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Whatever happened to...

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 17:13

Thankfully, modern versions of Windows have much improved memory management, making such packages extinct. There is "tune-up" software that promises to increase your available memory, but generally, these modern packages just flush the contents of RAM into virtual memory, providing a temporary speed increase... until you need to access the data that's been paged out.

Zip drives

There was a time when 500MB was a high-capacity hard drive, and it was during this era that Iomega's Zip drive shone. Released in 1994, the Zip drive quickly became the most popular of all the super-floppy products, offering 100MB of removable storage and later 250MB. However, when CD burners made it easy to store 650MB on a cheap disc that worked in nearly any computer, Zip drives began to lose their lustre. Iomega fought back with the Jaz drive, which supported 1GB and 2GB discs, but it couldn't compete on cost.

Unlike the floppy disk's graceful slide into obsolescence, however, Zip drives would depart in infamy. Unbeknown to most, Zip discs were prone to developing misaligned heads, rendering the data on the disc unreadable. A drive searching for missing data would produce an ominous clicking sound, which quickly became known as the Click of Death, as it was a sure sign that a catastrophic loss of data was on its way. Although competing products such as SparQ and SyQuest continued to bump up the storage, the arrival of USB drives and the ability to have huge capacities rattling around in the pocket pretty much put paid to the days of proprietary storage.

Apple's Copland OS

You may recall the great architectural leap Apple made nearly a decade ago, when version nine of its Mac OS was replaced with the shiny Mac OS X. This was, in fact, the company's second attempt to make the transition. The Copland Project, started in 1994 and sadly nothing to do with Sylvester Stallone, was supposed to replace the doddering System 7 with a new, supercharged Mac OS that completely overhauled the back-end code and user interface to give huge improvements in performance and productivity. Apple showed off demos at its Worldwide Developers Conference in 1996, and even sent out a "developer release". Unfortunately, it was hopelessly unstable, and nowhere near ready. Apple pulled the plug and started again from scratch with a Unix-based approach, leaving Mac users waiting two more years for an updated OS.

Domesday project

Not many ventures have been as badly let down by technology as the Domesday project was in 1986. Conceived as a celebration of the original Domesday book, the multimedia edition was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and included maps, videos, images and accounts of local history by over one million people - mostly schoolchildren. Unfortunately, this data was entrusted to laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which by 2002 had disappeared from sight faster than the first pint on a Friday night.

As fears mounted that the information would be lost forever, the Universities of Leeds and Michigan announced they had saved the day. Accessing the BBC Master Computer, the team was able to emulate the interface and retrieve the information from the discs. Unfortunately, it was impossible to copy the images and videos from the discs. Crisis was averted when the researchers managed to track down and digitise the original one-inch analogue films used to record the images and videos. They were then re-encoded and reinserted into the newly emulated system. The Domesday Project will soon be housed at Bletchley Park.