12 "Dead Technology" Advertisements

Actually BetaMax was pretty much alive in some TV production firms and TV stations. The only difference is that it evolved over time.

I agree with John Giotta, in fact newsroom video editors prefer Super Beta over Super VHS, because frankly it's more durable and reusable. At least that was the case 10 years ago.

Yep, I work in video production, and Beta was the professional standard well into this decade, when studios and production houses started migrating to either Digital Beta or DVCam/DVC Pro (same cartridge, slightly different format, some decks can play both)

Beta was so commonplace that we still keep a Beta deck maintained and plugged in to the edit suite, because if we receive footage from another production company, there is a reasonable chance that it will come on a Beta tape (though that's becoming less common). There is also a very slight chance that we will have to produce a Beta tape for someone else, although it's been almost 10 months since I had to do that.

But it's all a moot point now; DVCPro and DV Cam world won't get the run that Beta had. It's all moving towards hard drive capture. We are even talking about getting a student in to transfer our old tapes to a digital format. The only remaining hurdle is for the price of storage to decrease just a little bit more; which my company is hoping will happen before we need to run out and buy another couple terabytes.

I just hope that the window for technologies dying doesn't continue to shrink. It's incredibly wasteful.

If you take a one year old cellphone into an AT&T or Sprint store and they practically call everyone over to look at the antique. I mean, come on.

And I was one that got burned by the whole HD-DVD/BluRay debacle. Not by a lot, but that format went down in flames faster than I could have ever believed. Leaving everyone who bought into it holding the bag.

Neo-Geo games were sub-par? That's a ridiculous claim. Neo-Geo has a big library of well known AAA games. Fighting games are what the console is mostly known for, but also shoot 'em ups and other stuff like the still active Metal Slug series.

The main reason why Neo-Geo wasn't successful was the price of the console and the absolutely ridiculous prices of the game cartridges. This is because the home Neo-Geo console was identical to the arcade Neo-Geo cabinets and the games were also perfect arcade quality (with some home console specific changes). Back in the day full arcade quality games at home was simply unheard of (unlike now), but this made the games too expensive.

Awww man. That brings back a lot of memories! I LOVED my pager!

Thanks for the blast from the past!

Did Compuserve really stick you for long distance phone charges to use their service? AO-Hell, as bad as it did and still does suck, at least never did that.

I haven't used CompuServe now for over 10 years now. I had to cancel my account several times and I still have to check my bank account for fraudulent CompuServe charges. 10 years later! If you had a CompuServe account and no longer use it, make sure to check you bank accounts that you're still being charged.

Betamax as an end consumer product basically died out because the pornography industry chose to use VHS.

No, Gail, the long distance charges were from the phone company, separate from Compuserve's fees. Unless you were lucky enough to live in a city with a Compuserve hub!

Pagers weren't always able to receive numbers; the earliest one wouldn't do anything but go "beep" (or vibrate) when someone called them, so if your beeper went off you had to start calling everyone who had that number. When the new generation of them was able to receive numbers too, my (large) family devised an elaborate code system by which, using seven digits, you could let the beepee know who was calling, where you were, how important it was, and whether/how soon you needed them to call back. Some fun!

If you work in a hospital, pagers are not a dead technology at all. They're way more convenient and less intrusive to patients than cell phones or walkie-talkies.

Actually NIHIL @ 9, the porn industry was banned from using Betamax by SONY.

They had this pure ideal of the product and weouldn't tolerate the knocking of boots on the Beta.

And as for the MINI Disc player, yes I can sdee how it was superseded for playing music, but it is still faultless for recording. And the discs cost buttons, and are reusable.

As someone who lived through all of these, I beg to differ with the author. The Walkman was the iPod of its day. The Minidisk and Portable CD Player never were a hot thing. Polaroids rocked, CompuServe was just one of a number of online services that are now gone. The pager made millionaires. Betamax was just the first example of Sony thinking it could define the market. Neogeo never really had any market share. Projection televisions are still not a dead technology.

Polx, it's an urban legend that Sony lost the video format war because they banned porn on Betamax. Sony didn't want _their own_ duplication centers working for the porn industry but there were plenty of other companies who had no problems with producing porn videotapes for the Betamax format.

More recently Sony also prohibited daughter companies duplicating porn Blu-Ray discs (which isn't unique, other companies like Philips feel the same). No problem, the porn industry simply goes to a different company who has no qualms about working with the porn industry.

Sony lost the video format war because VHS was cheaper to license, had longer tape lengths, was based on simpler tech and therefore cheaper and there were a lot more companies producing VHS VCRs. Competition leads to lower prices leads to more products sold. Sony simply couldn't compete with its own expensive proprietary standard against one that was used by all other companies.

I have to agree with BearCreekMan. Compuserve took us two years to finally get rid of, though in the UK it was only a local call. I used to love it though.

I also remember my Dad bringing home our first VCR. A betamax. Walking down to the video store and having a much smaller choice of tapes to choose from. I remember watching The Golden Child and Coming to America on it one afternoon. Good times.

I'm fascinated by the design in a lot of these ads, with their Bold, roman headlines and white backgrounds and accompanying shots of the product. So many of them sucked but you did at least know what you were buying.

I loved my minidisc player! At the time I bought it, it was a good alternative to the then expensive and small capacity flash memory based players. You could fit heaps on those disks.

They have forgoten de CD-i (CD-interactive)

Actually pagers are still in high use. Many Technology support personnel still use them rather than cell phones because we rotate on-call coverage and just 'pass the pager'.

Beta would have lasted longer if they'd called it Master-Beta.