praise the manu`s as they did a
quick turnaround and with no quibbles at all. IIRC there was an app that
could diagnose the COD and that was good enough evidence and a replacement
was sent directly.
Pity as at the time was a good piece of kit until CD-RW came the norm.
I still have a couple of Zip disks here ( for historical value ) but no
reader.
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Mark
Caveat emptor
Nullus in verba
Nil illegitimi carborundum
I’ll tell you a piece of hardware that I wish hadn’t taken off.
I grew up using an Amiga 500. It had a roughly 6.5 mhz processor in. It was, in a word, awesome. My parents have just bought a washing machine (yes, that kind of washing machine) with a 7 mhz processor in.
I wish they hadn’t started making domestic appliances that could outcompute my beloved A500.
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