memory sticks zip drives cartridges
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 did 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 brass at 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 disc 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 disc that spun at 300 RPM the original zip disc
held 100 megabytes and spun at nearly 3
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
power max helping zip become a very popular format with graphic designers
but despite zipdiscs undeniable utility
and support for several different interfaces sales entered a terminal
decline in 1999. this was when recordable and rewriteable
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
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using the link in the video description finally here's something from way back
that has a surprising parallel to modern drm
cartrivision this was the original movie rental
format and having debuted in 1972 it
actually predated both vhs and betamax
unfortunately cartrivision 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 thirteen hundred and fifty dollars that's
equivalent to nearly ten thousand dollars 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 infuriating limitation you
couldn't rewind them similar to how modern digital rentals enforce viewing
limits this was a method to ensure that you could only watch the 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 carter 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 because this was all storage stuff