There are countless examples of failure in the annals of technological history. But how many have the special honor of having promised to change the world first? Here's seven of the best.
Bubble Memory
In the 1970s, Bubble Memory was the future. Thirty years later, it's not so much a has-been as a never-was. What went wrong?
Comprised of a film organized into "bubbles," each capable of storing a single bit of data, this form of memory was devised by Andrew Bobeck and developed in the 1960s at Bell Labs. Compared to tape and drums, it seemed a powerful alternative. Every aspect shone with ingenious engineering concepts, from the use of garnet as the substrate to its bizarre mode of operation, in which the bubbles are shunted around by magnetic fields, their data in hand. Non-volatile, solid-state and promising vast amounts of storage, it was not a technology to bet against.
Much of the industry rushed into the Bubble business, but commercialization proved troublesome. The areal density of spinning disks shot up even as they tumbled in price, dampening bubble's promise as mass storage. The memory's slow speed countered its other attributes, putting it at a disadvantage against semiconductor RAM and making quality control difficult. Its 1980s heyday amounted to a few arcade games and other niche applications.
Invisible Interfaces
Believe it or not, there was a time when people thought that
Window managers were but a stepping stone between terminals and, well, the future. Are we in the future yet? No.
We can blame it on the business, which likes selling what it already sells and throttling alternatives in the crib. Or we can blame it on the consumers, for having no greater desire than a progress bar for security updates. We can even blame it on the ever-hopeless state of human interface technology.
Whichever option you choose, you won't be telling your computer what to do anytime soon. Get clicking, citizen.
Space Stations (And the Shuttle)
An entire generation of kids grew up with the promise that theirs was the Space Age. They were lied to.
Space was merely the age-old tower game: two castles either side of a river trying to built a taller turret than the other. And as soon as there was a clear victor, the dream was done for.
After the moon landings, space stations were the next frontier, the stepping stone to moonbases, Mars and exploration of the planets.
Getting a can in orbit and keeping it there indefinitely, however, became the end of a withering vine, with America's Skylab beset with woes from the moment of its launch, and ending in farce when an
Australian town fined the U.S. $400 for littering after the station prematurely plunged from orbit.
Russia's Mir was more successful, but became an unsafe engineering nightmare whose decline became symbolic of its nation's.
When it finally burned up on re-entry, Taco Bell promised a free Taco to every American if its pacific target was struck by the chunks.
The International Space Station, our latest orbital megafolly, is good for a few science experiments and as a holiday home for the super-rich. The cost to planet Earth for this petri dish with a view?
$130 billion. So much for space stations.
As for the Shuttle, it's a twice-doomed deathtrap that costs half a billion dollars per launch and never lived up to its promise of cheap, regular space flight. I know it's pretty, but it's time to get real. Orion, the replacement, can't come soon enough.
Supersonic Flight
The Anglo-French Concorde remained the world's coolest jet from the day it entered service in 1976 to the day British Airways ditched the last one rather than sell it to Richard Branson. Turning the London-New York trip into a 2-hour commute, it could have heralded a revolution in international transportation.
But it didn't. Public complaints about the noise were relentlessly exploited by the project's enemies, and the oil crisis made fast flight less economical. Despite being one of the twentieth century's most amazing engineering feats, with a near-perfect service record and the obligatory communist copy, the world just wasn't ready.
Or, rather, BA determined that it made more money from first-class passengers on standard jets than those on the fancy ones, and canned it when tragedy provided a convenient excuse.
Pick your flavor of cynicism and savor it, because supersonic flight won't be back anytime soon.
The Paperless Office
Less a technology than an example of how we misunderstand technology's consequences, the paperless office is, at best, a form of philosophical porn. At worst, it's the residual joke of the personal computer revolution, which served only to inundate us with more paper than ever before.
Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Control-P Print.
Genetically Modified Food
Though a commercial success, the pubic perception of this technology is found somewhere past the U-bend of the PR toilet. It didn't have to be this way.
Part of it is the public's fault, for being scared of new things. We've been fiddling with nature since the dawn of time, and getting cold feet about it only after we've bred 6 billion mouths to feed is stupid and immoral. But a big part of it is also the pushers' fault, for being evil corporate filth.
The deal is easy to understand: GM crops are disease- and bug-resistant and promise efficient yields and value-added nutrients. They could save lives, feeding the masses in regions where crops frequently fail to bad weather, blight and war.
Watching the ethically-shriveled slime that sells it, however, makes it all too easy to say "No." They slither around the halls of power, spending millions on lobbyists and on their own addiction to corruption.
Meanwhile, the useless luddites arrayed against GM crops would rather risk lives than allow famine victims to eat unnatural food. Elsewhere, no-one with a full belly cares.
Artificial Intelligence
Super-smart computers, capable of human thought and interaction, have long been a science fiction standby. Scientists, however, remain confounded by the difficulties posed by engineering such a thing. We now talk of artificial consciousness and artificial emotion: tangential grasps at any conceivable target near this particular mismeasure of man.
In 1967, Marvin Minsky declared that the AI problem would be solved within a generation. Forty years later, and any gamer will tell you that AI still sucks.
It can bake a mean cake, though. Oh, and it can drive a Tahoe. Slowly.
