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Memory sticks, zip drives, cartrivation.

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For decades, tech companies have continued to think

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proprietary storage formats that only work

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with their own stuff are, for some reason, a good idea,

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even though they tend to fail after a few years. So let's look at three next big things

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that went the way of Betamax. First off, the memory stick from Sony,

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which how do they manage to trademark such a generic name?

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These bad boys first appeared back in 1998

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when standalone digital cameras were first starting to catch on and Sony digital cameras in particular

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were very popular. So the brasset Sony thought,

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hey, what if we start selling our own flash memory

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that people will have to buy to keep using our cameras?

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I mean, it worked great for the PlayStation. And that's exactly what they did.

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The memory stick wasn't vastly superior technologically

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to the more open compact flash or smart media cards

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that were also common at the time, but they quickly became popular due to how many people

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had Sony cameras, and they also worked in Sony's digital Walkman players,

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the PlayStation portable, and even their lineup of robot dogs.

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That helped them grab a good chunk of flash memory market share in the early 2000s,

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but it all changed once the now familiar SD card

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started gaining popularity. Because unlike memory stick, it was an open standard

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whose developers pushed hard to have it adopted in gadgets like other cameras and especially in smartphones.

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As those became more mainstream, people bought SD cards to expand their storage

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because cat photos, and the higher the volume

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of SD card sales, the cheaper they were driven, meaning that memory stick was eventually pushed aside

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and even Sony started selling cameras with SD support in 2010.

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Next up is iOmega's zip disk, which was quite different from the memory stick

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in that it served a purpose other than just lining someone's pockets.

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The thing looks like a bigger, chunkier floppy diskette,

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which might lead you to think that it was like a floppy

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that held more data, which actually is precisely what it was.

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Instead of a 1.44 megabyte disk that spun at 300 RPM,

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the original zip disk held 100 megabytes

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and spun at nearly 3000 RPM for faster data transfers.

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And we also got 250 and 750 megabyte variants later.

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The zip disk also came out at a pretty sensible time, 1994,

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when it was becoming very common for folks to work with files much larger than what a floppy could hold,

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but there wasn't a good alternative yet. This led to the zip disk enjoying a burst of popularity

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through the mid 1990s to the point where quite a few pre-built PCs actually came

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with internal zip drives, especially PowerMax,

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helping zip become a very popular format with graphic designers.

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But despite zip disks, undeniable utility,

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and support for several different interfaces, sales entered a terminal decline in 1999.

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This was when recordable and rewritable CDs

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were hitting the mainstream, and blank CDs and burners were much cheaper

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than the proprietary zip equipment that only one company made.

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Not to mention the notorious click of death that destroyed your data.

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Yeah, so they discontinued zip in 2003.

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Finally, here's something from way back that has a surprising parallel to modern DRM,

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Cartrevision. This was the original movie rental format,

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and having debuted in 1972, it actually predated both VHS and Betamax.

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Unfortunately, Cartrevision sucked, big time.

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For starters, you couldn't buy a separate VCR-like player for it and hook it up to your TV.

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You actually had to buy a combination TV

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with the player built in, which originally sold for $1350.

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That's equivalent to nearly $10,000 today.

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And yet, you didn't even get a particularly good rental or watching experience.

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Not only was the video quality notoriously bad due to space constraints on the cartridges,

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but if you wanted to rent a movie, you had to go to a store and order it from a catalog,

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then go home and wait for the title that you requested

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to arrive by mail. What kind of instant gratification is that?

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It's like a less convenient version of Netflix's original DVD delivery service.

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These rental cartridges also had an imperiating limitation.

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You couldn't rewind them. Similar to how modern digital rentals

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and forced viewing limits, this was a method to ensure that you could only watch

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a movie one time before you returned it to the store,

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where they had a special machine that could rewind the tape for the next sucker, excuse me.

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I mean, viewer. And to top it all off, the cartridges themselves were notoriously fragile.

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If you left them someplace that was a little too humid, they would disintegrate in a matter of months.

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So it's not all that surprising that cartridge vision

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was discontinued after only 13 months.

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Are there any other tech failures from yesteryear that you'd like us to explore?

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Let us know down in the comments and we may store your choices in a future episode.

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Get it? Cause this was all storage stuff.