Memory sticks, zip drives, cartrivation.
For decades, tech companies have continued to think
proprietary storage formats that only work
with their own stuff are, for some reason, a good idea,
even though they tend to fail after a few years. So let's look at three next big things
that went the way of Betamax. First off, the memory stick from Sony,
which how do they manage to trademark such a generic name?
These bad boys first appeared back in 1998
when standalone digital cameras were first starting to catch on and Sony digital cameras in particular
were very popular. So the brasset Sony thought,
hey, what if we start selling our own flash memory
that people will have to buy to keep using our cameras?
I mean, it worked great for the PlayStation. And that's exactly what they did.
The memory stick wasn't vastly superior technologically
to the more open compact flash or smart media cards
that were also common at the time, but they quickly became popular due to how many people
had Sony cameras, and they also worked in Sony's digital Walkman players,
the PlayStation portable, and even their lineup of robot dogs.
That helped them grab a good chunk of flash memory market share in the early 2000s,
but it all changed once the now familiar SD card
started gaining popularity. Because unlike memory stick, it was an open standard
whose developers pushed hard to have it adopted in gadgets like other cameras and especially in smartphones.
As those became more mainstream, people bought SD cards to expand their storage
because cat photos, and the higher the volume
of SD card sales, the cheaper they were driven, meaning that memory stick was eventually pushed aside
and even Sony started selling cameras with SD support in 2010.
Next up is iOmega's zip disk, which was quite different from the memory stick
in that it served a purpose other than just lining someone's pockets.
The thing looks like a bigger, chunkier floppy diskette,
which might lead you to think that it was like a floppy
that held more data, which actually is precisely what it was.
Instead of a 1.44 megabyte disk that spun at 300 RPM,
the original zip disk held 100 megabytes
and spun at nearly 3000 RPM for faster data transfers.
And we also got 250 and 750 megabyte variants later.
The zip disk also came out at a pretty sensible time, 1994,
when it was becoming very common for folks to work with files much larger than what a floppy could hold,
but there wasn't a good alternative yet. This led to the zip disk enjoying a burst of popularity
through the mid 1990s to the point where quite a few pre-built PCs actually came
with internal zip drives, especially PowerMax,
helping zip become a very popular format with graphic designers.
But despite zip disks, undeniable utility,
and support for several different interfaces, sales entered a terminal decline in 1999.
This was when recordable and rewritable CDs
were hitting the mainstream, and blank CDs and burners were much cheaper
than the proprietary zip equipment that only one company made.
Not to mention the notorious click of death that destroyed your data.
Yeah, so they discontinued zip in 2003.
Finally, here's something from way back that has a surprising parallel to modern DRM,
Cartrevision. This was the original movie rental format,
and having debuted in 1972, it actually predated both VHS and Betamax.
Unfortunately, Cartrevision sucked, big time.
For starters, you couldn't buy a separate VCR-like player for it and hook it up to your TV.
You actually had to buy a combination TV
with the player built in, which originally sold for $1350.
That's equivalent to nearly $10,000 today.
And yet, you didn't even get a particularly good rental or watching experience.
Not only was the video quality notoriously bad due to space constraints on the cartridges,
but if you wanted to rent a movie, you had to go to a store and order it from a catalog,
then go home and wait for the title that you requested
to arrive by mail. What kind of instant gratification is that?
It's like a less convenient version of Netflix's original DVD delivery service.
These rental cartridges also had an imperiating limitation.
You couldn't rewind them. Similar to how modern digital rentals
and forced viewing limits, this was a method to ensure that you could only watch
a movie one time before you returned it to the store,
where they had a special machine that could rewind the tape for the next sucker, excuse me.
I mean, viewer. And to top it all off, the cartridges themselves were notoriously fragile.
If you left them someplace that was a little too humid, they would disintegrate in a matter of months.
So it's not all that surprising that cartridge vision
was discontinued after only 13 months.
Are there any other tech failures from yesteryear that you'd like us to explore?
Let us know down in the comments and we may store your choices in a future episode.
Get it? Cause this was all storage stuff.