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Whatever happened to...

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 17:13

The long-range wireless technology - which Intel claims is up to three times as fast as today's 3G networks - has also become a political football. Unlike Wi-Fi hotspots, operators need a licence to broadcast WiMAX signals. However, British mobile networks have mounted a legal challenge to prevent Ofcom auctioning off the 2.6GHz spectrum that WiMAX operates over. Why? Because it's the spectrum they want to run their rival Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology over.

Until Ofcom sorts that mess out, WiMAX remains destined to be little more than a footnote in British broadband.

Active desktop

In many ways, Active Desktop was ahead of its time. Introduced with Windows 98, it served the same function as today's widgets, allowing users to place customisable HTML content such as weather reports and stock feeds on the desktop. The idea was that these feeds would constantly update, giving users access to the latest information without visiting separate sites.

Although Active Desktop could have been an attractive proposition, its implementation suffered from a lack of sophistication. Many users found minimising all their desktop windows to get to the content was more irritating than just visiting the sites through a browser. This was coupled with relatively high resource usage, and security concerns about having HTML script running on the desktop. However, Microsoft is nothing if not stubborn, and while the idea was widely considered a failure it wasn't dropped until Vista, at which time the Redmond giant simply transformed it into the Windows Sidebar. There's also more of a hint of Active Desktop in Internet Explorer 8's Web Slices.

Video phone

Here's one for the pub quiz: who was the first person in Britain to own a video phone? Answer: Jeremy Beadle. However, it's been the best part of two decades since this unlikely bout of tech pioneering, and videophones have proved as popular as a lunch date with Hannibal Lecter.

BT first tried flogging the concept in 1992, with the launch of its Relate 2000. The handset promised video refresh rates of 8fps, although most reports suggest that you were lucky to see the picture change more often than your hairstyle. A decade on, mobile network 3 made video calls the cornerstone of its flashy new 3G network, but coverage was initially appalling and the service struggled to find an audience.

Despite these failures, the technology is still staggering on to this very day. How long do you think it's going to take companies to work out that nobody wants to look at the person they're calling?

Novell NetWare

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, NetWare was one of the biggest names in business networking with its simple but powerful server-management features and support for commodity hardware. But as Windows gained popularity, NetWare's DOS-prompt administration tools began to look dated, especially for the increasingly sophisticated features NetWare was gaining. Moreover, since NetWare was originally based on IPX/SPX rather than TCP/IP, it meshed poorly with internet services. Microsoft aggressively marketed Windows NT as an alternative, and as the 1990s drew to a close, Novell's market share was flagging badly. With the arrival of Windows 2000, NetWare's fate was sealed.

BTX

Back in early 2005, with processors growing ever hotter, Intel proposed a successor to the ATX form factor that would allow better airflow over the core components. This new design saw the motherboard flipped to the other side of the case, meaning the graphics-card cooler expelled hot air upwards, rather than down into the adjacent expansion cards. The processor was moved nearer the front intake fan and the north bridge placed behind it, along with the DIMM sockets. Incompatible with ATX parts, manufacturers were reluctant to embrace BTX until the consumer demand was there, but it failed to materialise. In the meantime, heatsinks grew more efficient, as did processors, diminishing the need for better airflow. Worse still, the rigid guidelines on motherboard layout meant parts with the memory controller on the processor, such as the hugely popular Athlon 64 and more recently, the Core i7, wouldn't fit on a BTX board at all. BTX parts can still be bought, but its shot at the mainstream is long gone.