Technological progress is a ruthless business and the road is littered with must-have gadgets that fell by the wayside. Let's take a look at some of the false starts and the factors that led to obsolescence.

Instant cameras – The iconic Polaroid SX-70 came out in 1972. It was the first really useable instant camera with prints that developed as you looked at them rather than having to hold under your arm and peel apart. That was when Polaroid took off, but it went bankrupt in 2001 as digital cameras took off.

Digital watches – In the 70s everyone wore a newfangled digital watch. But not for long. In 1979 Douglas Adams wrote about lifeforms so primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. They didn’t win on function, just on being new and different. Digital watches never took over as everybody thought they would. Ultimately they were a failure because you had to fiddle with little buttons and work out what time 19:56 is.

Sandwich toaster – Sandwich toasters were introduced by Breville in 1974 and soon found their way to the back of the kitchen cupboard, where they reside to this day. It was an interesting development because it was dependent on Teflon. It was new, exciting but only does one thing. And once you’ve done that a few times it loses its appeal. Unless you’re a student.

A sandwich toaster.
[image by Nomad Tales, some rights reserved]

VCR – We think of video recorders as technological winners because every 1980s home had one. But whether VHS or Betamax, video cassettes were ultimately too complicated to survive. Long term they are losers because the technology required to read a video cassette is more complex than that required to read a CD or DVD – which may lose out to solid state storage.

Sinclair C5 – History has not been kind to Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5. The notorious mid-80s electric runaround has become a byword for failed technology. But why? It was neither meat nor fish nor fowl. It was too small and slow compared to cars but too bulky compared to bikes. It didn’t have the range either. If the world was full of things about the size of the Sinclair C5, it would have caught on. But it was a not very visible or fast vehicle and it wouldn’t go far.

Fax machines – Once a vital business tool, the fax machine is now largely redundant in the workplace. They took off in the 80s, largely driven by Japanese script. There are more than 10,000 basic characters in Japanese so typewriting is almost impossible and they needed a way to send handwritten messages. It has been overtaken by the relentless spread of English and computer things like Unicode which allows much more complicated emails.

Pagers – Before the mobile phone became a status symbol sometime in the mid-90s, a pager told the world how important you were. Clipped to the belts of doctors and executives, these matchbox-sized electronic devices relayed simple messages to their wearers. Pagers had all the appeal of text messaging but you couldn’t send messages. As soon as cellphones’ SMS allowed you to send, paging just collapsed and died.

Minidiscs – The Sony Minidisc and its late-90s rival the Philips Digital Compact Cassette stored compressed music but both lost out to MP3 players. They lost out to more robust technologies. What the Minidisc is up against is either solid state storage which has no moving parts and is therefore easy and reliable, or things like the iPod which is nice and sealed.

Rabbit phone – A very limited mobile handset introduced in 1992 which succumbed to marketplace myxomatosis and disappeared within a year. It was like having a cordless phone in your house but with base stations around shopping centres and train stations so you could make calls but not receive them. Completely pointless. But in a sense the idea is coming back with BT Home Hub and Fusion – a home phone that works like a cellphone when you go out.

The Rabbit Phone.
[image © copyright Jmb, some rights reserved]

BSB satellite TV – The British Satellite Broadcasting ‘Squarial’ proved a failure from the outset and by 1990 had brought down an entire company. It was the failure that never even succeeded temporarily. They used a different satellite to Sky and thought they could get by with a smaller dish with a cunning square aerial. But the elements had to be precisely spaced and they never managed to make them precisely enough.

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Discover more with the following Open University courses:

• Engineering the future
• Networked living: exploring information & communication technologies
• Data, computing and information
• Environment: journeys through a changing world
• Innovation: designing for a sustainable future
• Technologies for digital media
• Design and designing

About the author

Ian Johnston has been with the Open University since 1991, as a staff lecturer in the technology department.

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Blogging about

Digital Planet: BBC World Service

Let us guide you through a world of digital revolutions around this Digital Planet.

Once the realm of national geographical surveys, the increasing availability of affordable GPS devices means that it is increasingly possible to 'crowdsource' cartographic information (that is, map information) and generate maps that rival professional maps from user uploaded data. Where local infrastructure is such that you are more likely to find a dirt track than a recently laid motorway, local maps produced by tracking the daily movement of local travellers means that crowdsourced maps may in fact be more accurate than formally surveyed ones.

OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is the result of an international collaborative effort in which individuals can view, edit and maintain an increasingly accurate map of the world as it is today. In the same way the Wikipedia relies on the activity of volunteers, so too does OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap follows a five step process in the production of its maps. First, data is collected using GPS devices; the GPS traces are then uploaded to the OSM website, and transformed into the representation used by OSM. The next step is to label the routes so that they can be rendered correctly. The final step is to generate the actual graphical map tiles.

Other approaches to collaboarative mapping, such as Google's MapMaker, allow you to edit maps directly without the need to upload GPS data.

The following video shows how OSM maps can become increasingly detailed over time; in this case, we see how the Dutch port of Antwerp was mapped over a period from 2007 to 2009.

A second key feature that distinguishes OSM from commercial maps is that the data used to generate the maps is available under an open license. What this means, among other things, is that it is far easier for you to use the data for your own purposes. So for example, one service that I particularly like is called CloudMade, that makes it possible to add you own 'skin' (that is, your own colour theme or design style) to a map and share it as well. (So if you create your own Digital Planet for CloudMade/OSM, why not share a link to it on Twitter, using the #digitalplanet and #open2 hashtags?!:-).

So, wherever you are in the world, why not check out OpenStreetMap. And if you notice that the map isn't quite as accurate as it could be where you live, if you have a GPS device, why not consider uploading some of your own data to the map? Alternatively, why not try out Google MapMaker - it's currently open for editing locations in much of the southern hemisphere.

Or if you're looking for an even easier way in, why not try Google MyMaps? Google MyMaps let you annotate a Google map on your own map overlay with markers that identify points of interest to you. If you're fortunate enough to have an Android phone, the Google MyMaps app makes it one-click asy to add markers corresponding to your current location. But even without such a device, it;s possible to edit your own MyMap through any modern web browser. Even if you only add one or two points a day, it's amazing how quickly you can create a richly annotated map.

About the author

Tony Hirst is co-founder of the OU Robotics Outreach Group and a lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Open University. Far too much of his time is spent playing with web technologies, developing tools and applications that he claims will be OUseful, one day...

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The idea of gait recognition has been around for a long time. In G.K. Chesterton’s short story The Queer Feet, Father Brown prevents a crime by “merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage.” Gait analysis has been widely deployed in professional sports and medicine, enabling sports stars to improve their golf swing, running stance or cycling position and helping in the design of prosthetic limbs for example.

As a means of identifying someone at a distance, without any need to inconvenience the people being analysed, it would appear to be a useful proposition. It is important to note, however, that identifying someone in a crowded city square and verifying that someone is one of 200 people who have walked down a colourful corridor with clear contrast under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, are two entirely different problems.

Technically speaking, checking the gait of one person, in a psychedelic corridor with perfect lighting conditions, to find a match in a database of 200 recorded gaits, is relatively straightforward.

Detecting individual gaits in a dynamic, crowded city square, under less than ideal lighting conditions and pinpointing a baddie by attempting to match those (potentially) millions of readings against a database of millions of recorded gaits, is a much more difficult problem.

And we haven’t even thought about how we would get accurate measurements of millions of people’s (or indeed the baddie’s) walking styles on our benchmark database in the first place yet. Then if the baddie puts a stone in his shoe to change his walk to deliberately fool the software, as Dallas did with his funny walk on the first programme in the Bang Goes The Theory series, it becomes even more difficult.

From a security perspective, the notion that mass surveillance with advanced technology will magically detect the baddie, turns out to be fundamentally flawed. (It should be noted that mass surveillance is widely and wrongly promoted as an effective anti-terror tool but it is not advocated by the team at Southampton.)

Because terrorists are relatively rare, finding one is a needle in a haystack problem. You don’t make it easier to find the terrorist by throwing more hay (say the biometric data of millions of innocent people) on your data haystack. The technology doesn’t simply home in on the criminal as it does in Hollywood movies.

The police and security services end up spending so much time dealing with innocent people and false leads that their limited resources get swamped.

If each of the UK’s population of around 60 million were monitored once a day and our system was 99% accurate (e.g. flags 1 in a 100 innocents as terrorists and detects 99 out of every 100 terrorists), the police will have to process 600,000 false leads per day.

Given those of us who traverse public places are monitored multiple times a day you can see how that could quickly become unmanageable. It’s also unacceptable from a social, legal and economic point of view.

So it is probable that the use of gait recognition and other biometrics will prove to be more useful for small scale authentication - e.g. employee access to the workplace, rather than large scale surveillance e.g. picking a terrorist out of a crowd.

On small-scale authentication

Technically speaking authentication or verification is an easier thing to do than identification. Authentication (assuming we’re not trying to do it remotely) with biometrics merely asks whether a biometric belongs to the person presenting themselves for authentication. It compares their proffered biometric with the one on file under their name and determines whether there is a match.

Identification is much harder to do and is what security systems at airports or busy shopping areas or sports stadiums attempt to do – measure the biometrics of everyone passing through and attempt to check whether there is a match with a large (and not necessarily particularly reliable) database of biometrics.

The difference appears pedantic but is very important. In the authentication case one biometric is checked against one specific biometric on the database. In the identification case, millions of biometrics are checked against millions (potentially) of biometrics on the database.

Even with highly reliable technologies – say 99.9% accurate and none of the modern systems approach that yet – these millions of checks searching for matching pairs generate huge numbers of false positives (innocents flagged as malcontents) and dangerous levels of false negatives (real bad guys flagged as innocents and it only takes one to get through to cause serious security problems).

The police and security services then spend so much time, energy and resources dealing with innocent people they don’t have the time to deal with the real criminals.

Find out more

Floyd Rudmin, Professor of Social & Community Psychology at the University of Tromsø in Norway, explains why, statistically speaking, mass surveillance cannot work in this article:
The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation: Why does the NSA engage in mass surveillance of Americans when it's statistically impossible for such spying to detect terrorists?
Counterpunch magazine, May 24, 2006

For those interested in the use of biometrics and security more generally I’d recommend:
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World
Bruce Schneier, Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Freedom to Tinker blog - hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Jerry Fishenden Blog - New Technology Observations from a UK Perspective.

UK High Court Judge, Hon Sir Jack Beatson explains the legal issues with the use of biometrics in crime detection in Forensic Science and Human Rights: The Challenges [pdf], his valedictory address as President of the British Academy of Forensic Science, 16 June 2009.

Nuffield Council on Bioethics report, The forensic use of bioinformation: ethical issues [pdf], published in September 2007.

Human Genetics Commission Citizens Report, July 2008.

Biometrics: Enabling Guilty Men to Go Free? Further Adventures from the Law of Unintended Consequences - Jerry Fishenden blog post

Digital Decision Making: Back to the Future - chapters five and six
Ray Corrigan, Springer-Verlag

Study information and communications technologies with The Open University