Vintage Collection of Tech Failures

StormDriver writes "For every good design there are a dozen failed concepts. Nothing illustrates that better than a great online vintage gadget collection, published yesterday by the Microsoft Research team. The collection is a brainchild of Bill Buxton, one of the principal Microsoft researchers, a guy who's been through 30 years of continuous tech design. Awarded with three honorary doctorates and several professional awards, Bill also likes to gather things – the vintage, geeky kind of things, to be precise. Over the years, he has gathered an impressive collection of prototypes, probably the best I have seen online."

FrogPad

[christurkel]

The frogpad was not a failure. I work for a not for profit serving the disabled and we used FrogPads all the time. It was insanely useful for those with limited hand movement. It sucked when they stopped making them.

Failed?

[Lumpy]

The handeykey Twiddler is still in production and still used by many. It's a godsend to people with disabilities.

Frnaklin ebookman worked great for when it was viable. It's failure was that publishers were afraid of ebooks. it had good readability unti lthe Rex came about with a far better screen. Both were ahead of their time and only "failed" because of publishers.

A lot of that stuff were far from failures. they were designed for a specific task. the 3d mousing devices are STILL used to this day in high end 3d CAD.

I think the submitter needs to understand what "failed" means.