WEBVTT

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memory sticks zip drives cartridges

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for decades tech companies have continued to think proprietary storage

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formats that only work 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

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next big things that went the way of betamax

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first off the memory stick from sony which

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how did they manage to trademark such a generic name

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these bad boys first appeared back in 1998 when standalone digital cameras

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were first starting to catch on and sony digital cameras in particular were very

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popular so the brass at sony thought hey

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what if we start selling our own flash memory that people will have to buy to

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keep using our cameras i mean it worked great for the playstation

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and that's exactly what they did the memory stick wasn't vastly superior

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technologically to the more open compact flash or smart media cards that were

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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 the

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playstation portable and even their lineup of robot dogs that helped them

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grab a good chunk of flash memory market share in the early 2000s but it all

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changed once the now familiar sd card started gaining popularity because

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unlike memory stick it was an open standard whose developers pushed hard to

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have it adopted in gadgets like other cameras and especially in smartphones as

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those became more mainstream people bought sd cards to expand their storage

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because cat photos and the higher the volume of

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sd card sales the cheaper they were driven meaning that memory stick was

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eventually pushed aside and even sony started selling cameras with sd support

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in 2010 next up is iomega's zip disc which was

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quite different from the memory stick in that it served a purpose other than just

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lining someone's pockets the thing looks like a bigger chunkier

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

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held more data which actually is precisely what it was

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instead of a 1.44 megabyte disc that spun at 300 RPM the original zip disc

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held 100 megabytes and spun at nearly 3

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3000 RPM for faster data transfers and

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we also got 250 and 750 megabyte

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variants later the zip disk also came out at a pretty sensible time 1994 when

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it was becoming very common for folks to work with files much larger than what a

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floppy could hold but there wasn't a good alternative yet this led to the zip

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disk enjoying a burst of popularity through the mid-1990s to the point where

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quite a few pre-built pcs actually came with internal zip drives especially

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power max helping zip become a very popular format with graphic designers

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but despite zipdiscs undeniable utility

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and support for several different interfaces sales entered a terminal

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decline in 1999. this was when recordable and rewriteable

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cds 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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but we've got another real throwback for you that's kind of the og netflix right

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after we thank zoho crm for sponsoring this video soho crm is a 360 degree

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using the link in the video description finally here's something from way back

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that has a surprising parallel to modern drm

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cartrivision this was the original movie rental

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format and having debuted in 1972 it

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actually predated both vhs and betamax

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unfortunately cartrivision sucked big

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time for starters you couldn't buy a separate vcr-like player for it and hook

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it up to your tv you actually had to buy a combination tv with the player built

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in which originally sold for thirteen hundred and fifty dollars that's

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equivalent to nearly ten thousand dollars today and yet you didn't even

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get a particularly good rental or watching experience not only was the

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video quality notoriously bad due to space constraints on the cartridges but

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

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catalog then go home and wait for the

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title that you requested to arrive by mail what kind of instant gratification

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is that it's like a less convenient version of netflix's original dvd

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delivery service these rental cartridges also had an infuriating limitation you

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couldn't rewind them similar to how modern digital rentals enforce viewing

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limits this was a method to ensure that you could only watch the movie one time

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before you returned it to the store where they had a special machine that

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could rewind the tape for the next sucker excuse me i mean viewer

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and to top it all off the cartridges themselves were notoriously fragile if

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you left them someplace that was a little too humid they would disintegrate

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in a matter of months so it's not all that surprising that carter vision was

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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

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episode get it because this was all storage stuff