Entertainment For Lively Minds
It Seemed Like A Good Idea...
Posted by David Wright on 18 July 2011 - 9:58am.
Just reading Chris Evan’s second book of memoirs,where he mentions
his time working for the country’s first satellite radio station, alongside the likes of Johnnie Waiker etc. As we all know. it was a failure and with hardly any listeners , the station soon closed.
It made me think, what other things in life have been a failure, The other one that springs to mind is Clive Sinclair’s C5 electric car.
- More from David Wright.
- Login or register to post comments
-
MiniDisc.
Although I understand it lived rather longer in professional audio than it did as a consumer product. I used to have a MiniDisc player in about 2001. I thought it was GENIUS. You could program in all the track names and everything! And when you taped off a CD, it recognised the track breaks!
I believe it may have held up to 10 songs, too. Just... witchcraft.
MiniDisc
was hardly a failure. It just got superseded by digital players with hard disks.
Agreed
Recording in real time rather than drag and drop copying was the deal breaker for me. Also, in the live events world, being able to drop a track into, say, Audacity, and edit the track and then export it, all in the space of a couple of minutes is a life saver. Minidisc took an eternity to achieve the same thing.
I loved my mini-disc
But it was obsoleted almost overnight by early MP3 players. I remember the first time a (you'll laught now) 32MByte MP3 player became affordable which was pretty much the size you needed to get a full ablum on at a decent rip rate 128K, it was game over. This was purely because I could keep an MP3 archive on my PC in work, decide 5 mins before I left in the evening that I fancied another album and move it onto the device. YOu had to play your albums/tracks onto a mini-disc. Offloaded it (and it was expensive) to brother in law who used it for years to record live stuff for various bands he was in.
My Minidisc
continued to be used after the advent of the MP3 player for recording my DJ sets. Using the long play function I could record a four hour set on one minidisc. I still have them and they hold some great memories.
Sony, in an effort to extend the life of the format
Made a laptop with an interchangeable Minidisc drive which didn't need to record in real time. Too little too late I'm afraid.
The Remington Fuzzaway
Where is it now? It just seemed to...fuzz away.
JML
do something very similar to it - you can get them in places like Debenhams.
Eldorado
Someone told the BBC that Neighbours was popular because the sun was always shining. They believed it and spent 10 million quid on a soap set in Spain.
What they didn't take on board was that Australians in the sunshine is fine - but the viewers hated Brits in the sunshine.
A very good TV critic pointed out a basic flaw - the four characters in the main, central family all had different accents.
Rabbit Telephones
Seemed to me to be a good idea in general (affordable mobile phones anyone?) that didn't take on in practice because they didn't work that well.
Worked off hotspots
Not a million miles away from the use of wifi these days in cafes etc...
Funny alphabet
I seem to remember at infants school in the late 60s we were taught to read using some funny alphabet that was different from the real one. As you can tell, my memory of it is a bit vague, but I think 'a' and 'e' were written as one letter. Or something. Then they decided it was a rubbish idea. (Perhaps it led to long term memory loss?) Then I went to another school and learnt how to use a slide rule. I've no idea what for. In fact, in retrospect, I suspect that much of my school education can be summed up with the phrase 'seemed like a good idea at the time'.
Was it
The International Phonetic Alphabet?
I seem to recall that my cousins were taught it at their school in the seventies...
Yep, could be.
I'd like to attempt this reply using that alphabet, but it looks way too difficult for a grown man to attempt.
Was it...
...The Initial Teaching Alphabet?
i think that's the one!
Oh the memories flooding back!
Did it work?
It looks very confusing to me.
As I recall
they abandoned the idea pretty sharpish, never to be resurrected.
Bitter? Me?
I still blame it for my poor spelling to this date!
Funny alphabet
I seem to remember at infants school in the late 60s we were taught to read using some funny alphabet that was different from the real one. As you can tell, my memory of it is a bit vague, but I think 'a' and 'e' were written as one letter. Or something. Then they decided it was a rubbish idea. (Perhaps it led to long term memory loss?) Then I went to another school and learnt how to use a slide rule. I've no idea what for. In fact, in retrospect, I suspect that much of my school education can be summed up with the phrase 'seemed like a good idea at the time'.
Slide Rules
lasted for around 300 years and were only superseded when pocket calculators became widely available in the mid 70s. So they can hardly be dismissed as a "good idea at the time"
Sure they can!
Just that "the time" was 1670 - 1970.
Cuisenaire rods
Coloured sticks of different lengths that represented different numbers. They were supposed to help with arithmetic at primary school, but I had already been to a school that taught us how to do that with numbers, and I found them just confusing.
I have just had a quick check of Wikipedia, and they still exist, so perhaps they were a good idea.
I still use them
in my classroom. Very good at helping visual learners get the whole tens and units thing!
The Femidom
Hands up anyone who used one of those.*
*This phrase will only really strike a chord with those who did, and who are now shuddering very slightly. You know who you are.
Once, as a lark...
Me and two female friends split a 3 pack, and tried them out with our partners.
Every time I put a new binbag in the kitchen bin, there's a Pavlovian reaction...
Bottle Cutter
I can't imagine this was a huge success :
I remember that
A KTel or Ronco thing whereby you could make glasses and vases out of old milk bottles
the millenium bug
... was a big disappointment for some folk.
The millenium bug...
Was the trigger for the computer and technology industries to grow up and behave like a proper engineering dicipline. It was the rubicon where foisting crappy software and operating systems that routinely failed for no good reason (remember when the Blue Screen Of Death was a daily occurance) was no longer accepted.
It was a pretty straightforward problem, easy to identify and fix. The real issue was for companies who had software running for years and the folks who had written it were long gone and the source code missing. The only option there was to put a bullet in the back of the head of those systems. A lot of old software was dumped, which was generally for the better.
My own 'disappointment' with it was spending a year of my life filling out questionaires and legal due dilligence documents for clients, banks and the dog in the street - it was just nuts. I recall even having to fill one out for the company landlord from their insurance company who were presumeably worried all the computers would explode in Michael Bay fashion.
Microsoft's
Clippy
Never a good idea
Not in this universe or the next. Dear God the PC nearly went out the window every time he popped his fricking irritating head up. Loved the way you had to do some really vicious surgery to ensure it never ever ever came back.
And breathe...
I used to live in a flat,
which sported one of these.
my brother had one of those
along with, Betamax, Laserdisc and every other also ran format or device. In fact, had he been employed as a product consultant then he could have made a fortune advising on competing formats. All the manufacturers would have needed to do was choose the format he didn't like.
Super Heavy, like most "supergroups",
probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14184486
jesus!!
i thought maurice gibb was dead!!