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Aug 21, 2023

Readers reply: what are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations?

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

What are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations? Brian Phipps, Sheffield

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Without doubt, the Psion Organiser, launched in 1984, closely followed by 1999's BlackBerry. Richard Knowles

The tiny Sony Walkman. All my CDs copied at CD quality, a decent software system, and Spotify if you must. Credit-card size with an earphone connection ... Anthony Loraine

Horn & Hardart automats and teaching cursive handwriting in schools. Richard Orlando

A pen and a writing pad! Sandra Condron

Those of a certain age will recall the VHS and Betamax duel to the death – and many would suggest that Betamax is the vanquished product that should be remembered. But no: there was a third, better, format: Philips and Grundig's Video 2000. It had two sides and up to four hours on each. Simeon Gilchrist

The Video 2000 was bloody brilliant: you could turn the tapes over, like audio cassettes, and record something else on the other side. SpoilheapSurfer

Sega Dreamcast should have absolutely wiped the floor with PlayStation. Better in every way except sales. unclestinky

Little plastic submarine models lurking in breakfast cereal boxes. Dismayed_squared

In the age of software control of everyday items, from thermostats to cars dash controls, once ubiquitous buttons and dials have been replaced with touchscreens and keypads. It's got to such a crazy level. For example, Tesla requires drivers to navigate a touchscreen to change windscreen wiper speed. In 2020, the screen was judged by a court in Germany to be a distracting electronic device. Bradley Hunt

The Sunbeam Radiant toaster, invented in the late 1940s by Ludvik J Koci, is the best ever. There is no lever – you need only drop the bread into the slot to turn it on. The bread gracefully descends into the machine, where it toasts. When done, the toast glides up and out of the toaster. Seems to work for ever. And has a really cool space age look. Iain Tullis

I nominate the wonderful Here One smart earbuds from Doppler Labs. They had assorted tricks, but one was an absolute life-changer for me, for the year or so it lasted. In a crowded restaurant or bar, with lots of other people talking at once, it let you "focus" your hearing, via a little pointer in the app, so you could hear only the person or small group you wanted to hear. The rest was muffled out. It was like having a directional mic you could point at the people you wanted to hear. It was smart enough to know (mostly) which voices to focus on and which to muffle.

Most people can do that without a gadget, but I’ve never been able to. I’ve got good hearing, had all the tests, but I’ve never been able to hold a conversation in a crowded place, because all I can hear is babble. I can't pull out just one voice and understand the words. So I’d just nod and smile politely – and try to avoid these places.

I bought a Here One and for a few months I realised what it must be like to be able to do that all the time. They were not perfect, but it made it possible to talk to my wife and friends in busy places, which had never been possible before. They patched the bug in my sound-processing wetware.

Then, Doppler Labs went under, the app was pulled from the stores and they stopped working, other than as "dumb" earbuds. Lots of the other smart features they pioneered made it into other brands of earbuds, but not that one. Apparently, it counts as a hearing/health feature that requires clinical trials and licences, so nobody in the earbud market implements it. And hearing-aid companies don't do it for people with technically normal hearing, like me, as apparently it's very rare in people without hearing loss.

So, back to nodding, smiling and wondering what the jokes and gossip was, until I quiz my wife afterwards. Or never finding out, if she wasn't there. A glimpse of normality, snatched away. I really miss them. Bob Grahame

Water glass (sodium silicate) is not totally defunct, but has disappeared completely from the domestic setting. It has a variety of uses: to preserve eggs; as a versatile adhesive and sealant for leaky car radiators and head gaskets. It used to be available in town, when chemists really were chemists, not glorified cosmetics counters with a tiny pharmacy attached. drbad1

Record players with an option to play discs at 16⅔. The discs themselves were intended for spoken-word transcriptions and never caught on commercially. However, for an aspiring guitarist, the facility to play LPs at half-speed made it easier to work out what notes were being played and to play along at half speed, one octave apart. (Not that it helped much in my case, alas.) EddieChorepost

Teletext: it was a pretty quick and easy way of accessing information. It was deprecated when the move to Freeview/digital TV started, but need not have been. I remember that the BBC Freeview channels offered "text" via the red button, but it was slower and had fewer pages than the Ceefax service.

I’m not sure it's even a technical challenge; the BBC already takes headlines from its website CMS to populate its news channel's scrolling headlines, so it could easily take pages from the same for a teletext stream – in fact, someone has done this using a Raspberry Pi.

Yes, lots of people now have access to the internet/apps via their mobile phones, but, for those without, it could be a way of reading the news, weather and latest football scores. On modern TVs, it would be incredibly quick. (Many countries still broadcast the teletext signal via their digital services – Germany, for example, has teletext via digital satellite. They even have mobile phone apps that use the same numbers/interface.) monkeyfinger

Great big valve radios, with heavy wooden cabinets that produce a wonderful tone and remind you of exotic places such as Luxembourg, Hilversum and Oslo. They require patience, and switching on before the news, so that things can get nicely warmed before the announcer tells you that Alec Douglas-Home has just resigned. bricklayersoption

Lyons cupcakes. Orange, lemon and chocolate. Bring them back, pleeeaase. RD250A

Ready-stick wallpaper. The rolls where impregnated with adhesive and placed in a special trough filled with water. A plastic bracket with suckers was placed at the top of wall, then paper was drawn out of the trough and held by the bracket. You then simply wiped downwards to stick it to the wall. Marvellous. Stechriswillgil

Since everybody uses their mobile phone now, you don't seem to be able to buy a decent digital alarm clock (or clock radio). Paulo777

Digital Research's Gem software: did the same job as Microsoft's Windows, but much better. Also better than Windows 2. Discontinued before Microsoft soldiered on and produced the usable Windows 3. IBM OS/2: intended by all concerned to be the graphical user interface for IBM PC compatibles. Windows was used, by agreement, as a stopgap. Took so long to get right that Windows already owned the market, although OS/2, when it emerged, was better than Windows of the time. Novell NetWare: the network operating system (NOS) that owned the market. Microsoft produced the lame Windows NT, as they had to have a NOS. Novell took its eye of the ball and let Microsoft, already known for Windows, supplant NetWare. pol098

The Minitel in France was a great innovation. When it appeared just over 40 years ago, France Télécom gave away the monitor. With it, you could access lots of "online" services for the price of a phone call. It wasn't a computer, in that there was no hard disk or processor and you couldn't stock information. They were basically "dumb" terminals. Dumb, but not daft. People got quickly hooked and France Télécom started to make a tidy profit in all sorts of premium services, including adult chatrooms (known as "le Minitel rose").

You could do lots on the Minitel. For instance, if you typed "My car has broken down", it would give you a list of garages in whichever town or département you had selected. If you typed "I would like to visit Normandy", a list a hotels would appear. You had access to the yellow pages; you could consult SNCF information, sports, weather and road traffic updates, when the next strikes would be; you could use it to check cinema and theatre listings and even book tickets. You could also consult your bank account (with a password) and bank statements, transfer money and pay bills. You could send flowers all over the world, look for a job, prepare a CV.

Soon you could have a mailbox and exchange stuff with others (at one point, 9m households were using it), have pen pals, learn a language. In 1990, there were about 6m Minitels. France Télécom struggled to export the product and the advent of the internet circa 1995 killed it off. But, in 2006, there were still 2 million people using it! It ceased to function in 2012. auroreborealis