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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:13 pm   #81
stuarth
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The Concorde crashed because it ran over a metal strip which fell off a recently departed DC10. Now there WAS a failure.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:14 pm   #82
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Originally Posted by RobinBirch View Post
Currently doing very well as a compact power source in turbo gliders - EB28, ASH 25 etc
Much improved and refined, I trust? Not too many in motor cars though.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:15 pm   #83
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The CueCat, solving a problem that didn't really exist and contributing to Radio Shack's demise.
Heh! I remember those!
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:17 pm   #84
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I nominate the Duga-3 Woodpecker array. Obviously no-one can now get near it, but also reliance on the fluctuating ionosphere before suitable compensation methods had been developed (is said to have) limited it's usefulness.
Whereas the pyramidal PAVE-PAWS arrays worked really a lot better.

[Both DUGA-3 and PAVE-PAWS were, in their time, spectacular annoyances to us weak-signal amateur types]
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:19 pm   #85
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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I don't think you can describe rotary engines as a failure. There was problems with the early rotor tip seals but once developed and perfected (Mazda)...
I don't see the motor industry rushing to fit them in their products. Perhaps there are other issues - stigma, even - that preclude their use for more tor cars?
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:21 pm   #86
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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I don't consider Betamax a failure. Probably just as many going today as vhs.
I agree, Betamax was strong for a long time , maybe not in the rental area when it came to film rental, and indeed Sony have only recently stopped manufacturing Betamax tapes.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:23 pm   #87
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Can I lob the Bristol Brabazon into the mix ?

Big, slow, expensive - nascent Jet technology made it obsolete before it ever flew.

Alas the DH Comet spectacularly sullied the reputation of fast-and-clean UK civil aviation and so the world bought Boeing/Lockheed.

[Sidenote: I'm always intruigued at how Neville Shute Norway's "No Highway" novel anticipated by some years the Comet's catastrophic metal-fatigue issues. I consider Shute to be one of the overlooked 'visionaries' of the late-1940s]
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:52 pm   #88
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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The Phillips CDI ... was a total flop.
I actually built someone an IR receiver which translated the received codes from his CD-I remote into PC serial mouse packets, so that it could be used as a handheld 'wireless mouse' for a PC, for lecture purposes. It was an unusual remote in that it had an analogue joystick incorporated, along with the more usual range of buttons. This was long before actual wireless mice and keyboards became widely available.

I was paid a (then) high-end PC graphics card for the project. But it says something that even then, the only part of the system the owner felt he had a use for was the remote.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:04 pm   #89
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The Wankel engine was a success, it did what it was meant to do and did it well. Smooth, excellent power-to-weight ratio. The rotor seals were a weak point, but when the right materials came along, life increased vastly. They're not used in cars because they burn too much oil so can't meet emission standards. Basically, they have niche applications.

If the Bristol Brabzon was a failure then what about the Hughes H4 Hercules? Even bigger, late, only one built ever, although as it did fly (once) it could be argued it was a technical success but a commercial failure!
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:06 pm   #90
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Companies are very coy about their failures - for obvious reasons. Few of them end up like the Sinclair C5 - a very public failure. The only way the public will get to know about them is if the people on the job come clean and reveal what happened.

So I trawled my own professional experience to recall what went wrong. THe first project I was on as a graduate design engineer was at Pye Telecom in Cambridge - at their mobile radio lab. I was on a team tasked with designing a version of their M206, which was an AM boot mount transceiver with a very high performance. The requirement was to meet Home Office specifications for the police and fire services. That meant covering two 4MHz wide bands - as far as I recall that was 80-84MHz and 98 - 102MHz (one band was transmit and the other receive, I can't remember which).

Our version converted that to use frequency synthesis, offer both AM and FM modes, and 12.5 and 25kHz channelling. It was even clever enough to do "quasi-sync" mode without an actual IF filter wide enough to cope with three carriers spaced at 6.25kHz intervals. It had a microprocessor which scanned around very quickly to pick the best of the three carriers - and that was "clever" at the time that the MOD slapped a restriction notice on it in response to our patent application.

That set failed. Not because it didn't meet the spec. Prototypes went to the HO, and as far as I know they were happy with them. They just failed to place an order. In the end there was no order, because they moved the frequency band up to around 150MHz to clear out FM Band II for the new broadcasting services.

Calling it a failure may be a bit harsh, since much of the technology went back into other Pye Telecom products, notably the frequency synthesiser, which ended up in the M290 series of commercial products.

Richard
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:13 pm   #91
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Another total failure that I was somewhat associated with was Ionica. This was a company based in Cambridge around 1990 - 1996. It aimed to compete directly with BT by rolling out a microwave "last mile" telephone system, which would offer customers two phone lines at less cost than BT were offering at the time. This was a point to multi-point network operating at 3.5GHz. Technically it was very advanced - no other high volume product was operating much above 2.4GHz as far as I know back then, and pushing electronics that extra GHz while keeping the costs down was a severe challenge.

The two line customer premises equipment meant (back then) that people could use their phone line for voice calls, and be on the internet with the other line - using the usual voice band modem which was the only solution at the time.

Ionica went bankrupt. Not sure exactly why - probably because their business model was unrealistic, and they were possibly too disorganised to actually do a rollout in an advance economy like the UK. They had much more success overseas, in 3rd world countries - and I was involved with their partner company Nortel, which sold and installed the products exclusively outside the UK. So places like Sri Lanka and Mexico lapped up the product to the tune of millions of lines. Commonly in these sort of countries the incumbent phone supplier would take an order for a new phone line, and if you were lucky you might actually get the line 10 years later! No wonder, a line which could be provided within 2 - 3 weeks of order was an absolute winner.

Total failure in the UK though!

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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:18 pm   #92
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Veering off the subject but there's the rolls royce vulture aero engine, the twenty-four cylinder unit is one of their few engineering failures, out of it's demise and the avro Manchester bomber it was fitted to came the legendary Lancaster.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:32 pm   #93
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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that preclude their use for more tor cars?
That should, of course, say motor cars. I'm tempted to nominate the well-meaning but way-too-clever spillchucker 'I'll-put-in-what-I-think-he-means' mechanism in the iPhone!
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:33 pm   #94
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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I don't see the motor industry rushing to fit them in their products. Perhaps there are other issues - stigma, even - that preclude their use for more tor cars?
Well Mazda used them in very successful production cars until 2013 (RX8) and are apparently still keen to develop the technology further. They are talking about and indeed building prototypes of hybrids using rotary engines.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:48 pm   #95
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

WorldSpace Radio and (potentially) DAB. Trim Jeans. The Milnes gas-powered HT eliminator. The side-contact valve base. The RCA Nuvistor.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:48 pm   #96
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Originally Posted by HamishBoxer View Post
I don't consider Betamax a failure. Probably just as many going today as vhs.
But who today uses VHS?

From what I remember of the format-wars in the late-70s/early-80s what truly stiffed Betamax was that its advocates were reluctant to sell industrial-grade tape-replication farms to the adult industry.

The VHS side had no qualms and would happily sell 1-to-100 duplication gear to anyone who waved a fistfull of Dollars/Zlotys/Roubles/Yen in their direction.

Content is King. Even if it doesn't always render fleshtones perfectly.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 8:29 pm   #97
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The Transputer. Sink of vast quantities of government money.

I had to evaluate it for BT in the 80s. My opionion was that it had an inadequate development environment for the complexity of its applications. A great idea to have a huge "meshed" set of processors, but it failed to get any real traction in the market against conventional processors.

Made in Bristol, of course! Chris1900s (OP's) home town.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 8:30 pm   #98
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Currently doing very well as a compact power source in turbo gliders - EB28, ASH 25 etc
And also in man-luggably-lightweight APUs/gensets/air-compressors/firefighting-blowers/foam-provisioners on thousands of airfields across the globe.

For small-package Kilowatts-per-Kilogram power it's hard to beat a Wankel !!
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 8:36 pm   #99
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The Dolphin public access version of Tetra/Airwave. This was intended to replace/compete with NB3, the PAMR national trunked MPT1327 spec analogue radio system. I left the game just as one of our large customers was migrating over to it. I never found out what happened in the end but I suspect that someone was left with an awful lot of useless sets in various places. We trialled handportables and coverage seemed ok at the time. I wonder what went wrong?
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 8:41 pm   #100
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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The Transputer. Sink of vast quantities of government money.

I had to evaluate it for BT in the 80s. My opionion was that it had an inadequate development environment for the complexity of its applications. A great idea to have a huge "meshed" set of processors, but it failed to get any real traction in the market against conventional processors.
True: the lack of a sane compiler for it that could identify "parallelisable" parts of a job and spread them across an array was the killer.

I spent time evaluating Transputers against the late- 1980s "mini-supercomputer" symmetrical-multiprocessor players like the i860, Alliant, Pyramid, Sequent, Convex - for various nuclear/geophysics/computational-fluid-dynamics stuff.

Truth was, though when working on an optimal workload they could be blisteringly fast most of the time you had 63 processors sittimng idle and waiting for the 64th to complete its task.

The Convex C-1 a client bought spent most of its time servicing Unix-shell command-line users.

"Putting 64 wheels on a car doesn't automatically make it 16 times faster than a car with 4 wheels" as I was apt to tell people.
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