Genius 1980s Inventions that FAILED MASSIVELY - Life in America

[@scottfeinstein2422]

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first computer. Yes, it was very limited, but got me into computing before my family upgraded to an Apple IIc. I've now been a professional programmer for nearly 30 years, and it all started with that TS-1000.

[@paulstaf]

Same here!

[@airborne5642]

Yep. BASIC program.

[@selfdo]

That was WHY it was marketed. Sinclair, and even Timex when they partnered with him, never believed the ZX-81/TS-1000 would last all that long in the market, and it's profitability was inherently limited. Clive Sinclair hoped to whet the appetites of price-sensitive would-be home users, and he DID succeed in that strategy in the UK by the ZX-81s successor, the Spectrum (originally dubbed the ZX-82). Obviously forty years of tech have rendered all those 8-bit home computers into the realm of nostalgia, no different that a 1952 DuMont TV would be laughable compared to any given CRT-based TV of the early 90s, let alone the cheap flat-screens one can easily get at Walley World.

[@hunterburk]

Same. It wet my beak in computing in so many ways. To me, the Timex Sinclair 1000 was the pioneer in affordable computers for newbies at the time.

[@Jim-ie6uf]

I have one. Somewhere in my storage unit….

[@TobenVF]

I had a TS1000 in high school and had a whole lot of fun learning BASIC on it. It was responsible for my lifelong addiction to computers and even though it was pretty primitive, it opened up a whole new world for me.

[@JeffDeWitt]

The TS-1000/ZX-81 didn't fail, they sold well over 600,000 of them in the US alone, and for a lot of us, including myself, they were our first computers. Mine was fully expanded with the 16k RAM pack and the printer. I even modified it so I could use a regular keyboard. For such a simple machine you could do a lot with it, mine would even control a light by voice command... well, usually, and you had to have the TV on for it to work.

[@paulstaf]

Same here, the TS-1000 was the first computer I ever owned. If it hadn't been for that computer, I may not be where I am today in the IT field!

[@robertarnold9815]

yep, great machine to start. I did the same, adding a full keyboard, expanding the memory, and printer. I even modified the video signal to use a monitor instead of the TV. Frankly, the reason for jumping ship was the printer even though for some of my surveying programs I wrote, the output was good enough to transfer the numbers into the notebook for field work. Definitely not a failure, shouldn’t be on this list.

[@jimmeade2976]

Me too. It was the first computer I ever had, in May 1982. Sure, it was limited, but what fun it was. In fact, I still have it, in its original box. Never use it but it is a part of my history.

[@DaveBall54]

The ZX-81 and the ZX-80 before it, started a revolution. Not a failure by a long shot. It got computers into the hands of so many people. It started my career in IT and still sits in my office 20 years after I retired. P.S. It still works!

[@jnharton]

Compared to the Apple II (A2) and Commodore 64 (C64) the TS-1000 was a dismal failure. Still, as you point out, 600,000 units sold isn't too bad.

[@larryk731]

The Sinclair didn't really fail as it was a building block for one of the UK's most popular computers from the 80s.

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

Funny how Coleco bombed because of build quality problems, yet people tolerated the same from Sinclair. Awful company.

[@RolandAdams-h4m]

@@gdutfulkbhh7537 Sinclair ZX Spectrum was affordable and it worked.

[@Urban_Flux]

True and it does say Life in America... Iwas an Atari VCS, 800XL and 800XE fanboy in Scotland, even with the ZX's being built in Dundee haha ;O)

[@EdRyba]

Disco is…Dead, thank God.” x Dr. Johnny Fever

[@bobactuary]

I bought the Sinclair version from the UK before it was marketed as Timex. My roommate bought the kit version to assemble himself to save money. With the expansion slot to put in more memory, and the incredibly efficient memory use, I had a great time writing programs. It did not have a display: The user had to connect it to any television. My grandma gave me her old tiny B&W set, which work awesomely. I rigged up a switching device to easily save programs to a simple cassette tape recorder. I have many fond memories using this, and my mother used programs I wrote to simplify her store payroll work!

[@kevinh96]

Discovision didn't actually fail though, it was taken up by Pioneer, renamed Laserdisc and became quite successful with movie enthusiasts. True it wasn't mass market in the way VHS or other formats were but the format made Pioneer and the film companies enough money that it lasted into the early 2000s and many, many films ended up being released on the format before DVD killed it off.

[@jacindaspeaks]

Was about to say the same thing. It really wasn’t the media that was expensive, it was the players. There were many movie titles where the VHS prices were higher than LD.

[@Mike-ie5xu]

This whole video is a train wreck of misinformation. It comes off like it was made by someone who wasn't yet alive when these products came out did some "research" by reading a few ad articles produced by competitors - kinda like Pepsi "bragging" about how New Coke was a "failure", but not acknowledging the fact that Coca Cola used the switch to New Coke, then back to "Classic Coke" to cover the recipe alteration they needed to make: switching from cane sugar to corn syrup. People would have noticed that overnight, but few people noticed when Coca Cola reintroduced Classic Coke 6 months later. This video's errors: 1. Steve Jobs didn't see the GUI in a "dream", he saw it at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where it was created, along with the mouse. Bill Gates saw it there at the same time, and both Gates and Jobs thought that was the direction computers would go, but Xerox had so little faith in their "toy" that they released the patents to the public and let anyone use and copy them without licensing them. 2. The Kodak Disc Camera was never intended to compete with 35mm cameras. That's absurd - Kodak made it in hopes to financially recover from their massive financial loss with the Kodak Kodamatic, which was a copy of the Polaroid Instamatic camera, and Kodak had to pay Polaroid almost $1 billion, plus buy back hundreds of thousands of cameras from consumers. The Kodak Disc camera was designed to compete with the then-popular 110 format camera, but in a smaller format that was easier to carry in a pocket, and ride the popularity of media discs at the time. Kodak introduced it in 1982, 3-4 years after their lawsuit with Polaroid began. Kodak was able to draw the lawsuit out for over 10 years, but it cost them more in the long run. They could have settled for $250 million in 1984, but dragged it on until 1990, at which point the settlement was $925 million, plus staggering legal fees, and of course the cost of buying back all those now-useless Kodamatic cameras. 3. The Seiko TV Watch was never meant to be a consumer item. They used a tiny LCD screen (NOT a "cathode ray tube", aka CRT). Seiko didn't expect the popularity of the watch, and began making them in very limited quantity, and they sold for $250 to $800 back in 1982-83 ($800 to $2,600 today, give or take a bit), and they were very hard to watch. The screen had all of 32,000 pixels, and reception was difficult with the built-in antenna. It became hugely popular after the James Bond movie because the movie faked a color picture on it, but that didn't matter - Seiko didn't make enough of them for average people to ever see one up close. By most estimates, they made fewer than 1,000 of them. 4. The TS 1000 was hugely popular, and had the ability to use a larger keyboard. As others have mentioned, it got many people involved in computers simply because it used BASIC and could be had for $100. Most computers at the time started around $1,000, and quickly went up much higher than that. 5. As also mentioned, the DiscoVision wasn't a flop. Not only did they stick around as consumer items until the early 2000s, they were also used as a common method of delivering movies to movie theaters for about 25 years. And the Coleco Adam also wasn't a "flop" - it got a lot of people to buy Coleco computers and game consoles, and vice versa. It was one of the few home computers at the time (and one of the first) to embed a gaming system into a personal computer, and it's kinda of hard to imagine a computer today that doesn't follow that lead.

[@BretMix]

I used the Adam word processor all through high school to type out reports; that thing impressed my teachers to no end, though they would've been less impressed if they heard how incredibly LOUD that printer was (I used to drop a pillow on top of it to muffle the machinegun sounds it made). As for Laserdisc: I don't believe something that was manufactured for 23 years would fit any definition of "flop." Back in college I worked at an electronics store that sold them. We moved quite a few, but even with a generous employee discount I could never afford one, they were crazy expensive. In fact, I finally got my first player in... 2023, about a month ago! Watched the original, unmodified Star Wars on it last week. I've picked up a handful of the big Disney box sets (Pinocchio, Fantasia , etc.) as they tended to come with posters, prints, hardcover books, that sort of thing. Laserdisc definitely isn't a hobby for everyone... It's totally archaic and totally inconvenient, but I'm having a blast with it. Cheers!

[@greggv8]

@@Mike-ie5xu LaserDisc was also used in several popular arcade games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Buckaroo Banzai and some others.

[@bob_the_bomb4508]

I thought Philipps developed Laserdisk?

[@simonebernacchia5724]

Timex Sinclair might have been a partial failure in US, but they were immensely successful as ZX81 and ZX spectrum in UK, Europe, Australia and Eastern Europe; in the latter Spectrum clones were all around the place

[@dieseldragon6756]

I remember the USSR had a lot of early micro clones circulating around it, most developed from reverse engineering Western units (presumably) bought through the DDR. I had the usual pair of 80s systems (A Spectrum 128, a Vic-20) but as a man who's becoming increasingly comfortable with Cyrillic and has always had a love of the rudimentary 70s/80s Russian technology, what I'd *love* to have is a Russian C64 clone... 😇

[@williamcousert]

Were the Soviet computers priced so the average person could afford to own them, or were these reserved for elite party members?@@dieseldragon6756

[@potrzebieneuman4702]

I was living in the UK in 1983 and bought a ZX81. At the time it was amazing and I had it for years. From memory it had 2k of onboard memory and a 16k plug in of RAM which is shown in this video. Great stuff and a start in computing which for me turned into a business which my partner and I ran for 11 years.

[@danieljones9937]

@@potrzebieneuman4702 Minor correction; it was 1K of onboard memory in the unexpanded ZX81 (about 512 bytes of which was usable for programs). :)

[@HAVOCJKD]

​@@danieljones9937 Correct. As an interesting aside the Timex 1000 (the US release of the ZX81) did indeed have 2k as standard The follow up T1500 had a "whopping" 16k and was placed inside a keyboard case that mirrored the "dead flesh" keys of the 16/48k Speccy The 2068 was actually a great little machine, but the lack of inherent compatibility with the HUGE Speccy back catalog was a misstep almost of QL levels of stupid! Had that been in place ...well who knows?

[@HalRappaport]

For the record, the Seiko watch screen was LCD and not a CRT. I don't think it would be possible to shrink a CRT down and it would get way too hot and be too heavy. The idea of an LCD TV screen was really ahead of it's time though.

[@jnharton]

The original Sony Watchman had a comparatively tiny 2" monochrome CRT. I doubt you could make one much smaller and the required depth is a limiting factor.

[@louisvillaescusa]

@@jnharton You need depth for a CRT deflection yoke to work.

[@christopherrobinson1219]

you on yo SHIT!!

[@andreroussel]

The Timex Sinclair 1000 shown has a membrane keyboard, not a chicklet keyboard as mentioned. The first Commodore PET computer and the Color Computer (1) from Radio Shack as well as the later version Timex Sinclair 1500 are examples of computers with chicklet keyboards. I collect vintage computers and except for the LISA I have a working version of each of the computers mentionned including a Colecovision ADAM.

[@selfdo]

A fellow GLUTTON for punishment with them "Klassic Komputers". Yes, the TS-1000 had that almost unusable membrane keyboard, its immediate successor, one can at least more readily type in programs and other input, though for anything other than a short, one-page document, it's not a "word processor". I have it and the TS-2068, AND the QL. It was a shame the 2068 didn't do well, but, like so many decent products, a victim of bad timing and its maker/marketer having neither the desire nor the resources to "tough out" the rather dicey home computer market of 1983 to about mid-1985.

[@bjbell52]

You think those chicklet keyboards were bad - did you ever try an Atari 400 with its membrane keyboard. I actually got use to it after a while thanks to taking typing class in high school.

[@thegameczar]

The TS-1000 didn't fail in its mission. I grew up in a poor single-parent home. I received a hand me down TS-1000 from a friend. I learned BASIC and Z80 assembly. Today I am a RPA developer, in the aerospace and defense sector. I owe my start to cramming as much code as I could in 2K of memory, on my TS-1000.

[@jfrankcarr]

I learned to program on a Timex Sinclair, including using PEEK and POKE to really push it to the limit. I even bought extra memory and a keyboard overlay for it. It's amazing to think I paid less for a Raspberry Pi not that long ago.

[@davidrossi1486]

Ah Peek and poke - the high level assembly language keywords. Back when we knew what we were actually doing.

[@dave3657]

We got one when it went on clearance at Sears. I did learn how to do programming on it which helped me later in life.

[@wreckage-vs5jv]

Anything using laser back then was very futuristic for people. But the real reason discovision, laserdic...all flopped was the lack of xxx movies. Which on the other hand was the sole reason for VHS's success. It certainly wasn't picture quality. It's true to this day that hardware hardly matters much. The secret is in the software

[@Akira625]

Coleco made some weird design decisions for the Adam. It used proprietary cassettes as its primary storage device at a time when most computers used floppies. If the user left the cassettes in the deck when they turned the computer on, they would get erased by the massive magnetic surge the computer puts out when powered up. The computer also got its power from the printer, and if the printer didn't work, there was no way to turn on the computer.

[@selfdo]

Actually, in late 1982 and early 1983, when the Adam was being rushed through development, most HOME computers, which the Adam was, did NOT have even floppy disks. The popular Commodore VIC-20s almost universally used either cartridges or that 1530 "Datasette" (proprietary cassette recorder), because the old, clunky Commodore 1541 disk drives retailed for almost $500! The ADAM's "digital data pack" was THEORETICALLY a cost-effective solution, being in effect a "stringy floppy", much like the Sinclair "micro drives" that found greater acceptance with that UK computer maker's Spectrum and QL machines, offering data transfer speed that compared favorably with the floppy drives of the time...IF they worked. Which too often, they did NOT. As you pointed out, the user had to remove the "DDP" to avoid it getting accidentally erased, a HUGE design flaw. There were actually a few Adams pushed out in 1985, before Coleco bailed on the venture, that had a single 5-1/4" floppy drive, but by then, the brand had lost all credibility. And yes, the power supply being integrated with the daisy-wheel printer, which was obsoleted by the introduction of relatively inexpensive "NLQ" printers, was another annoying design flaw.

[@ablemagawitch]

The Coleco Adam Data Packs being taken out was normal back then as you didn't want the tape drives to jerk the tape when it spun up the gears as it powered on. The surge was just an extra risk because must people didn't have their printer set down the length of the power cable to side but had right beside the tape drives. I still remember when I had saved up and got the expansion for 2nd tape or Digital Data Pack Drive. I thought I was the king having two data packs of programs and memories available for all my needs. No switching from your program cassette to the flank one you saved data on, you just kept the program data pack in for accessing information and saved and loaded off that 2nd drive.

[@72seasonsofwither]

I was one of the unfortunate few who had an Adam computer system. It was the all-in-one system, not the expansion pack you added onto a standard Colecovision gaming system. It came with a pack-in cassette based game called Buck Rogers, and when the drive worked, the graphics were way better than if the game was played on a standard cartridge drive. However, the cassette drive was the first thing to go south. I would put a tape in, and it would spontaneously rewind and fast forward without loading the game. Turns out 5 out of every 6 units shipped to stores were faulty, and they only sold 100K units in its first year when they expected to sell 500K units. This system eventually sunk the Coleco company as we knew it.

[@ablemagawitch]

@@72seasonsofwither Sounds like you didn't respect the corruptible nature of data cassettes, I mean "Digital Data Packs". Leaving them in the drive or beside the printer would corrupt them and then the drive would spin the tape forward and backwards looking for the data that was not there or corrupted. That wasn't the fault of the ADAM computer or the storage media but end users not understanding how fragile data was. that these were not you normal car cassettes that you could use abuse in your Boom Box. There were not 5 out of every 6 with bad drives ether.... That would have been an instant recall, There were some faults but for price the DAM was reliable and good computer. It open the door to many ad held share in competitive market that was coming in to a hard crash. The timing of launch was bad. I had one and added a second tape drive to run both programs and my file storage and thought I was hot stuff with that much memory space, sadly the modems came out way too late ad BBS were drawing people into computers and the ADAM didn't have one and when they did it wasn't as cheap, so their customer base was less willing to pay computer part prices for regular retail. The Buck Rodgers game was great, I also figured out bug to eject and you could play the same level over and over to run up your score, them close the door and the game would then load the next harder levels. The ADAM was well packaged and priced computer that came out right as the market was failing, had to compete against computers with established names and more important software libraries. Which the same program on different computers were not able to open their save files on another computer. The different operating systems were that different back then. You had ATARI Computers which were Respected, then you had all the Tandy Computers from Radio Shack well respected and because of Radio Shack had better ability to get into the home of new users. IBM computers were the big elephant in the room and Apple computers was also making a good name for itself. Coleco was knowing for gaming consoles, and despite making better package, the people(the dumb masses) chose Commodore Computer over it due to it having more programs and parts (disk drives, modems) , this is just like public choose "VHS over the far superior Beta Max," same thing to "HIGH Def DVD and BLU RAY", The Laser discs never caught on and they were larg CD/DVD copies of films that were far supior to the tape formats...... The public chooses what survives it always isn't the better of the two options. The ADAM was Computer that came with printer keyboard and 2 controllers (the closest thing to a "mouse" at the time for gaming). Did they make mistake making the power supply in the printer, yes but they had to cut costs and separate power supply in the printer help keep the magnetic field from the start up surge farther away from circuits and DATA DRIVES. those Tapes held more than diskettes at the time. Which was selling point. People would put their floppy disk on the fridge with magnetic, not knowing better. Today that seems laughable but back then, the understanding by people was far far less, which we're turning back into. How many modern kids know what to protect a floppy disk or data cassette "Digital Data Pack from?

[@Nature9000]

It's fascinating how ahead of their time some of these companies were with their ideas and vision. I say that because it's truly amazing how close most of these came to some of the very things we have now through other companies.

[@-Steven-]

I really miss the 80s with all the inovations and amazing tech stuff being released, nowadays everything that gets released is just a copy of the previous version but slightly faster it's so boring.

[@park4472]

The Timex Sinclair was known as the Sinclair ZX81 over here in the UK, Sinclair went on to update it to the ZX Spectrum, one of the world's most numerous home computers (in its day). Not really the flop you suggest!

[@friendlypiranha774]

Before the Timex Sinclair / ZX81, there was the ZX80. I still have an advert for it somewhere, the casing of the ZX80 being white and blue in colour. THAT was futuristic.

[@oldtimer2192]

I had a Sinclair ZX spectrum 48K and in the day it was great! The old games like Knight Lore, Sabrewulf, Starstrike and the like were amazing at the time! Now we can have more than 10 cores, 20 threads running at 5GHz and the RTX 3090 as an example operating in the teraflop range producing near photo realistic graphics is just mind blowing.

[@selfdo]

Yes, Sinclair did quite well with the ZX81 and the first few offerings of the "Speccy" (16K, 48K, and Plus). But price competition from Amstrad and Commodore ate into Sinclair's profitability, and the intended "next step", the QL, was a "ghastly flop". Hence why Sir Clive was forced to sell out to Amstrad. Did not he and Amstrad's founder once get into a fight at a pub?

[@LeeCorne]

@@selfdoLegend has it he had a 'fight' in a pub with the founder of Acorn, Chris Curry, a former employee of Sinclair, over a newspaper ad slagging off Sinclair's reliability issues. Sinclair nearly went bust because Sir Clive put most of the profits from the successful Spectrum into his passion project, the C5 electric car (actually an electric recumbent trike) which was about 30 years ahead of its time, but completely impractical in the 1980s. He subsequently sold Sinclair Research to Alan Sugar's Amstrad who created the +2 and +3 Spectrums and continued to sell them into the 1990s alongside Amstrad's own CPC computers.

[@davidslife989]

JUST THINK IF the technology that is discussed here DID take off! I wonder where the planet would be today!

[@anticat900]

The Timex Sinclair was limited but a great educator and very good value, and for a short time after release it was the best selling personal computer in the US (with sales close to a million). This didn't last long, but it was the cause of computer price war of the early 80's and many companies pulling out with big losses.

[@mattx5499]

Many people started programming on Sinclair computers. They had pretty decent capabillities for the price and tons of software. Who would ever think it was a failure?

[@jimmeade2976]

I had a Kodak disk camera. and used it for several years. It was small and convenient to use. I don't recall the pictures being grainy, they were perfectly acceptable to my family. Between the disk camera and a Polaroid OneShot, all of our family photos in the 1980s were made with them. Of course, growing up in Rochester NY, Kodak's home, how could I not have a Kodak camera?

[@robkunkel8833]

And it is more likely that you have those old photos. Most of us have no idea where our thousands of digital images are or in which device.

[@bluevol1976]

I loved my disc camera, too. It was small and easy to use. Picture quality was questionable, though.

[@dave3657]

Got one for mom but she lost it 🤷🏻‍♂️. It was okay, but her old 110 camera was a lot better.

[@whiplashfatigue1430]

I got a disc camera and found an underwater housing right before my big scuba adventure to the Cayman Islands. The pictures were fine until I tried to get some enlarged to try to bring out some details.

[@caroldannenberg9778]

I'm also from Rochester, New York and had a disc camera. I thought the photos looked fine! The only disadvantage I remember was having only 12 photos before you had to change the disc.

[@suspiciouswatermelon7639]

The Kodak Disc wasn't a flop. My parents had those in the early 80's, we took loads and loads of pictures with those things.

[@Turnbull50]

The major problem with the Coleco Adam was that when you first switched it on it produced a very strong electric pulse and if you had left a tape in the machine it blanked it. The Timex computer had a different screen resolution to the sinclair computer in the UK so UK software did not run on it.

[@rovanderby759]

Another 80ies product I remember was the Philips Video 2000, a video tape recording system that tried to compete with VHS. It had better quality of both image and sound than VHS, but was more expensive and the number of movies released on Video 2000 format was much smaller, so it was more or less doomed to fail.

[@kiwihib]

Plus it recorded and played on both sides of the tape, that and Beta were better quality than VHS but kept too much in house restricting the range of manufacturing.

[@iliketowatch.]

You might as well create a video about how the 1908 Ford Model T stacks up against a 2023 Ford Mustang. The Model T was just one step in the evolution towards the cars of today.

[@selfdo]

The Model T put American and the rest of the WORLD on wheels like no automobile had before or SINCE. It was the right product for its time.

[@johndemeritt3460]

I'd much rather compare the 1908 Ford Model T to a 1944 model North American Mustang! A lot faster, better range, and six .50 caliber machine guns is STILL a LOT better than a 2023 Ford Mustang!

[@JoeMotionVideos82]

I remember seeing the TV watch at Sears. I thought that it was the coolest thing that I've ever seen. Giving today's technology. They all stand a fare chance of success.

[@dieseldragon6756]

Just out of curiosity, can you remember what the retail price was on those? Given the NES was about £100,- in the late 80s (Perhaps equivalent to £450,- today) I'd just love to work out what those come to when adjusted for inflation! 😇

[@kenbrown2808]

most of these "failures" were actually precursors to successful platforms.

[@MVVblog]

1:26 The idea of the graphical user interface and mouse was inspired (i.e. stolen) from The Xerox Alto by Xerox PARC. Great Video!!!!!!

[@jasonetruax]

The Seiko TV watch had an LCD screen, NOT a cathode ray screen as stated. If it had a CRT, that watch would be HUGE!

[@dieseldragon6756]

Certainly be a darn good exercise regime having something like _that_ hanging off your wrist all day! A 1,2" CRT would be at least an inch deep, and I'd estimate at least 1lb (226g) including the coils! 😀 Mind you: A pair of fresh AA batteries might get you _just about_ enough viewing time to watch a newscast on something like that... 🙃

[@danieljones9937]

I did wonder...

[@anotherstevendavis]

I would totally rock a CRT watch.

[@natsume-hime2473]

Mentioning the DiscoVision, but not that it evolved into the modestly successful LaserDisc is a glaring oversight.

[@iliketowatch.]

Perhaps these products didn't bring the huge economic successes their companies had hoped for...I think that young people who didn't live through these times won't understand the revolutionary steps each one of these products represented. Each was a step forward towards the products we enjoy today...and each one was mind 🤯 blowing for its time.

[@frankboff1260]

Absolutely agree. I attempted to say something similar but you said it best.

[@jons.6216]

I'll give Coleco this, though! They were at the top of the pack when it came to recreating arcade game graphics for home video games! As far as the Discovision, Pioneer came out with the laserdisc a few years later and seemed to have worked the hugs out! Still don't hear as much about the RCA Disc players anymore from the early 80s!

[@selfdo]

Yes, the Colecovision/ADAM games were rather close to "arcade" quality for a fairly inexpensive home computer. It was the CV that forced Atari to finally put out a successor to its long-successful 2600 console, the 5200 (which flopped), and the 7800 (which did, meh, it made a little money...), before the Trameil family bought the struggling company from Warner Communications, which was bleeding red ink with Atari. The Trameils re-styled the Atari 8-bit line and pushed on with the ST line, which was a credible competitor to the Apple Mac, so much that it was dubbed the "Jackintosh", but more or less abandoned the dedicated gaming platform, redoing the 8-bit XE into a dedicated system, but otherwise simply another home computer. Atari's Lynx would be a huge success as a handheld in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but meanwhile, its ST/TT lines were floundering in the USA, thanks to consumer preference for cheap Taiwanese and Korean PC clones. They did ok in Europe, especially Germany, but Atari finally threw in the towel on its ST/TT/Mega line in 1993, to focus on the 64-bit Jaguar console. It's market failure, only 150K units sold, was Atari's end.

[@greggv8]

Somehow Nintedo's technical inferior Gameboy squashed the Lynx and other portable games with color displays. Nintendo had a track record of winning with old gear. The NES and SNES were each revamps of Japan market consoles that had been available for two years before Nintendo took them international. I was surprised to see a 1983 copyright date the first time I opened an NES, which wasn't made until 1985. Later I learned the Famicom was released in Japan in 1983. Nintendo made bank selling the world obsolete technology when they were about to introduce their next console exclusively for Japan.

[@58jharris]

@@greggv8 The Lynx and Game Gear went through batteries like nothing and were also more fragile than the Game Boy which was built almost like a mini tank. Those advantages outweighed the color screens of the other portable consoles.

[@KrotowX]

Some of them simply came too early. When other tech wasn't on the level yet. Also artificial neutering like lack of necessary expansion slots and ports is stupid manufacturer decision.

[@ivanleterror9158]

When I was sent to Columbia School of Business in the early 90s for a Diploma in Micro Computer Applications our only tool was the keyboard. Until we reached the point to be trained in computer aided drafting. There was this item on the desk called a mouse. It was a whole new world. Also, in those days before the attack of the clones, most hardware was dedicated where you could only get replacement parts from the original manufacturer. Especially from Compaq as a friend found out when he bought a system from an auction of a failed company.

[@glennso47]

Remember the first I-Mac computer that had a transparent chassis? You could see the inside of the computer.

[@jasonblalock4429]

4:40 Actually, if you dig up sales numbers, the Colecovision was the one console that *wasn't* particularly affected by the "crash." Its sales numbers continued to grow, even as everyone else was shrinking. If the Adam hadn't wrecked Coleco's electronics division, the Colecovision probably would have stayed active.

[@greggv8]

Coleco and Mattel both got bogged down in the home computer market which they should have stayed far away from. Neither company had in their video game staff the people they needed to engineer and design a good computer. Neither the Colecovision nor Intellivision had the CPU power and other hardware and data bus connections needed to integrate with the additional RAM and peripherals to put together a decent computer. Coleco at least had the same video processor as the TI-99/4A. The ADAM was better than what Mattel finally slapped together as a "computer addon" to get the SEC off their back so they could shut down Mattel Electronics. The Intellivision was less capable of having a computer upgrade as an expansion. A small number of units were made where the game console served mainly as an interface for the game controllers. It was far too complex to be made at the price point required to meet their sales goals. The greatly reduced capability thing they settled on sold poorly but satisfied the Securities and Exchange Commission to be a "computer add on". Absent those misadventures which ate massive amounts of money to develop, those two companies might have gone on to make second generations of their consoles. Or Nintendo and Sega could have blown them away like they did NEC and anyone else still in home video games after 1985. Imagine Xbox and Playstation and Saturn coming into a market with Nintendo, Sega, Coleco, and Mattel.

[@scottDchicago]

Awesome episode!!! These are so much fun to watch as they strike a perfect balance of being entertaining as well as somewhat educational.

[@friendlypiranha774]

I remember most of these products when they were introduced. It was such an exciting time to live.

[@MrTPF1]

I had a Kodak disc camera in the 80's. Abysmal picture quality that are still the worst in my print and slide pics collection. What about all those Sharp mini pocket computers that started proliferating in the 80's?

[@robclark3095]

Lots of people had those Kodak Disc cameras when I was a kid. Most of my older relatives had them. I doubt they cared all that much about image quality. I had 110 film camera (film cartridge) and took tons of pictures with it. Mostly very bad ones, but what can you expect from an 8 year old.

[@dannydaw59]

I had one of those disc cameras. The quality wasn't all that good.

[@AlwaysEngland]

The ZX Spectrum was my first computer at the age of 18. Its been amazing to watch computers advance over the decades. The Apple Lisa was named after his daughter.

[@ivanleterror9158]

In addition to the Kodak Disc they also came out with a 3D camera years earlier. Too expensive to process and died on the vine. I happened to meet the man who helped design it years later.

[@whiteshadow1771]

As a college student, we loved the disc video system. We rented tons of them.

[@davinp]

Hey, what about Android watches which came out years before Apple watch? I hate Apple always gets recognition and not Google Android

[@chrisdavis3055]

"Locally Integrated System Architecture": At the time of its release, Steve Jobs was still denying (or at least questioning) his paternity of Lisa Brennan-Jobs. He finally admitted in 2005 that the Apple Lisa was named after his daughter.

[@uni-byte]

The Sinclair and Timex-Sinclair computers did not fail. They were one of the most popular home computing series world wide selling many, many millions and still actively used today in teh retro-computing community.

[@caeserromero3013]

4:36 Is that Christie Brinkley in the Adam commercial??

[@claudelemire2451]

Looks like Lori Loughlin to me

[@caeserromero3013]

@@claudelemire2451 100% Thanks 👍

[@02chevyguy]

My first DISC camera was from Minolta. This was in 1984, and I couldn't wait to use it (it also had a 10-second timer). However, everything in relation to the Kodak version, the negatives were quite true for these cameras. I bought different types of film by Kodak, and Fuji, along with cheaper brands, and all of the pics were extremely grainy.

[@tbarela]

I loved the Timex Sinclair 1000. Had fun making games! I still, to this very day, have my Timex Sinclair with the overlay button keyboard!

[@IanM-id8or]

My mother was a teacher and she attended a conference about the Lisa. She told me that techs presenting it told her that a new, better machine was coming - a machine called Lorraine. Lorraine was the original name of the Amiga

[@VoightKampf]

Disco Vision was not a complete failure as other commenters have noted here. However, RCA's video disc system, dubbed "needle vision" was an abject failure. Using a needle to read the video discs meant the discs wore out quickly. They were enclosed in a bulky plastic case which made them expensive and cumbersome and the video quality was comparable to VHS making the format pointless.

[@stevepmp]

In that era, every Timex Sinclair owner I spoke with absolutely loved that machine. It had quite a following in the US.

[@ll7868]

I got an Apple 2 for Festivus in 1982, it didn't have a mouse but in 1984 you could get a Commodore mouse and buy an expansion card package for around $400, a much cheaper alternative to a LISA. It could boot into the Control Program & Monitor system, the expansion card was like a CPU port or Bluetooth and it ran software like Wordstar and MousePaint, which was really popular, it was great for creating maps for D&D and everyone I knew played D&D in the 80s. We also had an Apple 2 Plus that hooked up to the television but just the one mouse so we had to keep switching the mouse back and forth, which was kinda like manually resetting a wireless game controller's link to a different console.

[@lavenderflowersfall280]

This is really neat. A TV watch in the 70s!

[@johntracy72]

My mom had a Kodak Disc 4000. She loved it.

[@System_Sega]

You do realise that Discovision and Laserdisc are the same format right? Not sure I would call Laserdisc a Massive Failure.

[@shorttimer874]

In 1980 I went to work for a tow company with a police contract. A requirement was to use a Victor Electrowriter to send one way handwritten notes over a phone line stating what vehicles we had impounded. Our graveyard driver later replaced this with a PC XT, a pair of modems, and a dot matrix printer to send the info, along handling a lot of the other paperwork involved. Over time this grew into a multiple terminal system running Xenix.

[@Barryfordmemphis]

I bought a Kodak Disc 4000 camera when I was in Navy bootcamp. It was a GREAT little camera and used it religiously!! It took fantastic pictures until I dropped it. I immediately bought another one. I kept using it until I couldn't buy disc film any longer.

[@Mrshoujo]

GUI = "Gooey" It's called the Timex Sinclair 1000. They also brought out the 1500 (a 1000 with 16K of RAM) and the 2068 (a color capable computer).

[@ZippyThePinhead]

The only one I even VAGUELY remember from this group is the Kodak Disc. I remember the Apple 2E, my sister and bro-in-law bought one for my nephew when he was in school.

[@luciandragos8556]

I had a Disc cam as a kid and loved the thing.. I was sad when I couldn't get film for it anymore

[@georgeh6856]

I dreamed about the Coleco Adam. It came with everything except for the monitor (you would typically use a TV back then), in one gigantic box. It had a letter-quality printer instead of dot matrix which was more common then. Color graphics. Built-in "fast" tape drives for programs and data. It even came with joysticks. I have since read that the power supply was inside the printer, meaning that if the printer died, you were screwed. The "fast" tape drive had a habit of garbling data.

[@LarryRobinsonintothefog]

Of the failures that survived, I'm glad that Laser Discs survived as DVDs and BluRay (though digital) and The Lisa continued the lanscape of GUIs started by XeroxParc.

[@thomasbeach905]

We enjoyed our TI-99 in the 1980’s. It used your TV as monitor and had plug-in cartridges for programs. No memory. Our kids learned math and other studies on it. Resolution was, I think 8- bit, but the programs were fun, well thought out for the time.

[@tableseven8133]

The TV in a watch was interesting and shortly after I bought a early version B&W pocket TV from Radio Shack. I still have it but a adapter will be required for it to get over the air TV now. The next year Radio Shack had a color one that was very grainy, then after that the TFT's came out in decent color,

[@Douglas_Blake_579]

I still get a giggle when I see the old computer ads with the printer pushed up in front of the keyboard and the video off to the side... so that it looked more like a typewriter.

[@michaelscheel9533]

I had the Timex Sinclair in 1982 I later got the 16K memory pack and the cassette cable for data use, Later I got a TI-99/4A which I bought the day before Texas Instruments announced they were discontinuing it. That should of been in your video. Later I got ann Atari 400 along with a disk drive and a dot matrix printer. I finally got a 486SX-33 in 1991.

[@RetroJack]

Another major problem with the Coleco Adam was the much-vaunted on-board cassette system - it was proprietary and would only accept Coleco-made cassettes!

[@jnharton]

I think the risk of accidentally erasing a tape left in the drive at startup was probably a bigger issue.

[@selfdo]

@@jnharton And they were way too UNRELIABLE.

[@jnharton]

@@selfdo Okay? I'm just saying that reliably is kinda moot if they can get accidentally wiped clean in a perfectly ordinary situation like that. --- You'd never have had those kinds of problems with a decent tape recorder and the choice of any number of cassette tape manufacturers (back then).

[@natsume-hime2473]

@@jnharton It wasn't the tape deck's fault. The Coleco Adam had a massive electromagnetic surge on start up, Which is what garbled tapes beyond recognition.

[@pon1]

7:01 The like/dislike buttons flash when he's saying "give us a like". Never seen that before. Interesting!

[@CoolDudeClem]

My mum had one of those Kodak disk cameras, I allways thought it was weird and a bit crap, even back then.

[@Wallyworld30]

ADAM was my first Computer and it was a damn fine machine. It's printer using a real daisy wheel printer made it a proper word processor for the home well before cheap word processors came along. It also played Colecovision Games and upgraded Colecovision Games on Cassette Tapes that had more memory than even an NES game.

[@DonaldTubbs]

OMG, Lori Loughlin in the Coleco commercial!

[@josephmorgan3058]

I loved the disc camera.

[@stephenwilliams-blacksburg]

On MCA Discovision : Discovision was developed in the late 1960s. The format was discontinued in 1981 when the technology was sold to Pioneer. Pioneer re-engineered the format into what became known as LaserDisc. LaserDisc players, while not as ubiquitous as VHS players, were sold at reasonable prices throughout the 1980s and 90s. Videophiles purchased them because they had image quality superior to video-tapes. I have personally owned 4 different LaserDisc players and purchased about 200 movies from a significant library of available titles. Your comment on discs "skipping" may have been a reference to RCAs ill-fated attempt to compete with LaserDisc by producing a disc player that uses a stylus, like a record player. RCA discs (CED), were horrible. They often could not be played through more than once or twice and they skipped A LOT. The RCA player was discontinued in 1984. LaserDisc players did die out in the early 2000s when DVD players arrived on the scene. DVDs produced much higher picture quality than both VHS and LaserDiscs. So, videophiles quickly transitioned. Lower priced players eventually made DVDs the standard format for everyone.

[@oldradiosnphonographs]

I do own some early MCA Discovision titles they were prone to laser rot. Apparently there were bonus videos of the dead side of these discs.

[@PS10N]

I owned a Timex Sinclair in the 80s. It didn't have a "chicklet" keyboard, but rather a "membrane" keyboard, which was even worse. And, it DID have "graphics" but each "pixel" was 1/4 size of a character in the character set (all 16 combinations of on/off "pixels" was actually a separate character in the character set.) On the base model, there wasn't enough video memory to fill the screen with graphic characters, meaning many games and programs simply did not use the last row of the character display.

[@kennethlee494]

I had the TV watch, It had an LCD screen, not a cathode ray tube. The biggest drawback was the low resolution screen that had no backlight.

[@mvl71]

The Coleco Adam had a few big flaws: You had to connect it to a printer for power, but the worst fault was the power surge when you turned it on. _In particular, when the computer starts up, the power supply emits an electromagnetic pulse so strong that it can scramble or destroy data on storage media left inside the drives or near the computer._ (source: wikipedia)

[@paulidjit]

I had the pleasure of meeting filmmaker Sadie Benning in the early 90’d . They made several short films on the PXL2000 early in their career.

[@Jm4steam]

I remember the ADAM and kodak disk camera.They were Hi-Tech in those days. I had Heath kit stuff...Arduino and Raspberry Pi were not around.

[@Robert_Presto]

My first computer i bought was an EPSON Equity One in 1987. Cost me over $1000 + extra for the dot matrix printer. My word processor was WordStar.

[@ronhutcherson9845]

A couple of guys in my shop class made a Sinclair into a primitive laptop. They attached it to a keyboard from a Ti-99-4/A, powered it with a camcorder battery, and used the tiny camcorder viewfinder CRT (1 inch!) as a monitor. Then they packaged it in a briefcase. Even back then the screen was the hardest part.

[@kingswing00]

That's pretty awesome!

[@Impulse_Photography]

Spelling >> Technology ........ !Techology I loved the Timex Sinclair - - it was also sold as a kit for us starting off in electronics / computer builders. I do not think of it as a failure because it allowed us to ' Get Our Feet Wet' ... I am 62 and I still dabble in electronics / computer hardware/ programming thanks to these Early Build-It Yourself Kits. I think, its target market was ' The Geek Squad ! '

[@jasongunther1929]

My dad has a timex Sinclair computer, everything had to be stored on cassettes and the disco vision simply became laserdisc which we also had. Never knew about the tv watch though!

[@wallypalmer4704]

I had a Timex Sinclair with the 16K RAM expander. It was a lot of fun at the time.

[@ConceptJunkie]

The Seiko TV Watch had an LCD display, not a CRT display. Still, this was a good video and I definitely remember a lot of these products at the time, although I never had any of them. The computer labs at Virginia Tech had some Lisas in 1983, and while it was a cool machine in many ways, it had some absurd limitations, not the least of which was that it could lock in a way that required the cover being removed to reset it. They didn't have those machines in the computer labs very long, and most of the machines were IBM PCs.

[@whatwouldwesleycook9759]

Aunt Becky!

[@Randy.E.R]

The only one I had any personal experience with was the Kodak Disc camera. What a dismal failure! I bought one to take with me for Grad Night when we went to Disneyland during my senior year of high school. Not only were the disks expensive, they were nearly impossible to find. The picture quality was okay but certainly not worth the money. I was better off with my 110 camera. Anyone remember those? The camera was small and the film was cheap- picture quality wasn't the best, but it worked

[@ingridfong-daley5899]

I had a kodak 110, and i remember the year my brother got his disc camera and realising mine was better :)

[@ablemagawitch]

The Coleco Adam Data Packs being taken out was normal back then as you didn't want the tape drives to jerk the tape when it spun up the gears as it powered on. The surge was just an extra risk because must people didn't have their printer set down the length of the power cable, but just to side of the main computer and that primary Data Pack Drive, right beside the tape drives. Worse storing their tapes between both as that little space was perfect for those then Digital Data Packs (they may be tapes to everyone else but they will always be that power name they marketed them as to me....) I still remember when I had saved up and got the expansion for 2nd tape or Digital Data Pack Drive. I thought I was the king having two data packs of programs and memories available for all my needs. No switching from your program cassette to the flank one you saved data on, you just kept the program data pack in for accessing information and saved and loaded off that 2nd drive

[@the_kombinator]

Hah, I had a PXL2000 - I recently found it (lens was completely dead) and played back some videos - 95% of the footage deteriorated, but the sound was awesome. I seem to recall that I had to feed it batteries constantly. I had the TV for a LONG time too, wish I hadn't pitched it.

[@valley_robot]

the kodak disk camera was used for years in Europe , it was very popular , it was a camera for the masses

[@Lachlant1984]

One thing you didn't mention is that the Sinclair ZX computers the Timex Sinclair 1000 was based on were very popular and very successful, especially the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, that said I think the Spectrum was released after the Timex Sinclair 1000.

[@JeffDeWitt]

Yes, the Spectrum came out a bit later, and it had the newfangled color graphics.

[@nuk1964]

The Timex Sinclair was basically the Sinclair ZX-81 microcomputer (which itself was an improvement over the earlier Sinclair ZX-80) -- most notable as being the first microcomputer to be priced at *under* US$100. To achieve the low price however meant some sacrifices had been made (only B/W, no sound, membrane keyboard, only 1K RAM, etc). As far as specifications went, it was underwhelming compared to its contemporaries. The 1K RAM was barely enough for only simple programs to be run, so the 16K RAM expansion was almost a must. Unfortunately the connection for the RAM expansion was one of its weak points (it would easily work loose -- and when that happened, the computer would crash).

[@JeffDeWitt]

@@nuk1964 One of the advantages of the TS 1000 was it had twice as much RAM as the ZX-81. And yes, that port was problematic, not only did the memory connect to it but so did the printer, and yes, the computer would crash if the RAM pack... connected after the printer, came lose.

[@nuk1964]

@@JeffDeWitt The TRS-80 Model 1 had similar problem. A short stiff ribbon connector used to connect the base unit (the keyboard) with the expansion interface unit -- if you moved the keyboard unit around you ran the risk of knocking that cable loose and crash the system. The heavier weight of the TRS-80 did make it a wee less likely you'd move it accidentally than the ZX-81 and TS-1000.

[@gregorytaylor41]

I had a Kodak disk camera. It was my first camera and was easy for a twelve year to use. Unfortunately the image quality was bad. At twelve, though I was just happy to have a camera.

[@TalmidAndy]

The 'timex' Sinclair was only less popular in the US than every where is and far from a failure. For it's time it was a huge leap forward in home computers and was also used in schools.

[@ByteMeCompletely]

In, 1982, I first bought an Atari 5200 to play games. Awesome ports of Defender, Centipede, Missle Command, Star Raiders, etc. I later bought a 400, 800XL, 130XE. Later, I bought a Sega Genesis.

[@steveh3240]

I had this computer. It came with a book of computer programs you could type in like checkers and even a flight simulator. I was able the save the programs on to a cassette tape and load them again without having to enter them a second time. I am still in the IT profession after 30 years because of the Sinclair 1000 and the Apple II.

[@yiffytimes]

Another thing about the Kodak Disc Camera double exposures were common. It was suppose to stop when you took the last photo. But accidentally drop or bump the camera. Double exposure time.

[@Rick-lt7sv]

How about the Comador VIC 20 and the RCA video disc player?

[@andrehinds568]

The Timex Sinclair did not have a “Chiclet” keyboard. It had a flat panel keyboard, like the virtual keyboard on an iPad. There was nothing to distinguish one key from the others by feel. Notable “Chiclet”-style keyboards were the keyboards on the original Blackberry or the first keyboard on the IBM PCjr.

[@the_kombinator]

Hah I had that disk camera in the late 80s. I don't ever recall taking pictures with it, but I did take it apart ;)

[@caeserromero3013]

Jobs didn't 'Invent' GUI, he stole the Idea from Xerox. he also wasn't interested in brining 'high end computing to the masses' (certainly not with a $9000 computer). What jobs wanted to do was bring the money of the masses to his pocket. Jobs was an extraordinary marketer and salesman, but he was not a 'technical visionary' (especially if you know about his later tech track record away from Apple). If you look up the development of LISA it was mostly the work of Trip Hawkins, John Couch & Jef Raskin (just as the earlier Apple computers were primarily the work of Wozniak).

[@selfdo]

Jobs' didn't STEAL the GUI, Xerox SOLD it to Apple. Yeah, those idiots at Xerox didn't know what they had. I'd say Jobs DID have quite the "tech vision" with his Next lines, much of which went back into Apple once he came back, but his "marketing genius" was gone when he was effectively fired from Apple.

[@sensorycircuits1338]

Common themes: Price, feature set, build quality/robustness, library/use cases, ease of use, timing into the market. Making a successful & innovative product is really difficult.

[@ledhceb]

The Timex Sinclair (actually a Zx-81) was the first computer I actually owned. Most recently the British Raspberry Pi 400 comes in at $91 and sports a Pi4 built into a keyboard. While the computing power of the Pi400 exceeds the Timex by many orders of magnitude (capable of driving 2x 4k displays) it has a similar remit, a low cost keyboard computer, intended for STEM and making. Note that the fastest supercomputer of that time, a Cray 1 ran 81 times slower than a Pi400! Actually the ZX-81 would clock in at ~$335 inflation adjusted.