Many years ago I coined the term technobridge for a college paper. Since then I’ve overused the term to refer to the gap between new technologies. Technobridges usually span a gap; I’ve lived through some that were epic failures.
Last week I received my first e-card in almost ten years. It was Rudolph and Santa dancing to a techno beat. What happened to e-cards is what happens to most bad technological inventions. E-cards were meant to take the place of printed greeting cards but they weren’t personal.
Receiving the card made me think of all the passé fads that have come via technology. Kind of like my technobridge theory, these are the short lived ideas that fueled technology’s evolution and helped provide us with better innovations.
Some of you who are in your late 20’s to mid thirties may remember the chrome rivet embedded above the camera on the back of cell phones. That shiny rivet was designed specifically as a selfie mirror. Nowadays phones have a front facing camera, eliminating the rivet.
Motorola made a device that allowed two people in the same house to text message. The blue gizmo consisted of a mini QWERTY keyboard and LCD screen. Users could connect with built in proprietary wireless. These, of course, have been replaced by text messaging which doesn’t limit users to being in the same physical location.
Kodak made a little photo viewer in the 90’s that allowed those with Kodak digital cameras to share pictures. I believe the idea was to purchase one camera and multiple little silver boxes with mini LCD screens. They didn’t last too long with the advent of high speed internet access and picture sharing websites.
I seem to be on a kick today about selfies, cameras and phones. But, for about a year Samsung made a camera designed specifically for selfies. Rather than place the LCD on the back of the camera, they placed a smaller one in front. To further frustrate users, the camera instantaneously uploaded the pictures to the internet. Some unhappy owners discovered all their snaps were automatically uploaded.
Years ago the company I worked for insisted I use an iOmega Zip drive which was a 100MB floppy disc. For its time they were wonderful tools for backing up large amounts of data; that is until they self destructed and destroyed the data. I replaced mine with a CD rewritable drive which held nearly five times as much data.
Along with the keys to my grandfather’s car, I was given a box of 8 track tapes. 8 tracks were only around for a decade or so, but were the rave in the 60’s and 70’s. Those big clunky tapes couldn’t be rewound so I was forced to listen to the next song. Luckily my next car had a standard cassette player with rewind.
Microsoft developed a line of interactive Barney toys that led to the creation of other interactive PC driven robots. For me and my daughter these toys proved extremely frustrating. After an hour of setup the dolls had to be placed in a specific location and might work as designed. Luckily Teddy Ruxpin and Barney both ended up being taken off the market and not replaced with other technology.
Thankfully developers saw the shortcomings in these products and pushed to make them better through replacement or attrition. On one hand technology doesn’t grow without mistakes. On the other I would probably have less grey hair if they never existed.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)