Whatever became of (fill in your own item here)?

10/27/2011 11:56 AM EDT

Let's not forget the 42V car.

10/27/2011 2:49 PM EDT

Most of the problem, sorry to say guys, is the hype created by the trade press and the regular press. That's a general problem with the news media. When the media hype up something, it sure would be nice to read a follow up, to see how reality panned out.

For example:

1. Web 2.0, as far as I can tell, is nothing more than what all those people with bowed heads are doing, over their smartphones. That's all it ever amounted to.

2. UWB was oversold by people who preferred hype over education. The problem with UWB is that it is only a short range solution (because the highest frequencies attenuate much faster than the lower ones), and another problem was that it became politicized. The OFDM community tried to force-fit OFDM into it, which makes little sense, UWB being naturally a spread spectrum technique and OFDM clearly not. Even at short range, interference did occur, because power levels had to be higher than promised for the bandwidth desired. People are now looking at 60 MHz instead. But honestly, it was the trade press' failing to follow up on that, as I think they should have done.

3. I recently read an interview with a Ford engineer, who explained that 42V cars are dead because hybrids took over that role. A little strange, but his thinking is that the 42V idea was to improve fuel economy. I thought it was about supporting the heavier electrical loads, but I guess it amounts to the same thing. So, hybrids, especially ones like the Volt, in fact have much higher voltages available than 42V, so no problem running peripherals like heat pumps.

I'm always looking for updates on things just like the 42V idea, and it seems like pulling teeth to get that info. Instead, we read the hype du jour. The hyoe du jouir? Why, "cloud computing," of course. Just a new buzzword for the web. A perfectly natural evolution of what the web has done from day 1.

10/27/2011 5:09 PM EDT

I love my Netbook and still think it's a great idea. It is much better for traveling than a full-sized laptop, but does practically everything the laptop does. It's much easier to open in cramped quarters like airplanes and easier to store. And I love the 12 hour battery.

So why aren't Netbooks more popular? I think it really gets down to this; There is only so much time and money available for portable electronics. People are enamored with their i-Phones and i-Pads so there is no time left for a Netbook. i-Phones and i-Pads are good for viewing content, but neither one is very good for generating it.

I think what it all boils down to is this, most people (with the exception of students) don't generate all that much content anyway so they just don't care. And that's why I believe Netbooks are not as popular as they should be.

10/28/2011 5:19 AM EDT

3d tv..

10/28/2011 7:49 AM EDT

Sun Micro systems had predicted that their Java based thin client machines will make the windows based PCs obsolete. It never happened and today's even smart phones are fatter ( in terms of the processing power , memory, OS etc) than those yesteryear's desktops

10/28/2011 9:59 AM EDT

I always loved machines that could recognize handwriting. One small computer after another flamed out trying to handle hand writing (Was it the Apple Newton, an early handheld? I don't remember now...) Palm came along with a really neat idea: force the user to use a particular character style. "Graffiti", as it was called, was an odd idea, but it was easy to learn, and it worked well. Well enough, until Palm changed hands and some moron decided that Graffiti I wasn't good. I bought a new Palm one day, and found out that I had to learn another Graffiti style. My comments were unprintable. What ever happened to Palm Pilots?

10/28/2011 2:26 PM EDT

As Bert22360 points out it is partly the media's fault. A lot of times companies are to blame, such as the over-hyping of Java-based client machines.

Another thing that happens is that the ideas being touted as the next big thing simply become common practice over time and lose their "next big thing" status. Sometimes, these technologies get changed along the way and perhaps may not be recognized in their altered form. I think Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence are perhaps in this category.

10/28/2011 3:25 PM EDT

A few "whatever happened to..." items:

- Magnetic bubble memories
- Everything via bluetooth (most people think that "a bluetooth" is a headset)
- IA64
- HD Radio
- VRML - Virtual Reality Modeling Language
- Virtual Reality in general...
- IRDA
- Several flat panel display systems (eg. Candescent Technologies)
- Ultrasonic speakers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound)
- Apple's HyperCard
- Voice recognition (but maybe that's changing with the new iPhone...)

10/28/2011 3:38 PM EDT

Whatever became of Micro$oft Internet Explorer... They went bust, right? Bill Gates came to the head office to unplug this unit from the company, right? Damned... Not yet...

Internet Explorer is such a piece of crap that our software engineer needs 80% of his time to make stuff functional for this browser alone. The 20% is the *real* development needed to implement CCS web pages for Safari, Firefox and a few other browsers.

Internet Exlorer, what an enormous piece of crap! I really wonder what those 70K software engineers are doing the whole day. Unbelievable...

10/28/2011 6:20 PM EDT

Bob Pease would undoubtedly have added fuzzy logic to the list. I'd add silicon-on-sapphire, gallium arsenide logic, push tech on the Web, JIT (Just-In-Time) inventorying... It's been a great 40 years in this field!

10/28/2011 7:53 PM EDT

...synchronized sweep.

Isn't triggered sweep wonderful?

10/29/2011 5:05 PM EDT

Whatever happened to:

Software compatibility?
Operating systems no longer need to support legacy software; if software no longer runs after an update the people do without it - no matter how useful or productive it was.

User loyalty?
If you change your office software interface so much that most people have to literally re-learn it, they might work out it would be quicker to learn to use a Mac from scratch.

IBM's CUA guidelines?
No-one knows or cares e.g. how many items should be on a menu, or why, or what color things should be?

Yellow Post Office vans?
Years of painstaking research having shown that yellow was by far the safest colour for their vans, they painted them all silver to promote the privatisation deal. And never went back to yellow.

Non-drip kettles?
Don't get me started on this one....

10/29/2011 10:23 PM EDT

"The Next Big Thing" is not only a media product, but it mostly comes from those CEO and other management types as they desperately work to drive share prices up. They don't get a bonus for announcing that there is going to be less of a dividend because of an increased emphasis on developing a better quality product. The bonus comes from announcing that the product about to enter the market is the next big thing. That is why we see sales predictions that come close to the GNP for some product line. Sometimes, to assure ones bonus, one must fabricate good news and believe in it. Could there possibly be any other explanation?

10/31/2011 3:00 AM EDT

The commercial flights to moon! promised some 30 years back and having a few thousand people who already paid for them in advance

10/31/2011 6:45 AM EDT

And while you're at it-

DNA computing, dunno what that was supposed to mean in the first place.

Artifical heart, doubt if anyone still works on this rather than re-use from cadavers.

The big thing- Virtual reality. I vividly remember those geeky looking goggles in those research reports. Only now we see a tiny bit of that in Kinect.

11/1/2011 12:54 AM EDT

- Fluorescent multilayer discs,
- Holographic storage,
- Racetrack memory (indeed, pretty much every "universal memory")
- Reconfigurable computing ("hypercomputers")
- Real-time raytracing (like Maglev trains and fusion reactors, it seems like real-time raytracing is the future, and always will be)

11/1/2011 9:26 AM EDT

I grew up being told my car would fly and 30 hour work weeks would be the norm. My car still rolls on wheels and 50+ hour work weeks are the norm at least in this field.

11/1/2011 11:49 AM EDT

Another angle would be the hyped "next big things" that didn't really go away, but just morphed and the buzz word went away.

Remember "Office Automation"? That one was big in the late 70's and early 80's. I don't come in to work everyday and sit at my office automation device.

"Desktop Publishing." Remember PageMaker? How about Ventura Publisher? Pretty much all the functionality lives now in MS Office and Open Office, but it's not thought of as anything more than just formatting a document.

11/2/2011 9:15 AM EDT

Ah... what happened to Pascal? It had been designed as a teaching language; plenty of compilers existed for it, and to my mind, it was a very nice language indeed. It did whatever you might want, and it had a pleasant syntax. It had built-in set manipulation and overall, I enjoyed both writing some fairly large applications in it, and teaching it. Later on, when I was writing Ada, it reminded me of Pascal, but was much less fun.

11/2/2011 9:46 AM EDT

Multibus II seems to have died. Does anyone know of any machines that are still produced with that? I know it morphed into PCI, but there are many differences. At one time in the 80's that was going to replace VME. We still see VME.

11/2/2011 11:24 AM EDT

I think PASCAL is still my favorite language. It was quite easy to learn and use. I wrote my first paid contract software application in PASCAL.

The job was for a small accounting company replacing an ancient system that was more not much more than a customized calculator. In the old system, customer records were individually stored on tape cassettes a little smaller than the size of a VHS tape.

11/4/2011 4:45 PM EDT

I heard that Palm lost a lawsuit over Graffiti and had to change it. People no longer trusted Palm and it went away.

As for voice recognition and cloud computing: voice recognition in cell phones (including Siri) uses cloud computing. The processors in the phone, no matter how fast they are getting now days, just aren't fast enough, nor do they have enough data to be able to match the servers and databases in the cloud. There are a lot of such services on phones that use cloud services without you knowing it. (Just try using Google Maps as your GPS when you get out of cell-phone connection range!)

As network speeds get faster and faster, this cloud computing will be more and more seemless (until you reach your monthly data cap!) So I predict we'll see more cloud computing in the future, or, that is, we'll use more of it without even knowing it.

11/16/2011 10:00 AM EST

Whatever became of cheap solar cells?