5. Overdrive socket and CPU upgrade boards: Remember Intel's
" overdrive socket"?. The idea was simple: keep your existing motherboard and just replace the CPU, by plugging it into a special "overdrive socket", to save on upgrade costs. This illusion was sold to unsuspecting customers as the holy grail of modern computing. I remember buying a 486-66 DX2 board and being told by the vendor "when the 586 arrives, you'll just plug it in this spare upgrade socket". Wow, it sounded so exciting. Like everyone else, however, I got tired of waiting for the elusive Overdrive CPUs and retired my 486 buying a 100Mhz Pentium I which additionally had PCI slots.
Looking back, I reckon this "illusion" might have helped La Intella sell a lot of i486 systems steering people away from AMD's offerings. In the words of
this page on 486 CPUs: "The final development of the 80486 chip may be the Pentium OverDrive chip. Some System Boards have been produced that are equipped with a Pentium OverDrive socket. This chip took about two years to actually see the light of day and now the Pentium OverDrive chip has finally arrived it has been discovered not all the boards manufactured with a Pentium OverDrive socket will actually work with the chip.".
The idea of a separate "overdrive socket" was quickly killed, but "Overdrive CPUs" continued for a bit more, and were sold also for Pentium PRO sockets, basically giving you a Pentium II on a slower-bus Socket-8 Pentium PRO motherboard. Other firms also made "586 upgrade boards" that plugged into 486 motherboards. They never had a huge following as the upgrade from a 486 to 586 mobo often gave newer technologies like PCI and Plug and Pray, and a faster bus.
6. Commodore's CDTV and CD32 games console: as an Amiga user at the time, I thought for a few years that Commodore Business Machines would be able to pull this off. After all, the Amiga always had great games, and the CDTV-idea-turned-CD32 games console looked
solid enough. This was the evolution of the Amiga 16/32bit computers from the desk to the living rooms.
In the end CBM was so mismanaged that the whole company went under. What is sad is that the idea was very good: lure existing and new games developers to the platform, which would in turn make the Amiga software ecosystem grow even stronger.
Microsoft applied the same idea with Windows games and the XBox console, which proves that The Vole copies others' ideas more often than not. Those interested to learn more should probably check out the book titled "
On the Edge" - 'the spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore'.
7. Vista. The "evolution" of Windows XP. Nobody out of Redmondia got excited about it. Even Microsoft
admitted it. PC builders like Dell choose to
continue offering WinXP. And Microsoft appeasers at Gartner
said it will take up to two years for Vista sales to surpass XP. Need we say more?.
Microsoft Vista booth at Expo Dell Buenos Aires 2007.
Wow! Notice the crowd fighting to be the first to buy their copy? Neither did we.
8.
The EISA and VLBus:
EISA was designed as an evolution of ISA after IBM annoyed third party vendors with its Microchannel bus, it promised jumper-free boards and you configured boards with an ugly DOS-based utility to assign IRQs and the like. I will spare newer generations with blank stares on their faces as they read this any more information about the joy it was to manually assign IRQs to ISA and EISA boards. I owned a 486-DX2 motherboard with EISA slots. I hated it (EISA) with a passion. After using the EISA setup utils, you screamed for jumpers and a screwdriver. EISA enjoyed some limited success on business servers before the move to PCI killed it for good.
VL-BUS: Vesa Local Bus This was actually a new technology, not an evolution of ISA. But it was sold to consumers as the next upgrade path to get decent video speeds out of 486 and a few early 586 motherboards.
It worked quite well, but PCI first -and later AGP- killed it. VL-BUS boards were the longest you could find, and you always thought you had broken something after inserting one in its slot due to the heavy pressure and force that was needed. I'm happy to see it dead. More
here.