How many of these did you use/own ?

[SingSing]

People from the sucker nation rejoice. Tell the world, how many of these did you use/own ?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2616&ncid=2616&e=27&u=/pcworld/20060526/tc_pcworld/125772

Er, I bought a zip drive, and currently on IE 6.0.

[ron spencer]

Ha...Ha...not one!!!

i remember them all.....they all sounded just too good at the time. those who bought into them were too stoned or raging on crack to know the difference.

[ron spencer]

I should add I use IE 6....no matter

[Beavis]

There was nothing wrong with Zip drives.... Sturdy plastic, 100 MB storage at a time when that was a lot compared to 1.44 meg floppies, etc. They really found widespread use- including as standard hardware for many businesses and university labs. Just because Iomega had a manufacturing problem with some doesn't mean Zip discs themselves were one of the "worst tech products" ever. Furthermore, CD-RWs and DVD-RW were hardly a replacement for the Zip discs as the article mentions if you wanted portability and convenience. The only thing that killed them off was (as the article correctly mentions) the flash drives.

[ROF]

1. AOL - Using it right now
2. Realplayer - Installed but never use it
3. SoftRAM - never used it
4. Windows ME - Better forgotten - Never used it personally. Fix'em alot though.
5. Sony BMG CD's - Own'em, Tested'em, got yelled at here for doing so.
6. Lion King CDs - Don't have them.
7. Microsoft Bob - I thought it was cool but maybe it was the alcohol.
8. IE - Still slow, still bug riddled, never use it.
9. Never used Pressplay or Musicnet.
10. dBase brings back memories both good and bad depending on which iteration we speak of.
11. Priceline - Sorry Captain Kirk, no sale.
12. Pointcast - Never used it.
13. I still own a working IBM PC Jr.
14. Never owned, purchased, or supported buying a Cow. They better left in the field.
15. Own 4 Zip Drives - rarely used today.
16. Comet Cursor is a curse. I regularly deal with issues from people having installed it.
17. Never owned a Mac Portable.
18. Never bought a 75GB Deskstar but I still own and use a 16.8GB Deskstar. Great drive.
19. oQo Model 1 - huh? Never heard of it.
20. Cue Cat - Never used it.
21. I don't see the need for a wearable DVD player.
22. Never owned a Pippin.
23. Never owned a free PC, but I have fixed quite a few.
24. Never understood scents from websites. What would video help smell like?
25. Never seen a 3D notebook.

[ROF]

Furthermore, CD-RWs and DVD-RW were hardly a replacement for the Zip discs as the article mentions if you wanted portability and convenience. The only thing that killed them off was (as the article correctly mentions) the flash drives.

I'm not going to dispute the usefulness of zip discs. They are great or were for the time they came out. I think price is what killed them. They are still pricey today.

[SingSing]

Not fair, your IBM jr make the list. But not my IBM convertible !

[ROF]

I owned a Texas Instruments version of the convertible. Sold it on eBay for $175 last year.

[Epicurus8a]

Widows Me.
What a mistake that was.

[mats.hogberg]

One - IE6 - But I was close on the Timex DataWatch. Luckily, I found it a bit too expensive!
IE6, I only use to check compatibility of my web apps - never "for real". I have no higher hopes for IE7 either - Firefox does all I want it to, and then some.

/Mats

[Bullworth]

I'm still in tears thinking about some of these products. That was definitely a different time when people thought some of these products were something the average consumer would actually want The one thing I thought the iSmell would be useful for would be to create a web site full of foul smells and send an email link to someone with it .

On the IBM 75 Deskstar I guess I got lucky. I bought one and during my endless upgrades installed it in my sisters' PC. Had it around for over 4 years and still works although I encourage her to run a health chech on it regularly

[lordsmurf]

This writer is an idiot.

1. AOL let people online, before there was even an Internet, in fact. Nothing bad about it for many years.
2. Real brought streaming mainstream. They pioneered it.
3.
4. Windows ME fixed the problems of 95-98, and gave a taste of the XP yet to come. It pushed the Win32 base OS about as far is it could go. XP is all based off the NT kernel.
5.
6.
7.
8. IE 6 fixed serious flaws from IE 5 and previous.
9.
10. dBase was fine. Not any worse than FoxPro or Access at the time. I hated them all.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15. Anybody who thinks Zip was a failure was clearly not using computers in the late 1990s. CD-RW was expensive and inconvenient (packet writing, anybody?) with horrid software. Zip was a big old floppy drive. Superdrive would be the failure here, just because it was unpopular, not because the tech was bad.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23. This also helped bring the Internet mainstream. People could now get a truly free computer, and pay only for dial-up net access ($25-35 a month, average at the time). There were no ads on these. The hardware was not the best, but free is free. And they did work as promised.
24.
25.

Some of this tech is so obscure. Quite a few of the honorable mentions are more prevalent tech that led to aggravation.

Another tech dork that is apparent unable to give credit where credit is due, especially when it comes to companies and products that made computers/Internet what it is today. Typical tech dork magazine writer mentality. It's a shame people like that are given print space to type their dribble. What a dumbass.

[SCDVD]

I suspect the guy who created this list is too young to remember the progression hardware and software made as the PC technology unfolded. Sure some of these products by today's standards are pretty clunky but a number of them were pretty slick at the time. For example, is a dial-up modem a "worst" product because we are so accustomed to DSL now? Sure it was slow by today's perspective and sure it dropped connections unpredictably. But at the time, dial-up was pretty slick. I think this guy is revealing his youth more than anything else.

[shelbyGT]

Or, you could just read it for the comical and reminiscent values it provides and not try and rip the writer a new one because you feel your opinions are more valid and/or they don't know what they are talking about.

[Conquest10]

2. RealNetworks RealPlayer - Back in the day, most streaming audio and video required Real Player. If you wanted to stream, there was no way to avoid it.

4. Microsoft Windows Millennium - My computer came with it preinstalled. I never noticed any problems with it. I liked it a lot better than 98. XP is a whole lot better but that's not to say that Me was awful.

5. Sony BMG Music CDs - Another thing that makes me thankful that I do not purchase music CDs anymore.

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 - Used to use it. Got sick and tired of the constant exploits and patches.

15. Iomega Zip Drive - When I first started college, these were "the" thing. All labs were Macs and Zip drives came standard. Plus, what other way could you haul around +30MB files around (this is before flash drives)?

16. Comet Systems Comet Cursor - Installed it when it first came out. Hey, I was in high school and it was the cool thing.

[zzyzzx]

Just these two, and I'm still using both.

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)
10. Ashton-Tate dBASE IV (1988)

[lordsmurf]

Or, you could just read it for the comical and reminiscent values it provides.

It does not provide any.

Being told something was a mistake by a twit with a typewriter is a far cry from telling stories about the old days of getting online.

- Stories about RealPlayer would involve broadcast.com and Mark Cuban. Watching Jovan on NetTalkLive on tv, and seeing the web simulcast, unheard of at that time.
- Stories about AOL would involve how chat has evolved from proprietary networks to AIM that works for anybody and can even now plug into something like Trillian.
- Stories about that person in your family who suddenly had interest in getting online because she got a free computer for the mere price of paying AOL or Earthlink for a 2-years subscription.

That's reminiscing. Of course, to do that, you had to actually be there. But somebody who was likely playing in the sandbox 10 years ago will instead write up stupid lists on why old tech was a mistake. Again, what a dumbass.

[Conquest10]

Being told something was a mistake by a twit with a typewriter is a far cry from telling stories about the old days of getting online.

A typewriter? Would he even know what that is?

[lordsmurf]

Being told something was a mistake by a twit with a typewriter is a far cry from telling stories about the old days of getting online.

A typewriter? Would he even know what that is?

Yeah, I probably should have said "Microsoft Word with spellchecker".

[shelbyGT]

I give up, of course I'm never right.

[otpw1]

I give up, of course I'm never right.

Say it like I do. I thought I was wrong once......

[Faustus]

There was an easy hardware hack to make the quecat into a normal barcode scanner. So we loved our quecats.

[SingSing]

AOL being the online service for people who don't know any better.

AOL let people online, before there was even an Internet, in fact. Nothing bad about it for many years.

There were Prodigy, AT&T worldnet, and earthlink. AOL get ahead by sending AOL coaster in magazine, and supermarket. Overprice and bad products finally caught up with them.

[BJ_M]

compuserve was king for many years really

[SingSing]

AOL being the online service for people who don't know any better.

AOL let people online, before there was even an Internet, in fact. Nothing bad about it for many years.

There were Prodigy, AT&T worldnet, and earthlink. AOL get ahead by sending AOL coaster in magazine, and supermarket. Overprice and bad products finally caught up with them.

compuserve was king for many years really

Netzero is currently the popular dial-up ISP. The service and price are good for what they charged. With the agressive deployment of cable and DSL, All of above are going to be history.

[SquirrelDip]

The title is wrong - "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time"

There are some bad products there but most are/were not when considering their time (as already pointed out).

[Supreme2k]

I still have a quecat, with the hack. I bought it for $3.00 and used it to database my DVD collection. (one of the) best $3 I've ever spent.