I don’t know what provoked me to start thinking about this sometime but it all started with me making a mental note of things that were going to be huge (particularly in the 1990’s) and then died a death. It started with a couple of things, and I sat down today and wrote a list. I also took the liberty of doing a google search for “whatever happened to” which has over 12 million matches.

Enough with the preamble
1. The first one that got me thinking was computer Voice Recognition

It sounds like a great idea to alleviate RSI and by telling the computer what you want to do as opposed to typing it or using a mouse seems much more userfriendly. Apple Computer developed a technology in the early 90’s as an extension to System 7 called plaintalk. It is now part of the system preferences of OSX and simply called Speech Recognition. It enables you to use a hotkey to talk into a microphone with certain key phrases and it will follow your instructions. I had mixed results when trying it, mainly due to the fact that it assumes you speak with an American accent. My impressions aren’t very good and it doesn’t like British English too much. IBM developed a program called ViaVoice which was supposed to be very good but expensive. I think the big reason why the whole thing never worked was it looks like you’re mad talking to yourself and doesn’t work well in an office environment. Just my 2 english pence!
Having said that you still get glimpses of it used in telephones for speed dials and I always think of the Odeon cinema hotline that asks you to say the name of the Odeon that you want to book tickets for.

2. Next up we have the paperless office!

Having worked for the UK health service for 3 years I can categorically say this is nowhere near to even being a possibility, in fact the opposite has happened thanks to email allowing people the ability to forward pdfs and other attachments eg. this article. The internet now has more information out there than ever before and expectations are high on how much of that information we have at our finger tips. Net result, my desk looks like a pig sty and i never get to the bottom of any of my piles. So much for fax software and handheld scanners for electronically storing any letter or other piece of paper received by non electronic means. I am yet to meet anyone who seriously uses fax software, you can’t buy handheld scanners, those paper port scanners never scan things in straight and if you decide to use OCR you can get some unexpected results sometimes.

3. Removable storage (Data, Music and Video) – what on earth happened with this! I originally had them all separate but they’re kind of related.

Let me list a few:
Floppy Disk replacements such as the SuperDisk (LS120) and Zip disk
Sony’s “SACD – Super Audio CD
Laserdisc
Mini Disc
Just to name a few! I’ll start with the floppy disk replacements because i was so close to yelling at my co-workers when he burnt two files to cd which totalled 1mb onto a CD-R when the computer was a wintel box and had a floppy drive. But i restrained myself and said nothing. My point is that since Apple released the iMac Rev A which was the first commercial computer not to have a floppy disk drive (and others have followed suit though in more limited numbers often having an interchangeable floppy & CD drive) people are more confident that a computer will have a CD drive than a floppy drive. It is ridiculous to waste 99.9% of a CD’s capacity, and there are now more variations than is needed. Iomega came close with the zip drive until they hit a snag with the click of death problem, and Imation tried to market the LS-120 but it was horribly slow. I tend to email/ftp files these days and tend to bank on being able to get an internet connection as everywhere there’s a computer there seems to be broadband internet! Occasionally i’ll burn a CD or for larger files i’ve got my Firewire/USB external drive that i should use for backup but don’t as I haven’t had the time to use any backup software (whoops!)

SACD – what the heck is that you are probably asking. Basically it was meant to be higher quality than a CD and instead of an album taking up 500-700mb it would be 4.7Gb – so a DVD. Thought up in 1999 by Sony & Phillips. I have never seen one in the shops and doubt I ever will – it was a complete disaster as it came out just before a program called napster appeared. There’s also a format rivalry with DVD-Audio and like all Sony Products it uses some copy protection which I wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole – oh, and i’d hazard a guess that i wouldn’t be able to notice any difference since i can’t tell the difference between a 192kbps mp3 and the original CD!

Laserdisc – this was originally patented in 1958 but didn’t appear till the 1970’s but you could still buy them when I was young. I don’t know anyone who owns any or even the player. The nearest I’ve got is a DVD that was made by being copied off a Laserdisc of Star Wars Episode IV with Chinese subtitles. Haven’t seen anything laserdisc related for about 20 years.

Another audio format the minidisc – you still see them around for recording purposes but record companies did try and sell albums on mini disc. It must’ve lasted about 2 years at most, and I haven’t seen them since. I like to record gigs from time to time but record on tape as that’s all i’ve got. I thought about minidisc but they’re expensive and it’s still a pain to transfer to mp3 because sony never made it easy to do so as they are incompatible with Magneto Optical drives and vice versa which use the same technology

4. My final one comes from one i saw on the google search above… Virtual Reality

William Gibson predicted it in his book Neuromancer in 1984 though the credit on wikipedia seems to go to Damien Broderick for his 1982 book The Judas Mandala. Pure and simple – what happened to it? It died a death somewhere in the mid-90s and hasn’t been heard of since