The computer industry has grown immensely within the past twenty years. The home comptuer has grown from a room full of vacuum tubes to a small powerful consumer device that is almost ubiquitous in today’s society. Even a modern cell phone has more processing power than the Apollo Moon Lander!
There have been many, many products that have greatly propelled the industry forward, and a few serious blunders along the way. Here is our list of some of the worst technologies that either left us scratching our heads, threw the industry into a backwards spin, or just plain sucked. We now present the top 11 Worst PC Technologies.
11. VKB Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard
This gadget looks amazingly cool, and is an extreme example of science-fiction brought into reality. This little gadget projects a keyboard of light on any flat surface, which can be typed on just like any normal keyboard. Unfortunately, the technology just doesn’t work, and keyboard entry is extremely slow and buggy. During setup, many users receive an error message stating that “The device does not offer any usable services”, so most people could not use the device at all.
10. IBM Microchannel bus (MCA bus)
The Micro-Channel architecture was presented by IBM as an alternative to the standard ISA bus in 1987, and slowly spread into IBM’s entire computer line. At the time, IBM was still a major player as a personal computer manufacturer.
The MCA architecture offered several advantages over the slow ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus. ISA’s bus speed was 8MHz, and Micro-channel initially offered a whopping 12MHz bus! There were several other behind-the-scenes technological differences, but this was the major speed advantage. Unfortunately, peripherals that used the MCA bus were not only hard to find, but cost much more than its ISA counterpart.
Micro Channel was an attempt to address, once and for all, the problems that had come to plagued ISA (also known as the PC bus).
The principal design problems of ISA were
- A slow bus speed (8MHz)
- A limited number of interrupts, fixed in hardware.
- A limited number of I/O device addresses, also fixed in hardware
- A lack of bus-master support.
- Hardwired and complex configuration with no conflict resolution.
- Poor grounding and power distribution.
- Undocumented Bus Interface standards that varied between systems and manufacturers
The industry agreed that there needed to be an evolution to the slow ISA bus, and MCA was eventually taken down by the PCI bus, which offered a 32-bit path, 33Mhz, bus-master functionality, and overwhelming industry support.
9. Vesa Local Bus
The VESA Local Bus (usually abbreviated to VL-Bus or VLB) was introduced in late 486 computers. VESA Local Bus worked alongside the ISA bus; acting as a high-speed conduit for memory-mapped I/O and DMA, while the ISA bus handled interrupts.
A VLB slot itself was an extension of an existing ISA slot. Indeed, both VLB and ISA cards could be plugged into a VLB slot (although not at the same time.) The extended portion was usually coloured a distinctive brown. This made VLB cards quite long, reminiscent of the expansion cards from the old XT days. The addition resembled a PCI slot.
The VESA Local Bus was designed as a stopgap solution to the problem of the ISA bus’s limited bandwidth. VLB had several flaws that served to limit its useful life substantially:
- 80486 dependence. The VESA Local Bus relied heavily on the 80486’s memory bus design. When the Pentium processor started to gain mass acceptance in 1995, there were major differences in its bus design, and the VESA Local Bus was not easily adaptable. This also made moving the bus to non-x86 architectures nearly impossible. Few Pentium motherboards with VLB slots were ever made.
- Limited number of slots available. Most PCs that used VESA Local Bus had only one or two slots available, as opposed to 5 or 6 ISA slots. This was because, as a direct branch of the 80486 memory bus, the VESA Local Bus did not have the electrical ability to drive more than 1 or 2 (or 3 at the most) cards at a time.
- Reliability problems. The same electrical problems that limited the VESA Local Bus to 2 or 3 slots also limited its reliability. Glitches between cards were common, and when important devices such as hard disk controllers were attached to the bus, there was the all-too-common possibility of massive data corruption.
- Installation woes. The length of the slot and number of pins made VLB cards notoriously difficult to install and remove. The sheer mechanical effort required was stressful to both the card and the motherboard, and breakages were not uncommon. This was compounded by the extended length of the card logic board; often there was not enough room in the PC case to angle the card into the slot, requiring it to be pushed with great force straight down into the slot.
Despite these problems, the VESA Local Bus was very commonplace on 486 motherboards. Probably a majority of 486-based systems had a VESA Local Bus video card, although early 486 systems never had VLB slots, as VLB debuted years after the introduction of the 486 processor.
Like MCA, VESA Local Bus was ousted for the PCI architecture implemented in Intel’s Triton chipset (introduced with the first Pentium processor).
8. Iomega Zip Drive
Iomega sold millions of this super-floppy, but many of them ended up having catostrophic problems. Some of the drives had a head alignment problem which caused the heads to clip the edge of the disk’s media, crunching and permanently destroying the disk.
Frustrated customers filed a class action lawsuit against Iomega in the late 90s. Iomega settled this dispute some years later by offering rebates on other Iomega products, but by this time consumers were using other storage devices such as writable CDs.
The technology was similar to that used by the floppy drive, but packed many more bits in the same amound of space. Zip discs delivered a whopping 100MB of space (which at the time of 500MB drives was very appealing). Unfortunately the discs were rather expensive, compared to floppies and cost over $10 each. Iomega even marketed a “Giga-pack” of 10 Zip disks, which cost over $100.
Although some of the drives were SCSI, most Zip drives used the PC’s parallel port, which delivered around 50 KB a second. While technically faster than a floppy drive, it would take over 30 minutes to fill up a disk. The processor usage was unusually high for a drive write, so the PCs at the time was practically unusable while data was being written.
7. nVidia NV1 (Diamond Edge 3d)
When the Diamond Edge 3d debuted in 1996, it appeared to be one of the most innovative products on the planet. It incorporated a new powerful 3d chip from a newcomer nobody had ever heard about (nVidia). This card not only had 3d technology superior to 3dfx at the time, but also functioned as a soundcard, MIDI synthesizer, and gamepad contoller all at once (at the time each of these functions were handled on a seperate card). The card would even use standard Sega Saturn controllers direclty on the card, and many reviewers dubbed this a “console on a card”.
The boards are PCI-based and sport a digital gameport for precise joystick control, as well as two video gameports that allow specialized, multi-player versions of Sega Saturn titles, such as the arcade hit Virtua Fighter Remix, to be played on Windows 95 PCs.
With Diamond Edge 3D accelerators, game developers could support resolutions as high as 1024×768 (The Voodoo2 could only do this in SLI mode) with 65,000 colors while still achieving fast, realistic action.The Diamond Edge 3D delivered fast 2D Windows acceleration at resolutions as high as 1280×1024, color depths to 1 billion and refresh rates of up to 120Hz.
The 3D functions of the Diamond Edge 3D were designed specifically for the consumer multimedia market where the primary application was interactive entertainment. Traditionally, 3D graphics were created by drawing large numbers of successive polygons using the CPU, which resulted in a tradeoff between detailed graphics and speed of interactivity. With the Diamond Edge 3D, the hardware engine accelerated polygon rendering of real-time, texture-mapped 3D images at the highest possible frame rates without unduly slowing the CPU. In addition, the Diamond Edge 3D could create realistic 3D graphics by using nine control points to create a curved surface, called quadratic texture mapping (QTM).
Unfortunately, there were several things that went wrong. The card was designed to work with Windows 95, which had just come on the market and was still struggling with industry acceptance. It was one of the first PCI-based sound cards, and the only all-in-one product. At this time, Direct3d had just been introduced, and the card did not work with the new industry standard. There were only a few games that worked natively with the card, and they were all ports of Sega Saturn titles (Virtua Fighter 3d and Panzer Dragoon).
The NV1 was just too ahead of its time, and quickly became a useless piece of $300 silicon.
6. IBM OS/2
OS/2 was originally a joint venture between Microsoft and IBM, but the project fell through. Microsoft took its technology and developed Windows NT, and IBM developed OS/2. At the time, DOS (and Windows 3.1) was the major operating system, and OS/2 was superior in nearly every way (except industry acceptance).
This great idea was not marketed properly, and there was hardly any native software available for the new operating system. While it had good support for DOS applications, it did not work with most Windows software, which was winning most of the desktop market despite its stability issues.
OS/2 had a loyal group of folowers, and the operating system went through 3 revisions, with OS/2 Warp (version 4) competing directly with Windows 95. OS/2 was technically superior to Windows 95 in that it did not rely on DOS, and had more technology similar with Windows 2000. There just wasn’t enough support for OS/2, and it was obliterated by Windows 95 and 98 in the latter half of the 1990s.
5. NeXT Computer
4. 3dfx Voodoo 3
The original Voodoo graphics board (and its subsequent Voodoo 2) put 3dfx on the map as the pioneers of the PC graphics industry we know today. The original products were extremely innovative, priced well, and revitalized the PC industry as a serious gaming platform. 3dfx had a few stumbles with some of its followup products (the Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo Rush), but competitors started to catch up and delivered products that addressed the shortcomings of 3dfx’s offerings.
3dfx executed a major strategy change just prior to the launch of Voodoo3 by purchasing STB Technologies, which was one of the larger graphics card manufacturers at the time; the intent was for 3dfx to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling its own graphics cards, rather than functioning only as an OEM supplier. This alienated 3dfx’s OEM customers, all of whom chose to switch, and source their 3D chips from other manufacturers, rather than do business with a company who was their direct competitor at retail. With the purchase of STB 3dfx created a line of Velocity boards (a STB brand) that used crippled Voodoo3 chips, as a product to target the low-end market. The chip came with only a single functional TMU, making it similar to a Voodoo Banshee.
The Voodoo 3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx. The Voodoo 3 chip was basically reused in parallel to make more powerful cards, so the Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 cards were really just overclocked Voodoo 3s with multiple chips running in parallel.
This strategy change was one of the main contributors to 3dfx’s downfall; the company did not sell any Voodoo 4 or 5 chips to third party manufacturers. The company was also presumably distracted by the need to focus both on the retail market as well as the OEM market, selling cards to computer manufacturers. The latter was hard-won business, but provided a steady income to fund subsequent development. A significant requirement of the OEM business was the ability to consistently produce new products on the six month product refresh cycle the computer manufacturers required; 3dfx did not have the methodology nor the mindset to focus on this business model. In the end, 3dfx opted to focus on the retail business using its own manufactured and branded products.
The Voodoo 3 was heavily hyped as the graphics card that would make 3dfx the undisputed leader but the actual product was below expectations. Though it was still the fastest by a small margin, the Voodoo 3 lacked 32-bit color and large texture support, features that fledging rival NVIDIA included in the competing Riva TNT2. While at the time, few games supported large textures and 32-bit color, and those that did generally were too demanding to be run at playable framerates, the features “32-bit color support” and “2048×2048 textures” were much more impressive on paper than 16-bit color and 256×256 texture support. The Voodoo3 sold relatively well, but was disappointing compared to the first two models and 3dfx gave up the market leadership to NVIDIA. Ironically, 3dfx’s actions in the STB buyout had turned a lot of its former board partners into NVIDIA-exclusive suppliers (ATI did not start outsourcing its products until 2002), giving NVIDIA a major advantage in the marketplace.
As 3dfx attempted to counter the TNT2 threat, they were caught off guard by NVIDIA’s GeForce 256, which took the performance crown by a wide margin, making it superior to the Voodoo 3 in all respects. 3dfx missed a product cycle as they attempted to match the GeForce.
3. Bigfoor Killer Network Interface Card
The Bigfoot Killer NIC is another example of an innovative product, but the sad fact is that it just doesn’t work for its intended purpose.
The card has more processing power than any other network card, and even runs a dedicated Linux kernel (complete with its own bash prompt used for configuration). This dedicated network coproecessor (in theory) takes on all network tasks, freeing up your main processor for other tasks. This card is marketing heavily to PC gamers, promising higher framerates and lower lag.
While this sounds great on paper, the truth is this expensive card just doesn’t work. For onling gaming, your speed is mostly limited by the speed of your Internet connection (and all the routing in-between), so there is very little the network card can do. This card is rather expensive, and offers virtually no benefit.
2. Waffer Aircon PAC 400
Waffer’s PC Aircon is one of the most useless computer cooling products ever invented. The Waffer PC AirCon is essentially a small air conditioner, but instead of using a compressor to change the phase of a coolant, the unit uses Peltier technology to introduce cool air into your PCs chassis.
Not only did the unit suck up hundreds of watts of power (virtually killing an average power supply), but it only marginally cooled the air, and had absolutely no impact on a case’s internal temperature. In addition to its utter ineffectiveness, the unit also took up 3 5.25″ drive bays, and was extremely loud.
1. IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive
The IBM Deskstar 75GXP, and several other models made around the same time, became infamous for their reportedly high failure rates. This led to the drives being colloquially referred to as “Deathstars”. The sumptoms of this sudden death is a regular “scratch-click, scrath-click” noise coming from the hard disk. Once it starts the drive will frequently not appear in the BIOS, and the fault is known as the “click of death”.
The cause of the failure are usually the Giant Magneto Resistive read/write heads used by the drive, and the way they interact with the data stored on the hard disk. Internal problems within the disk cause contamination, which in turn produces the infamouse “click of death”. A further problem noticed with the IBM Deskstar line is the corruption of data contained on one of the integrated circuits on the controller board.
Despite failures being reported within the manufacturer warranty period (3 years), a class-action lawsuit is underway to claim refunds from Hitachi for all affected drives. The decision of this lawsuit will provide the best indication as to whether there is actually a manufacturer fault with these hard drive models.
IBM eventually recognized some of the fundamental problems with its drives, namely possible data corruption due to a problem with SMART background operations, and application of wear levelling to avoid the heads hovering too long over the same area. IBM released a microcode update to address the issues, but too little too late.
The drives were also known for commonly head crashing, possibly due to the combination of two relatively new technologies (at the time): GMR (Giant magnetroresistance) heads and glass platters. GMR is a quantum mechanical effect observed in thin film structures composed of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers.
IBM subsequently sold its hard drive division to Hitachi in 2002.
Research for some of the items in this article was obtained from Wikipedia and PC World (http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125772-page,1/article.html)