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Old 9th Jun 2017, 7:22 am   #61
MrBungle
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Originally Posted by Bazz4CQJ View Post
Well, what about... John F Kennedy...before this decade is out...Neil Armstrong, and safely back again?

T'is a pity that at the moment, the Americans have to cadge rides in to low-Eath orbit
Apollo 1 Command Module. Let's also not forget Challenger. Big accidents very much avoidable.

Soyuz is pretty reliable so far. Makes sense. The Americans want something grand. The Russians want to get to space.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 9:11 am   #62
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Wankel engines. Especially in the NSU Ro80.
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) they are very good powerful smooth engines.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 9:17 am   #63
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I don't think anyone's mentioned DCC, Digital Compact Cassette, yet. I remember it being launched with great fanfare but I've only ever seen one DCC machine in the wild. Its owner was just using it as a DAC!

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Old 9th Jun 2017, 9:45 am   #64
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Wankel engines. Especially in the NSU Ro80.
Currently doing very well as a compact power source in turbo gliders - EB28, ASH 25 etc
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 9:47 am   #65
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 9:48 am   #66
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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CP/M and Concurrent CP/M operating system is probably the ultimate example. MSDOS set the software industry back years.
CP/M was very good and lived out its natural life. Concurrent CP/M had a short life as it was at the end of the life cycle of 8 bit hardware so possibly.

MSDOS, well, prior to windows probably the most successful computer operating system ever, technically a mess but you can't argue that it wasn't successful.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 10:36 am   #67
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Perhaps there should be another museum for things which were successful but should not have been. MSDOS and the 8086 architecture should be in there.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 10:45 am   #68
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The Sony Minidisc is a technology that seemed to have a very short life. I have a hi-fi player and disks but seems to have been made obsolete very quickly by the emergence of solid state music storage technology. The engineering was very good though.

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Old 9th Jun 2017, 1:14 pm   #69
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I can't see how the RMS Olympic was a failure.
Does anyone know why HD-DVD and BluRay were 'rival formats', yet LP and the 'new unbreakable 45' jointly rendered the long-established 78 obsolete?
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 1:24 pm   #70
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

1/
The Rabbit phone

2/
Cobra Mist
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 3:19 pm   #71
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Brigham
HD-DVD and Blue ray were rivals like VHS and Betamax Blue-Ray gained more support and then won, although that seems to be waning in the face of downloads.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 3:30 pm   #72
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Betamax probably deserves to be there somewhere - though maybe mine has now made its own admission of the fact and refused even to power up when I tried it yesterday.
My Betamax players are both still going strong along with their tapes
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 3:33 pm   #73
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I don't consider Betamax a failure. Probably just as many going today as vhs.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 3:33 pm   #74
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Some failed tape formats to ponder;
Garrard & RCA Tape Cartridge
Grundig Cassette DC launched alongside the Philips and disappeared quickly.
The JVC Microcassette HiFI on a dictation size tape and the Elcaset mentioned earlier.
In the face of downloads and solid state storage all recording formats seem destined to disappear soon except with forum members who like to keep them going!
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 4:19 pm   #75
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Surely failure is crashed and burned, or never really getting established. Being successful, but losing out to competition, or just becoming obsolete is natural selection, very little is immortal in the physical world. If Betamax was a failure, then 405 TV was too.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 4:34 pm   #76
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Originally Posted by high_vacuum_house View Post
The Sony Minidisc is a technology that seemed to have a very short life. I have a hi-fi player and disks but seems to have been made obsolete very quickly by the emergence of solid state music storage technology. The engineering was very good though.
It had a much longer life in the AV industery. MD was the media of choice for backing tracks on most events I worked on upto just a few years ago.
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 5:27 pm   #77
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HD-DVD and Blue ray were rivals like VHS and Betamax Blue-Ray gained more support and then won, although that seems to be waning in the face of downloads.
LP and 45 were rivals too.
The 45 rpm single was deliberately designed to challenge the LP format; yet both became accepted.
The same occurred, twice, in the home games console market. You had either SEGA or NINTENDO, and now SONY or X-BOX. We never heard of anyone 'not buying' until the 'format war is over'.
So why are some products a battle to the death, and some just personal preference?
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 5:41 pm   #78
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Apollo 1 Command Module. Let's also not forget Challenger. Big accidents very much avoidable. Soyuz is pretty reliable so far. Makes sense. The Americans want something grand. The Russians want to get to space.
Your response makes little sense. It was always likely/inevitable that there would be accidents and losses getting to the Moon and pretty much all accidents are avoidable in retrospect (e.g. the sinking of the channel ferry "Spirit of Free Enterprise"). The Russians, sadly, had their fair share of accidents too (though you fail to mention those) which were in vain, since they never reached the Moon.

If you think the Apollo programme was a failure, then I think that your rationale is even less reasonable than those who think it was hoax.

Speaking of the TU144, shall we put Concorde in the museum? It never sold anything like the projected numbers and one crashed and killed a lot of people due to a known vulnerabilty which was only fixed after the crash. I'd definately say no, but what do you think? Apollo, the Shuttle and Concorde all in the museum of failure ?

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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:00 pm   #79
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Hi

I'd include in the list the WorldSpace satellite radio platform.
Although the static radio sets worked well, I don't think they
ever got the mobile ones to market before the provider went bust.
I don't know if the satellites were redeployed for some other use or abandoned.

Stu
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Old 9th Jun 2017, 6:13 pm   #80
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Closer to topic, perhaps, CD players in motor vehicles. I don't ever remember one that despite clever 'reading in advance' technology, actually worked consistently over bumps. It's just not technology that is suitable for the highways. (In my opinion)
Au contraire - in the 1990s I did a few hundred thousand miles in a Ford Granada 2.9i that had a Sony "6-CD" stacker in the boot. It was great - shove in a 6-pack of CDs and I could drive from Oxfordshire to Edinburgh without a glitch! It didn't even flinch when I fired up the various 100+ Watt HF/VHF radios also on-board.

Far, far better than cassette-players!
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