We all know about the gadgets that get showered with constant praise—the icons, the segment leaders, and the game changers. Tech history will never forget the Altair 8800, the Walkman, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone.

But people do forget—and quickly—about the devices that failed to change the world: the great ideas doomed by mediocre execution, the gadgets that arrived before the market was really ready, or the technologies that found their stride just as the world was pivoting to something else.

In our last piece on gadget history, we profiled the worst products the Ars staff had ever used. Here, we celebrate the best products that are sliding slowly into the memory hole. But when they first appeared, we loved them.

Computer hardware

The Iomega Zip Drive

In the beginning was the floppy disk. It was eight inches across, and it was... floppy. Over time, the floppy shrank to 5-1/4”, then down to 3-1/2” (gaining a plastic outer shell in the process). It eventually offered 1.44MB of portable storage. And computer geeks saw that it was good.

But then the hard disk began to grow. Backing up important files became more of a hassle as hard disks passed the 200MB mark. After I bought my first Mac desktop (a clone, actually), I found that transferring my files from an old PowerBook 145 to my new Umax SuperMac J700 was a hassle, as was ensuring that all of my important documents were backed up. Enter the Zip Drive. Bigger and thicker than the 3-1/2” floppy drive, Zip disks held a whopping 100MB of data (they would later come in 250MB and 750MB sizes).

The Zip Drive was introduced in 1994, and I purchased an external SCSI model (and I terminated my SCSI chain properly, dammit!) within a couple years of its arrival on the market. Zip disks weren’t terribly cheap at $20 each, but I eventually amassed a sizable collection and backed up to them (semi) regularly.

By the latter half of the 1990s, OEMs like Apple and Dell offered Zip Drives as options on their machines, and I briefly owned a PowerBook 1400c with a Zip Drive module. But the Zip’s reign as the portable mass storage of choice did not last. By the end of the 1990s, CD-R and CD-RW drives were increasingly available; after I used Zip drives to move files from a PowerMac G3/266 to my new PowerMac G4/400, the Zip disks were stored away in a drawer. There they remained until I moved a few years ago, when they were put out in the alley along with the other electronic detritus I had accumulated over the nine years I lived in that house.

Nowadays, I can stuff a 32GB USB thumb drive in my pocket, making the bulky 100MB Zip disks seem even more antiquated. But for a few short years, the Zip Drive hit a sweet spot in the market, which is why I still have fond memories of it. (Eric Bangeman)

Magneto-optical drives

The number of instances where my tastes overlapped with those of the late Steve Jobs are pretty limited, but we did share one conviction: we both thought magneto-optical drives were a really good idea. Jobs actually made them the default removable storage media for some early models of NeXT computers, a legacy that lives on only through the spinning-beachball-of-death that persists in OS X. For me, they were the answer to a rather obscure issue: how do you keep an ever-expanding collection of microscope images organized and archived?

Back in my research days, I could generate hundreds of high-resolution images in a matter of hours—then do the same thing the next day. In the mid-'90s, this created all sorts of problems. Desktop hard drives hadn't reached the point where you could just leave every image you ever took on a single machine. Hard drives failed, so I needed a backup system. Not every machine would have all the software you'd need to work with the images, so you often needed to shuffle hundreds of megabytes between desktops.

Writable CDs hit the market around this time, but the burning software not exactly user friendly, and the discs created an organizational nightmare. A given day's work might involve imagining three different experiments. You were likely to repeat all of them at different points over the next few months. If you were good about archiving to CD, you'd end up with dozens of disk with bits and pieces of different experiments scattered on each one. Actually finding the bit you wanted later was not much fun.

MO disks seemed to offer a solution for all of these issues. The 5 1/4" versions had multi-gigabyte capacities but were removable, meaning you could shift the data to any machine with a drive hooked to it. They were also re-writable, meaning that whenever you got more material from a given project, you could just drop that into the same folder that contained the rest of that work. And they were archival quality, guaranteed to retain data for decades.

Plus, all the alternatives were much, much worse. Iomega was the king of portable media at the time, but people in my building were losing data left and right to the "click of death."

About the only thing obviously wrong with them was that MO drives were slow—but less obvious things took their toll. The tech never went mainstream, so both the drives and media ended up stuck at the high prices typical for a niche product. Newer, higher capacity drives were often promised but ended up badly delayed. The hardware that did make it to market was often poorly supported and suffered from flaky drivers.

With today's cheap, massive hard drives and cheap, fast networking, I'm not sure MO drives would be a great option now even if they had caught on at the time. But their fringe status is probably a worse fate than the technology deserved. Still, I hear that, like Spinal Tap, they're big in Japan. (John Timmer)

Vadem Clio C-1050

Windows CE gets no respect. But in 1998, the Vadem Clio looked like the future—and in many ways, it still does. The MIPS-based portable computer weighed 3 pounds, had a battery life of as much as 12 hours, and was the first really successful convertible tablet/notebook, at least from a design standpoint. Its blessing and curse was that it was built for Windows CE.

Microsoft heavily promoted a class of devices built on the Windows CE 3.0 H/PC platform called “PC companions.” The draw of Windows CE to device manufacturers was, among other things, its modularity; it allowed them to bolt on functionality specific to their hardware as well as other software. In Vadem’s case, that included CalliGrapher, handwriting recognition software from Vadem’s ParaGraph subsidiary, that made it the best pen tablet of its time. It allowed pen input directly into the Windows CE version of Microsoft Word, and was good enough that I could take cursive or print notes on the screen with such a low error rate that I seldom needed to correct them.

The design of the Clio, created by frogdesign based on ideas from Vadem's engineering director Edmond Ku, was innovation in itself. It was designed to be carried, with an almost organic shape that made it easy to hold with one hand and write on in its tablet form. Unlike the other notebook-style devices that were its contemporaries, it had a screen mounted on two arms that could rotate 180 degrees on a pair of carbon-fiber reinforced arms, allowing it to flip around and lay flat, tablet-style, while concealing its keyboard, or to be rotated into any position while open for use with its built-in keyboard. That made it ideal for punching out a breaking story on a long airplane flight sitting behind someone with a reclined seat, or filing a story by e-mail from a phone booth that had an RJ-11 plug to jack its 56kbps modem into.

Considering that my “real” notebook computer was an Apple PowerBook Duo (see our “Worst Gadgets” story), the Clio saved the day for me on a regular basis.

Windows CE lives on in many forms, and Vadem still owns ParaGraph. But the Clio design and other intellectual property associated with the device were acquired by The Pinax Group, which attempted to license out the "swing arm" design to other manufacturers before slipping off into obscurity. (Sean Gallagher)

Apple PowerBook 1400

Back when I was college, from 2000-2004, it's hard to believe that laptops were still relatively uncommon for classroom notetaking, even at a large school like UC Berkeley. WiFi was just coming out, and certain classes taught in certain lecture halls could be watched online. I had a trusty laptop that was even pretty old by 2000, the PowerBook 1400.

Beyond being a decent laptop for its era, the 1400 had two features that were pretty neat, and I've been surprised that they never quite caught on. The first was functional: expandable drive bays. On the bottom of the laptop, two modular slots allowed for an extra battery, a disk drive, a CD drive, or even a Zip drive, which was awesome in that pre-USB stick era. Both slots were hot-swappable when the computer was asleep, of course.

The second, which was more flashy, was the BookCover feature, a removeable piece of clear plastic on the top of the laptop that let users put in different patterns, art, stickers, or otherwise personalize their own computer. While I didn't know it at the time, ClarisWorks had a feature that let users create and print their own, based on an included template that was bundled with the software as an "extra." (Cyrus Farivar)

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