Obsolete Daily

More than 20 companies, including IBM, Kodak and General Electric, turned down the invention behind the office photocopier. The Xerox 914 was unveiled on September 16, 1959, by Haloid Xerox of Rochester, New York. It was the first successful copier to use plain paper, making about seven copies a minute. It weighed about 650 pounds and cost $27,500, so most offices rented it and paid per copy. The process came from Chester Carlson, a New York patent attorney who found copying documents by hand tedious. He and physicist Otto Kornei made the first copy using his process in 1938 in a rented room above a bar in Queens, but company after company turned him down. Haloid's president, Joseph C. Wilson, bet the company on it, spending $12.5 million, more than Haloid earned from 1950 through 1959. Predictions were for about 5,000 machines in three years, and 10,000 had shipped by the end of 1962.

TV remotes got the nickname "clicker" from tiny hammers hitting metal rods. The Zenith Space Command went on sale in the fall of 1956. It had four buttons and no batteries. Each button struck an aluminum rod that rang at a pitch too high for people to hear. TV sets with it cost from $259.95 to $550, about 30 percent more than without it. Zenith's founder, Eugene F. McDonald Jr., hated commercials and wanted viewers to be able to mute them without getting up. In 1955, engineer Eugene Polley built the Flash-Matic, a remote that aimed a beam of light at sensors on the TV, but sunlight could set them off too. Zenith engineer Robert Adler switched from light to sound. Every press of a Space Command button made a small click, which gave remotes their nickname.

The first smartphone went on sale for $899 and was named after a kids' game. The IBM Simon Personal Communicator was a touchscreen cellular phone and PDA sold by BellSouth starting in August 1994. With a two-year BellSouth contract it cost $899; without a contract it was $1,099. It could place calls, send faxes and email, and run apps like a calendar, address book and sketch pad on its LCD with a stylus. IBM engineer Frank Canova originated the idea and led the architecture. He demonstrated a prototype code-named Sweetspot at COMDEX in Las Vegas in November 1992, and the next day USA Today ran a front-page Money section photo of him holding it. BellSouth sold roughly 50,000 Simons before the product was discontinued in early 1995. The name came from the Milton Bradley memory game Simon, and the device is widely cited as the first smartphone.

The first consumer digital camera with a screen was born when a prototype got too hot to use. Casio released the QV-10 in Japan in March 1995 for 65,000 yen. It was widely recognized as the first consumer digital camera with a built-in color LCD for framing and instant playback. It stored up to 96 images in 2 MB of flash memory at 320 by 240 pixels and could send them to a PC over a serial cable. Lead developer Hiroyuki Suetake had earlier watched Casio's 1987 electronic still camera fail. In 1991 his team built a bulky prototype nicknamed Atsuko and Omoko, Japanese for hot and heavy, because it ran near 90 degrees Celsius and weighed about 2.75 kilograms. They ripped out the viewfinder, stuck on a cooling fan, and used a Casio LCD pocket TV as a makeshift screen. Seeing the shot right away was so useful that Suetake built the display into the QV-10, and digital cameras with screens soon became the norm.

Myst, one of the best-selling PC games of the 1990s, started as free Macintosh software. HyperCard was a hypermedia tool for Apple Macintosh computers, created by Bill Atkinson and released by Apple on August 11, 1987. New Macs got it free; existing owners paid about $49. It let people build stacks of interactive cards with buttons, graphics and a plain-English scripting language called HyperTalk. Atkinson had insisted Apple give HyperCard away, calling it a software erector set for non-programmers. Rand and Robyn Miller of Cyan used it to build Myst as a HyperCard stack before the game became a CD-ROM hit. Ward Cunningham later traced the idea of the wiki back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s. Atkinson later said that if he had aimed HyperCard at networks instead of local disks, it might have become the first Web browser.

Most terminal apps on modern computers still imitate a screen from 1978. The VT100 was a video terminal made by Digital Equipment Corporation and introduced in August 1978. By 1980 it was advertised for about $1,550. It was a keyboard and screen that connected to a larger computer, and it followed new ANSI standard codes for moving the cursor, clearing the screen and changing text style. It became the industry's best-selling terminal, so much software was written to use its codes. In 1984 at MIT, Jim Gettys had his student Mark Vandevoorde write a terminal program, which became xterm for the new X Window System. Early versions of it imitated DEC's VT102, a close relative of the VT100. Later terminal apps kept that compatibility, so the codes DEC designed for one 1978 screen still run inside today's terminal windows.

The computer used to invent the World Wide Web was a black magnesium cube. The NeXT Computer was introduced by Steve Jobs in October 1988 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, priced at $6,500. Jobs had founded NeXT after being forced out of Apple in 1985, and the machine's NeXTSTEP software made it unusually fast to build programs with windows and buttons. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Switzerland, wrote a proposal for linking documents across computers. His boss, Mike Sendall, wrote "Vague but exciting" on it and let him buy a NeXT. On that machine, Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and ran the first web server, with a label warning people not to turn it off. Apple bought NeXT in 1996, and its software became the basis of Mac OS X.

IBM's most successful typewriter replaced swinging metal arms with a spinning ball. The IBM Selectric was introduced on July 31, 1961, starting at $395. Instead of separate typebars for each letter, it had a single ball covered in characters that turned and tilted to strike the paper. Swapping the ball changed the font in seconds. The machine's look came from Eliot Noyes, an architect and designer hired by IBM president Thomas J. Watson Jr. in 1956. Watson had admired the stylish typewriters of the Italian company Olivetti and felt IBM's products looked dull by comparison. Noyes gave the Selectric a smooth, rounded body inspired in part by Olivetti's designs. The ball also meant there were no typebars to jam, and the Selectric became a fixture of offices for decades.

In 2004, Motorola sold a flip phone less than 14 millimeters thick. The Motorola Razr V3 was unveiled in Chicago in July 2004 and went on sale in the US that November through Cingular for $499.99. It had an aluminum body and a keypad cut from a single sheet of metal. Motorola sold about 130 million Razr phones. The phone came from a small team in Libertyville, Illinois, led by engineer Roger Jellicoe, who had also worked on Motorola's StarTAC. In 2003 he was told to build the thinnest phone ever, within about a year, so celebrities could carry it at the Academy Awards. Designer Chris Arnholt shaped its look, and the team kept trimming parts to save fractions of a millimeter. They missed the Oscars, but the Razr was the best-selling phone in the US in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Sony's first portable CD player started as a block of wood the size of four CD cases. The Sony D-50, sold in North America as the D-5, came out in November 1984 for 49,800 yen, about $350 at the time. That was roughly half the price of Sony's first home CD player, the CDP-101, released two years earlier. At the time, few people owned CD players and only about 1,000 albums had been released on CD. Kozo Ohsone, who ran Sony's audio division, wanted a small, cheap player to change that. He showed his engineers a wooden block about 13 cm square and 4 cm thick and told them the player had to be that size. Many parts had to be shrunk to fit, but they made it, and the D-50 helped turn the CD into something people could take with them.

One of the first phones with a built-in camera took pictures of about 0.1 megapixels. The Sharp J-SH04 went on sale in Japan in November 2000 through the carrier J-Phone. Its camera captured 110,000 pixels, and you could email the photo straight from the phone, a service J-Phone called Sha-Mail, from shashin, the Japanese word for photograph. Three years earlier, in 1997, software entrepreneur Philippe Kahn was at a California hospital while his wife was in labor. He wired a digital camera, a laptop and his cellphone together and sent a photo of his newborn daughter, Sophie, to friends and family. The J-SH04 put that whole contraption into a single phone. Today nearly every phone has a camera, and phones are how most photos get taken.

The first computer to sell a million units was advertised by William Shatner. The Commodore VIC-20 went on sale in the US in 1981 for $299.95, when many computers cost well over $1,000. It had a full keyboard, color graphics and 5 KB of memory, and it plugged into an ordinary TV. Commodore founder Jack Tramiel wanted computers for the masses, not the classes, and he sold the VIC-20 in department and discount stores instead of just computer shops. Shatner, known as Captain Kirk on Star Trek, appeared in its TV ads, pitching it as a computer that did far more than a video game console. In January 1983, the VIC-20 became the first computer to pass one million units sold. It reached about 2.5 million before the Commodore 64 took over.

IBM built a laptop whose keyboard was wider than the laptop itself. The ThinkPad 701C, released in 1995, had a 10.4-inch screen in a case about 9.7 inches wide, too narrow for a full-size keyboard. So its keyboard came in two interlocking pieces. When you opened the lid, they slid out and locked together into a keyboard about 11.5 inches wide. The design, nicknamed the butterfly keyboard, was led by IBM engineer John Karidis. Small laptops usually meant cramped keys, and the 701C let people type normally on a machine small enough for a briefcase. It became the best-selling laptop of 1995. Larger screens soon made the trick unnecessary, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York added the 701C to its permanent collection.

The compact disc is the size it is partly because of Beethoven. The first CD player, the Sony CDP-101, went on sale in Japan on October 1, 1982, for 168,000 yen. It read music from a 12-centimeter disc with a laser, so there was no needle, no hiss and no wear from repeated plays. Sony developed the CD format with Philips. Disc size was one of the last questions the two companies had to settle. According to an account Sony has told for decades, executive Norio Ohga wanted a single disc to hold all of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which can run more than 70 minutes. The final standard held about 74 minutes, on a disc 12 centimeters across. Every CD player, CD case and car stereo slot that followed was built around that number.

In Japan, a Buddhist temple has held funerals for robot dogs. The dogs were Aibo, made by Sony. The first model went on sale in 1999 for 250,000 yen in Japan and $2,500 in the US, and the 3,000 units offered in Japan sold out online in about 20 minutes. Aibo could walk, respond to its owner and develop its own behavior over time. Sony stopped making Aibo in 2006 and ended official repairs in 2014. A repair company called A-Fun, which employed former Sony engineers, kept many running with parts taken from Aibos that couldn't be fixed. Owners felt those donor dogs deserved a proper goodbye, so starting in 2015, Kofukuji temple in Isumi, Chiba, held funeral services for them before they were taken apart. Sony brought Aibo back in 2018.

Nokia's game phone made people hold it sideways to make a call. The Nokia N-Gage launched in October 2003 for $299, combining a cellphone with a handheld game console. It had a screen in the middle with buttons on both sides, like a Game Boy Advance, and it could play multiplayer games over Bluetooth. The design caused problems. The earpiece and microphone were on the edge of the phone, so making a call meant holding it against your face edge-on, which people mocked as sidetalking. Swapping games was worse: the game card slot sat under the battery, so you had to take off the back cover and pull the battery every time. Nokia fixed both in the N-Gage QD a year later, but the original had already become a punchline.

On December 31, 2008, Microsoft's Zune music players froze all over the world at once. The Zune was Microsoft's answer to the iPod, launched in November 2006 for $249.99 with a 30 GB hard drive. It came in black, white and brown, and it could share songs wirelessly with other Zunes, something the iPod couldn't do. On the last day of 2008, the 30 GB models got stuck on their startup screens. The cause was a bug in the clock software: 2008 was a leap year, and when the day counter reached 366, the code got caught in an endless loop. Microsoft's official fix was to let the battery run all the way down and turn the player back on after noon GMT on January 1. The players worked again, but Microsoft stopped making them in 2011.

The most replayed moment TiVo had ever measured came from a Super Bowl halftime show. TiVo, launched in 1999, was one of the first digital video recorders sold to consumers. It recorded TV onto a hard drive, let you pause live broadcasts, and recorded your favorite shows automatically. Its founders, Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton, had worked at Silicon Graphics. On February 1, 2004, during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, Justin Timberlake pulled at Janet Jackson's costume and exposed her breast for about a second. TiVo collected anonymous viewing data from its subscribers, and it announced that this was the most replayed moment it had ever recorded. Viewers had paused live TV, rewound it, and watched that same second again and again.

A $5 billion satellite phone network was sold for $25 million. Iridium, backed by Motorola, launched in November 1998 with 66 satellites in low orbit, so a single handset could make calls from almost anywhere on Earth. The phones cost about $3,000, and calls could run several dollars a minute. The plan assumed huge numbers of business travelers would sign up. But the phones were bulky, worked poorly indoors, and ordinary cellphones were spreading fast. Iridium filed for bankruptcy in August 1999, less than a year after launch, and there was talk of steering the satellites down to burn up. In 2000, investors led by former Pan Am executive Dan Colussy bought the whole system for $25 million. Iridium is still operating today.

On May 19, 1998, most of the pagers in the United States went silent at once. At the time, about 40 to 45 million Americans carried pagers, small devices that beeped or vibrated and showed a number to call back. Doctors, repair workers and parents relied on them, and most signals were relayed through a single satellite called Galaxy IV. That evening, Galaxy IV's onboard control computer failed, and the switch to its backup failed too. The satellite turned away from Earth, and an estimated 80 to 90 percent of US pagers stopped receiving messages. Some radio and TV feeds dropped off the air as well. Paging companies spent days moving service onto other satellites, and millions of people learned how much depended on one machine in orbit.