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Ask HN: Tech that seems to have vanished?
70 points by araes on Sept 11, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 186 comments
Main Question: What tech do you remember over the past years that seems to have withered or vanished from the public zeitgeist? (even if it's really just stealth).

Motivation: Was reading "Ian Wilmut, Creator of Dolly the Sheep Dies" [1] today, and realized that Dolly was born back in 1996 (>1/4 century). Yet, I rarely, if ever, read about cloning of any kind until Dolly's creator dies.

Notably, this appears to be a case where the tech is being used, yet not written about very much [2]. The list of species cloned is pages long, yet I have not read about any of these in major news. [3] Cloning hamburger (cattle)? Cloning housepets (canines)? Backup housepets in case Yeller falls in the well (Sooam Biotech, South Korea, was reported in 2015 to have cloned 700 dogs for their owners @ $100k / each)?

Other examples from my own view:

Graphene - First sighted 2004, still cannot buy graphene in any real quantities (cm's for $100's)

Digital/Smart/Bionic Contact Lens - First sighted 2010, apparently existed earlier (1999). A lot of companies have appeared and then failed or pivoted [4] (Mojo Vision being the most recent [5])

Thermal Cameras - I really thought every phone would have a cheap, mass manufacture thermal camera by now, so everybody could do "U so hot" jokes.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-scientist-who-created-do...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_animal_cloning

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_have_been...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality#Contact_lens...

[5] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/after-losing-sight-of-its-...




The technology I always cite for something that had huge hype then died is 3D generally. I remember around the time Avatar was release everyone was convinced that 3D was the next big thing.

For several years after Avatar it was hard to watch movies that weren't showing in 3D. People rushed out to buy 3D TVs. Phones were featuring 3D displays. Cameras were boasting the ability to capture 3D pictures...

I think 3D will eventually make a come back as VR technology progresses, but I genuinely didn't get the hype for 3D during that period.


The first 3D movie I saw I knew it was just going to be a trend. I'll admit, it took longer to die than I expected, but it was inevitable. I'm still not convinced that 3D VR will be the next big thing any time soon. The experience of playing fruit ninja on the Wii is still better than playing the slicing game on the oculus. Show me some proper 2.5D augmented reality, that seems like a critical stepping stone (with far more practical use cases) first.


> People rushed out to buy 3D TVs.

well, one of the problem is that they sorta didn't. 3D TV was pushed hard in the channel, but consumers didn't really go for it.


VR has definitely been just around the corner for several decades now. Well, it really is here now and there are tons of games that support it, but it's still a niche, and it may remain that way forever, because there simply are some intrinsic problems with it:

You feel like you're really in that virtual world, in which you can look around and move around, but the moment you actually try to move around, you stumble over your own furniture that you can't see. It's either going to be a very thin illusion or you're going to need a ridiculously big and expensive setup. And the fact that you're blind to the world that your body is in, is always going to be awkward. It's a fun gimmick, but it's possible that it will always remain a gimmick.


Quest 2 has sold 10+ million units with over a billion in app sales.

By far not mainstream, but it’s around the same as first generation iPhones, so over the coming years may be just crossing the threshold of entering to mainstream.

I’ll make a guess that Quest 3 will have sold 30 million units by 2026, and perhaps the next one after that will be mainstream (xbox, playstation level) territory.


Could be, but the real test is whether it's practical. The iPhone was. I suspect VR is not. But I'm open to being wrong. It's absolutely cool, and I'd love to see more of it.

But I haven't made the jump yet, and part of the reason is that being unable to see the controller or look at instructions is going to be an obstacle with a lot of games.


3D hype has a comeback every other decade. It never sticks.


3D hype is going to come back soon, and it will stick - but instead of being in TVs, it'll be in VR headsets.

It'll stick because 3D is inherently available in VR headsets, so there's no need to have a "3D VR version" and a "normal VR version"; if you're targeting VR at all, you might as well use its 3D.

I think VR will (given time) succeed, because VR has a couple of benefits aside from 3D - first up, you get infinite screen-size.

Second, it's more portable than basically anything else can be; even laptops are limited by their screen-size whereas future VR goggles could potentially fit in your pocket.

Third, it integrates "companion apps" much better than a smartphone can, due to AR capability - you don't need to keep glancing between your <smart toaster> and your phone, you can just open up the toaster-VR app and look directly at the toaster.

To be fair though, VR might skip a decade before it truly breaches mainstream (e.g. it might be simply too expensive with current tech, when a smartphone can be bought for <$100), although I doubt it. I think VR will become mainstream by 2030.


Yeah, this is my opinion too.

I think as VR headsets become more common place over the next decade and that will likely create a market for 3D content.

I doubt it it will be a significant market for some time, but I think VR technology is getting to the point now where people may start using headsets on flights soon and I think companies like Apple will start to invest in quality 3D content to encourage adoption of their VR devices. Although I'm still to be convinced people will want to use them at home over their tablets and TVs.


I think it's the need for headsets that will keep VR/AR squarely in "niche" territory (mostly games). Perhaps a large niche, but niche nonetheless.


Windows98 shipped with a VRML viewer.

3D internet was available to everyone 20 years ago, and nobody used it.

This cycle has gone on longer than 3D TVs


It's a long step from a VRML viewer to the 3D web. Sort of like it was a long step between JaM in the 70s and HTML over the internet in the 90s.


I just hate the form factor for now. Putting on a VR headset is still like sticking a console onto your head as opposed to a pair of glasses.

I'm very pro-VR, love "thrill of the fight" and "alyx" but sweating it out with a chunky plastic headset is not something I go back to regularly.


This, sort of. I love the idea of VR and I've enjoyed my time with it. I've used a few of the Quests and PSVR and the issue, for me, is always that I get migraines from it, the heat is intense, and the weight of the device is uncomfortable even when barely noticeable. I also dislike the need to have some large room, or an empty room, or both, to really enjoy them. That's not an issue with VR in itself but it is a hurdle for me to adopt it. Once we add all these together it becomes a fun toy that has no real future in my home. With luck we'll advance the technology such that it can be used by more folks in interesting ways.


The concept of headsets isn't exactly new though. We've made huge inroads into one of the constraints (the uncanny valley is rather deep and unpleasant, but modern consumer hardware can run ultra high resolutions in real time), but we're still stuck wiith motion sickness etc and a fondness for multitasking meaning a lot of people prefer the less immersive experience


This is definitely a technology that 5% of people really enjoyed and the majority never overcame the increased hassle, or in some cases motion sickness. It turns out that it's just not necessary - while we do have stereoscopic vision, most of our aesthetic enjoyment of images works just fine by interpreting a 2D scene.


This was pushed more by the theatres (extra fees on the ticket price) then pulled by the customers who wanted it. I personally really dislike the 3D experience and always seek out 2D showings - and fortunately that's easier and easier to do. The 3D sequences were often randomly tacked on and not critical to the story, and the rest of the time you had to watch the movie through tinted shades. No thanks.


> People rushed out to buy 3D TVs

I thought 3D TVs were commercial failures, which is ultimately why 3D disappeared


I haven't heard a single person mention Apple's Vision Pro in person or even in media. No one really wants 3D or VR.


Memristors are touted as the forth fundamental electronic component after resistors, capacitors and inductors. Progress is steady and fairly recent but the technology only seems to hold public attention for very brief periods over the decades. So I guess you could say it has withered in the eyes of the public at least. It should be a big deal though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor


> It should be a big deal though.

If they can get the manufacturing process for them worked out. I really do wish memristors turned out to be a success, HP hyped them so massively in the 2011-2015 era. What happened was that the material they had was susceptible to rusting, so what seemed like a good initial yield would become unusable some months down the road.

I google for memristors sometimes, and all the activity regarding them is still confined to the lab unfortunately.


> Memristors can potentially be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which could allow greater data density than hard drives with access times similar to DRAM, replacing both components.

It's weird I had to scroll down so far to understand what exactly this thing could do.


>Experimentally, the ideal memristor has yet to be demonstrated.

I'm not an expert by a looooong shot, but it looks like there is some baseline of expected behavior that has been experimentally demonstrated for all three established components. If I'm understanding correctly, that would be a huge roadblock to wide adoption.


> Thermal Cameras - I really thought every phone would have a cheap, mass manufacture thermal camera by now, so everybody could do "U so hot" jokes.

Well they kind of do - you can buy a cheap tiny thermal camera for your smartphone. They aren't built-in in most phones because it's a specialty feature and it's not "cheap" cheap.

The thing with thermal cameras is that the progress has been artificially restricted by the arms regulations, especially in the US. That was a major factor behind them staying so expensive for years despite having the tech.


It's not just the arms restriction. Theres little restriction if is 9Hz or less. Easily commercially available but can't be exported to many places. You can get a 9Hz 120x80 FLIR Lepton module for about $200. Even stuff at higher frame rates isn't that had to get domestically.

The real problems are lenses and volume. The low quality stuff like the Lepton use low quality silicon dioxide lens. The better stuff uses the expensive germanium. Cheaper zinc selenide can be used with good effect but has health hazards under some conditions. Then there's a small market (maybe 1M Leptons sold is considered high volume) with really one manufacturer (Teldfyne FLIR).


Yep, remembered buying the thermal camera as a sensor for a project on a new type of rice cooking that is more effective in term of rice cooking quality, i.e. just the right amount of cooked rice texture in between conventional boiling (too moist: how modern rice cooker works) and steaming (too dry: use by some fancy restaurants). It turned out that the rice cooking heat overwhelm the thermal camera to provide any meaningful reading, and but later improvised it for detecting multi-point temperature readings from the face during the Covid pandemic.

It's a cheap FLIR thermal camera with just OK resolution to be useful for imaging. The shipment was delayed due to the need to sign off form declaration for non-military application before importing.


Even if it weren't restricted, what is the advantage to the average consumer? What benefit does a thermal camera offer that would make it being built in as a standard phone feature economically justifiable?


Here's ref from another post that shows why someone might want a thermal camera phone (thank you @emmelaich). Also, they're actually available in a $500 camera phone.

Check out the MSX and AlphaBlending in an automotive mechanics shop.

https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s62-pro-smartphone/


The ability to see the temperature of your surroundings has an infinite amount of utilitarian uses. And certainly an LWIR module is far more useful than a macro lens module many phones have just because it's cheap. Especially if it's fused with visible spectrum, NIR, and ToF/LIDAR.


> The ability to see the temperature of your surroundings has an infinite amount of utilitarian uses.

That doesn’t answer what they are, which is the question in your parent comment. If you could give a few good examples, it would advance the discussion.


Spotting weak points in your home's insulation is one of the obvious use cases. Moving some heavy stuff to the right areas can really cut down on HVAC losses.

A more industrial use case is figuring out what parts of a machine are running dry


- Cooking and baking

- Troubleshooting car trouble


E-ink displays... After seeing the OLPC I expected every display would soon have the same properties of eye-strain-reduction, legibility in the sun, angle indifference and low power consumption. Yet here we are - while there does seem to be a resurgent niche of e-ink enthusiast products it seems like they never broke through to the mainstream except in ebook readers. It's a shame!


E-ink is slooowwwwly improving, but the tech is so niche that there's nowhere near as much R&D investment as for LCDs/OLEDs/QLEDS/etc.

The biggest recent improvement in e-ink, IMO, is the fast multi-dye tech in the Gallery 3 - it enables a color screen that doesn't destroy contrast/resolution like CFA tech does, and doesn't require 10+ second refresh times like past multi-dye screens did.

I'm hoping that the color-tech in e-notes (e-ink stylus tablets) will give e-ink a broader use-case and drive economy of scale. Also I want a color e-note that's not crappy, because drawing in greyscale really limits your options, especially if you want to draw a sunset.


E-ink displays are all over the place, where they make sense: price tags at stores.

Book-reader devices are alive but very niche, because phone screens got much better.


I've never seen e-ink used to display price tags at stores. What country are you seeing that in?


Netherlands. Almost every major super market chain uses them and dynamically adjusts the prices. Here's an article from 2019 about a major chain intending to change all the price tags that year (Dutch): https://www.emerce.nl/nieuws/albert-heijn-digitaliseert-prij...


It's seem to have finally roughly hit critical mass these days. I imagine it will become somewhat ubiquitous in the next 5 years or so in most of the western world.

Inflation seems to have kicked this into high gear as I'm guessing prices update a whole lot quicker. Plus it's a lot cheaper now to fiddle with dynamic pricing and change stuff day to day based on your metrics.


In the US, best buy uses them. I think I've seen them in some airport shops too.


Whole Foods, too.


E-ink is tied up with patents so there aren’t many organizations that can work on improving it.


> E-ink is tied up with patents so there aren’t many organizations that can work on improving it.

I find myself forced to repeat myself. Could you give everyone here some verifiable data? Please identify what patent you're talking about. I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response and a link to some random claim made as an HN comment. It is fun to blame patents. But do you think it might be because physics?


Anyone know when important patents will expire?


Nobody knows because the people claiming that patents are slowing down innovation never seem to actually work in that specific industry or have actual detailed knowledge. Almost makes one think they don't actually have real information and are just casuals.


People who work in the industry never talk about specific patents because patents are very vague and if you admit to being aware of something that potentially overlaps your work you're painting a target on your back. If you lose a lawsuit after that admission you're subject to 3x damages, not 1x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages


I've been seeing a lot more e-ink pricing "stickers" at stores recently. Best buy in particular.

Seems its slowly catching on.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi was an attempt.


> Thermal Cameras

They're not built in, but you can easily get a thermal camera that plugs into your mobile these days - that one's definitely been improving rather than disappearing. Due to the cost of ownership, there are also companies that will come in with their own and do thermal mapping of your whole house.

I'm not sure if this one really makes a list since nothing was ever mass produced, but automatic food preparer/cooker machines are kind of a popular sci-fi-of-the-80s idea. Some attempts were made and mostly failed to get traction. I've not heard about them for years now.


>automatic food preparer/cooker machines

There are some companies out there in the restaurant automation space. Miso Robotics is one that comes to mind.

A "cheap" automatic food prep system would have huge public health benefits with people eating less processed **. Stretching the idea out further, you could probably save a lot of time and energy from saved/avoided trips to the grocery store.


You can also rent decent thermal cameras for a day if you want to do your own thermal mapping of your house. For me it was worth the cost to avoid the "home energy inspection company" trying to upsell me on needless things. I could not get any one of them to agree to come, do the imaging, leave, and send me the video for a fixed price.


>automatic food preparer/cooker machines

Cleaning is the main problem. Anything that comes in contact with meat, dairy, etc, is going to need to be cleaned after every use (at least in a home setting).


They are built-in on some Caterpillar phones.

https://www.catphones.com/en-au/features/integrated-thermal-...


I remember watching a tv program named "Beyond 2000" (obviously, this was last century) which featured upcoming technology. One of these was an ultra-sonic dishwasher. It was supposed to be faster, and use less detergent and water than 'ordinary' dishwashers (though I suppose dishwashing machines in the 1990s probably used a lot more water than they do now). Never heard anything about it again.

(Edit: I mean a full-size dishwasher, not the little devices that are partially immersed in water)


Fun fact, the company that made it became Beyond Productions which made MythBusters. Which is why they are always talking about their Australian production crew.


That show was great. A successful Australian export of a non-primary kind, woohoo!

Trivia, it's predecessor was called "Towards 2000"


Oh how I loved that show. Defined my childhood and technoptimism


It probably wrecks tons of non steel dishware. Also energy usage might be fairly off the charts, not sure though.


This was one where was demoed a fabric that was fully fire resistant? I remember something like a flame tower direct at it and it not even get black....


Also loved that show. It aired through my teen years (90s) in Discovery Channel. There are other similar shows like this such as Next Step.


I was reminded by another post on HN today: RAD - Rapid Application Development. Newer "no/low code" systems pale in comparison to what novices used to be able to do with Visual Basic or Hypercard or even old PHP. I was one of those novices and I learned so much from them.


Add Delphi to that mix. Proper Delphi I mean, not the complicated mess it later became.


Delphi 5-7 was such a boon to anybody picking up Pascal in school. Still remember that feeling of discovering that you can drop controls on a form, write some spaghetti to make them work together, and bam! you can make a real windowed application all while being 14. Nostalgie…


Alcohol batteries for your laptop / phone. Instead of a battery it would be a fuel cell that you would just add alcohol to instead of recharging it.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/tiny-alcohol-fu...


This would be revolutionary. When you spill wine on your computer it’d be a good thing.


Not sure if this is serious, or a Futurama reference.


Very serious. Another news report: https://www.zdnet.com/article/smart-fuel-cell-shows-off-alco...


Some good examples here already. The one I was optimistic about (it was never super hyped but sounded interesting) was laptops that would have heatpipes bringing the heat from the CPU to the lid were it would just dissipate - so using laptop lid as a radiator. I remember they were saying it could dissipate ~20W continuously (which was not enough at the time ~2005?) but lots of laptops now could be completely fan-free.

I can't find much about this on google, but I swear it was a thing. Some people discussed it on this website for half-baked ideas:

https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/LCD_20heatsinks


I think you run into a couple problems with this idea.

It seems mechanically challenging to have a heatpipe that can flex as needed for a laptop.

LCD performance is connected to temperature, so if you pull a lot of heat to the screen, you're going to see weird effects as the heat distributes unevenly.

Moving the cpu to the lid is probably a better idea, and some devices have been made that way, but it's not common either.


iPad Pro + Keyboard is essentially this.


Microsoft has sort-of used heat dissipating lids but that's because the lid itself contains the CPU (surface book, surface pro).


This might not qualify because it was never really in the zeitgeist, but I remember around 2000 that flywheels were going to be an amazing mobile energy storage mechanism. Your car would rev up a massive disk inside a vacuum, and use its momentum to propel itself in stop and go traffic.

I believe the showstopper was that in even the slightest fender-bender, the flywheel would get off-balance and yeet off in a random direction, causing mayhem and calamity.


Isn’t that exactly what this company is selling? https://www.torus.co/


It sounds unbelievable.

> Energy Retention After 10 Years 100%

> Potential Storage Capacity 1 day 32 kWh, 10 years 116,800 kWh, 25 years 292,000 kWh

What's the down side? Is it expensive? Is it slow to release energy on demand?


Everyone still slightly worried about what happens if it cracks, and I think the cost of lithium batteries has simply won?


Neat! Hadn't heard of them. I think the company I remember was called Ballard, and their flywheels were intended to drive the vehicle mechanically rather than to generate electricity.


In ME school I was on our human powered vehicle team and we actually designed our bike with a flywheel. I remember using it like one or two times during a race at UF just to give my legs a break. It was a piece of junk bike, but the flywheel was cool.


Formula 1 KERS can be either flywheel or batteries.


Nuclear powered domestic water heaters. You could have heated your home just by pumping water through a radio active pipe section. It would have been very cheep, carbon neutral, and relatively safe (no risk of chernobl style meltdowns). Trouble is disposal and security.


That would require commercial availability of large amounts of radioactive materials. Anyone could make a dirty bomb or maybe worse, be the next Radioactive Boy Scout and contaminate their own neighborhood without even meaning to, or being detected, unless always on Geiger counters became standard like CO detectors.

I think I could live without hot water instead of this.


I did read a while back about people one day replacing gas-based domestic water heaters with microwave-based ones. That never happened either.


This seems like an extremely hard sell. It's a heat source you can't modulate, and what's the effect of neutron absorbtion on water?


European water based radiators have regulators built into them and can heat with water anywhere from 40 all the way up to 120C (steam). They regulate the flow based on the room temperature and configuration.


I'm talking about the radioactive source itself. I know what a radiator is.

(do you understand what I mean about not being able to modulate the output of radioactive decay? Or are you proposing an actual reactor?)


What will you do with all the radioactive piping and water that you produce?


The water isn't in direct contact with the radioactive material and does not become radioactive itself? Its not like the water normally expelled from nuclear powerplants is radioactive.


What is in direct contact with the water? I assume the water is heated conductively by another material that absorbs the radiation and is heated. What material is used to for this shielding and heating?


Ceramic coated lead?


The lead turns into bismuth, the bismuth into polonium. And if you don't run it above the annealing temperature, you have to care about the neutrons creating internal stresses from directly dislocating the atoms.


What's the attenuation rate of neutrons by the shielding? I find it hard to believe it would be 100% with none passing into the piping or water


In the 00’s there was a lot of hype around “smart” textiles being the next big thing. A lot of sports companies were trying to make something happen with it but aside from some niche projects, seems to have fizzled.

In the 90’s, mini discs were hot for a year and then just vanished.


I think the reason a lot of this vanished is that textiles were quickly banned in competitive sports. Swimming is a great example - the advanced suit fabrics were really impressive engineering. As someone who had a chance to wear them (and the subsequent inferior replacements after the ban), they really did make a huge difference in performance.

For a while people thought the suit records would be untouchable, and many folks even specifically requested they be specially designated with an asterisk. Since then, the new generation of swimmers have absolutely stepped up to the plate, and many of the believed-immortal records have since fallen.


One would think they'd just do it by division; it's not that difficult to have a Production division for standard suits and an Open division for the highest of the high-tech fabrics. Other sports that have this kind of division still have Open competitors get beat by Production ones anyway.


I think in this case it was because people could essentially just buy speed to some degree, which was a first for swimming, and this had implications on equal access within the sport. The suit bans were both swift and restrictive, which was definitely a clear signal on how seriously this issue was taken. Ultimately, as fun as the super suits were, it was definitely the right call to put an end to the fabric arms race early.


Minidiscs were a great tech—-we had a couple recorders in the early 2000s, mostly for recording my wife’s recitals. They were a huge step up from DAT in terms of easy, tiny personal digital recording and playback.

Couple things killed them, though. The recording industry did their usual “ZOMGWTFBBQ this will KILL the music industry!” dance that they do every time there’s a new recording tech, so Sony responded by building in 90 layers of DRM all over the place. That meant you could record yourself playing, but trying to get that recording off the disc was anywhere from annoying to impossible depending on the player model thanks to Sony’s proprietary audio formats and connection systems. Until NetMD, the players would only use ATRAC, so you’d have to use Sony’s tools to move content in and out of the devices, with lots of DRM flags to make it harder to use them to bootleg concerts or trade music.

All of that was in place right when MP3 and HDD/solid-state recorder/players exploded, at which point there was no selling point for MD anymore. No one wanted to buy a copy of an album on MD (there weren’t many anyway) when they could buy the MP3s or buy the CD and rip the MP3s instead. No one wanted to record audio in a proprietary format on expensive MDs when they could record it uncompressed to a computer or a solid-state handheld and burn it to a CD if they wanted a physical copy.

Kind of sad, really—-the later NetMD models were tiny, fun to use, and by then Sony had removed most of the obstructions around recording and transferring audio. Solid-state is more reliable, but those recorders don’t have the cool looks and fun interfaces of the consumer MD models.


I should add: while there were market issues, a significant amount of the failure of MD as a format lies with Sony, who have a long track record of laboring under the misapprehension that consumers would rather buy proprietary formats that only work on Sony gear. (See also: Betamax, DAT, Memory Stick...)


Mini discs lasted longer than a year! Well, in Europe anyway, and Japan


Global Hypercolor!


I worked for a lab that did IR research 20 years ago, so I don't know if this is still the case. But at the time, the IR sensors were made with a rare mineral only available in a remote region of Russia.

At the time (late 90s) I bought (on behalf of my employer) a FLIR camera that had a 512x512 sensor for $70k. I remember the cheapest camera we could find was 15k, it had almost no optics and the sensor was noisy as all get out.

I have a thermal inspection workstation (FLIR) that cost about $2700 and has a 320x240 sensor.

So there really has been a cost reduction. It's just more linear than exponential. A few years back, I got a camera for a friend which had a 90x90 sensor, and I think it cost $165 if memory serves. When I worked at that lab, it was inconceivable that a normal person would ever own an IR camera. They were the exclusive domain of researchers, large corporations, and law enforcement. I have 5 or so.

Also, the average person doesn't understand the electromagnetic spectrum, or concepts like emissivity or reflection. They think they're seeing an accurate temperature from their device, not understanding that every material they measure has its own k value.

** BTW: I tried to research this mineral/element and could not find any documentation on it. If you happen to know its name, or if I'm completely off base and its not used anymore, I'd love to know about it.


Was it indium antimonide?


Music/mp3 players. Something that has local storage and plays files stored there, and works away from network coverage, and doesn't require a subscription of any kind.


Plenty around still, but they've moved to the audiophile space, added hifi (FLAC) support and increased in price by 10x - 100x.


If I'm carrying my phone around anyway, why not just put my music on there? I've been using my phone as my mp3 player since the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone (W800) came out in 2005


It takes willpower to actively avoid distractions. Using a single purpose device can improve the experience: an ereader for books, a DAP for listening to music…


You can do this with most smartphones (e.g. by installing VLC). Folks just stopped buying dedicated devices in any sustainable amounts outside of audiophile markets.


You can do it with iPhones with the built in music player. Does the android music app really not support playing from local storage?


I provided VLC as an example in order to head off any responses around what built-in apps do or do not support (rather than to imply that you need VLC). Not sure where you inferred that I was using Android, but apologies if what I said led you down that path.


I don't know about you but I have a portable music player with 128Gb of storage in my hands right now.


it's integrated in phones now, but you still can buy it


Not world-changing, but self-heating coffee/cocoa cans! I remember getting these 15 years ago at Walmart and thought they were the coolest thing ever, but they never really took off.


My guess is that their dubious disposability works against them. You can get self-heated coffee and ramen in a lot of Japanese vending machines, which makes sense because Japan is the capital of non-biodegradable disposables.


Other countries have these all over.


Starlite [0] thermal shielding plastic.

the inventor took it's recipe to the grave.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite


Tech generally disappears (though it never/rarely really does completely) either because it proves not viable/economic, or it's superseded. Though sometime it's because of shifts in fashion, or legal/moral restrictions.

Hyped then didn't take-off: persistent ram (mram, Feram, PCram etc).

Superseded: Incandescent lightbulbs, gas mantle tech, CRT display tech, vinyl, cassette and especially CD/DVD tech, etc.

Fashion: maybe teasmades (alarm clocks that brew tea), I'm sure there are better examples.

Legal/moral/health restrictions: maybe 'consumer' radioactive tech, radium clocks etc.


The Orbo "free energy" device that turned out to be running on batteries in the end.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

https://www.wired.com/2009/12/orbo-strikes-back-perpetual-mo...


Perpetual motion isn't tech, it's a scam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuxbMfKO9Pg


Smart glasses (e.g. Google Glass).

IIRC Google Glass was announced accompanied by sky divers landing at the conference center.


I think the backlash against Google Glass set back the interest in wearable computing. I haven't heard about Steve Mann in a while either.


fun fact: I predicted it would flop because as someone who just got eye surgery few year prior I knew that nobody would want to wear glasses all day


Don't many people wear glasses all day?


because they don't have choice


I know people who used to wear glasses for fashion (i.e. they didn’t need them and chose to wear them). Contact lenses are also a choice for many who wear glasses, but many prefer the latter due to cost or convenience.

Maybe you haven’t worn them long enough, but you do get used to glasses to the point you forget you’re wearing them, leading to events like showering in them or searching for them while they are in your face.


> still cannot buy graphene in any real quantities (cm's for $100's)

I’ve never needed to buy graphene before… why would most people? Not every technology needs to be applicable at home for it to count as “not vanished”.

Upon googling it, I found this source for about $1/cm^2 of graphene, which is 100x cheaper than what you seemed to be claiming: https://grolltex.com/product/monolayer-graphene-on-copper-fo...

Regardless, one recent product announcement I remember hearing about, which can apparently be bought on Amazon for $13: https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/625-kryosheet-en

Graphene is real. It hasn’t vanished. It just takes a long time for a new material to become widely used unless it fits neatly as a substitute for something else that was already there. By all appearances, the graphene industry is still growing.

> Thermal Cameras

Seriously? Thermal cameras are commonly used in so many professional applications. They’re not even that expensive, if you want one. No, every smartphone maker is not going to add 5% to 50% to their BoM (depending on quality and phone price, rough estimate) for a feature most people don’t need. Some smartphones offer thermal cameras for people who need that.


OP is asking us for OUR ideas of vanished tech, not a critique on his imperfect examples.

Maybe like Space elevator, or wireless electric transmission...


Space elevators have never been a thing besides in sci-fi or maybe project plans somewhere. Wireless electric transmission is an established commodity. I used it to charge my phone this morning.


If we want space tech that was here and then disappeared: manned missions to the moon. And after retiring the Space Shuttle, the US even lost the ability to put people into orbit until SpaceX came along.

Of course that's all really about money and not knowledge, but that's true for all recently disappeared tech: it just wasn't economically viable.

For tech that has actually been forgotten, you have to go back to Roman self-repairing underwater concrete.


Juicero https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s... ;)

Somehow I ended up remembering this out of all the things.


Intel Optane. That was pretty muck killed off, but has its uses.


Come here to tell this story, Optane or 3D Xpoint.

It promises a game changing non-volatile memory technology (RAM) for the masses but it never took off for some unknown reasons. Backed by the biggest processor manufacturer (Intel) and the biggest RAM manufacturer (Micron).

[1] 3D XPoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint


3D printers which can fix everything at your home.

Hand gesture computer control (Leap Motion).

Flash.

Wework. Peloton.

Google Plus. Google Wave. Google Reader. Google...


Generally, a technology has to have a commercial market that scales in order to be pursued, much less to be widely and cheaply available.

It's often the case that a number of technologies have to converge to make a compelling product, and then all of them become commercially available at basically the same time. Firearms, for instance, required both the ability to cast strong, straight metal barrels and the ability to produce gunpowder. Prior to around 1600, these technologies existed but nobody was really pursuing them very hard because either one, by itself, isn’t that useful. Put them together and suddenly the world changes.


To extend your example: Rifling pre-dates muskets, despite most muskets being smoothbore. This is because muzzle-loaders are slower to load if they're rifled (the point of the rifling is to grip the bullet and force it to spin, but that grip applies just as hard when you're ramming the bullet into its firing position), so you were paying more for a substantially lower rate-of-fire and the rifling was harder to clean, more prone to failure etc.

Once breachloaders became common, rifling also became common.


This is very important. We see a lot of "new battery" or "new green tech" papers here. Very few of them make it to market, because the thousands of details that make up the non-lab manufacturing process are very important. There's a big gap between "works in lab" and a product everyone can buy.


MEMS switching/logic. The premise was that you could have a mechanical switch that was actuated electrostatically, and just stayed where you put it due to magic, consuming no power, until you altered the state electrostatically again. You could implement logic that functioned with effectively no static power consumption, but capable of passing gigahertz signals.

To get an idea why it didn't pan out, here's a PDF[1] from Analog Devices for the ADGM1144 SP4T MEMS based switch ($50 in quantity, $72.88 for one from Digikey).

[1] https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...

[2] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-devices-in...


Look at the Gartner Hype Cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Some things have rebounded after a dismal start

Tablet computers (credit Steve Jobs) vs. HyperCard (credit Steve Jobs)

All sorts of digital (and analog) media (until they're nearly gone)

Pivoting headlights (making a comeback, I understand )

Cameras that don't need a battery

Gas Turbines?


From Whittle to today gas turbines have only ever gotten better and more used


> Gas Turbines?

RAM is making an electric truck with a turbine generator as a range extender.

I'd prefer a PHEV truck, but EV + turbine isn't terrible either.


> HyperCard

I would argue HyperCard of this decade is alive and well as Notion. (And other similar apps)


I think that undersells what HyperCard could do. It wasn't just a database or a wiki like Notion; it had some fairly powerful scripting capabilities, and was often used for nonlinear interactive content. (Myst was a HyperCard stack, for example!)


Notion and others have APIs that can drive whatever you want. But I agree with the gist - it's not the HyperCard reimplemented, but it is HyperCard evolved to today's common needs.


I would argue that modern hyper card is the web. a simple document format that can be linked to other documents. with a built in scripting language.


And (python) notebooks?


I have this decades-old memory of science magazine articles about acoustic imaging using phased microphone arrays. Unlike phased-array radars of the time, it claimed to be passive and the imagery was shocking. The example images I recall were underwater and looked like some ray-tracing scene but where the surface ripples were like ceiling lights.

It seemed like the kind of thing that was going to revolutionize sensing applications. I remember wondering whether it could work in air instead of underwater, such as to provide better visual sensing in fog/smoke conditions. But, I have trouble finding any reference to it, and always wondered where it went...


The underlying tech isn't dead but in the 90s I remember reading article after article about how ramjets and scramjets were going to change air travel forever any day now. That day still hasn't arrived and I doubt it ever will.


They are unbelievably noisy. High efficiency turbofans have won for subsonic, and nobody's really interested in the inevitable cost barrier of supersonic.

People keep talking about SSTO spaceplanes, but I think there are unsolvable thermal problems in the engines?


It's not just cost of supersonic planes, but sonic booms & how far they travel.

So around populated areas it's a no-go. Which means you have to do a good portion of flight subsonic, and benefit from SS flight over a smaller leg of the yourney.

Iirc there were some studies showing that sonic booms were heard by people 100s of km's away. And eg. in Europe: more or less densely populated areas everywhere. So no SS city hopping there. Never mind check-in, waiting on runway & taxying vs. actual flight time.

Benefits simply don't outweigh the negatives on most routes. And where they might, too small a market to invest in passing technology / regulatory hurdles.


Thermal cameras are subject to tight ITAR restrictions, which would tend to restrict their use in consumer products. I'd expect 1080p thermal cameras are a thing, if you have the "need" and can comply with all of the restrictions.


I could see some comedy spoof of a SEAL like mission with the team running around with their cell phones attached to their rifles like a mobile game controller. SEAL Team GenZ reporting for duty!


Cloning has largely been banned, no wonder there hasn’t been innovation there


It hasn't, excepting for cloning humans.

It's just, largely pointless. Aside from hoping you can get another champion race horse, why would you spend a bunch of money to get a cloned animal?


I had an elderly neighbor that blacked out periodically for somewhat unclear reasons. Her dog was able to give her advance warning so that she can sit down before falling down. He wasn't trained, just did it naturally. She had the dog cloned with the hope that the trait was innate. The clone didn't really have the temperament of the clonee. Environment? Who knows.

Unfortunately, the neighbor had COVID-19 sequela that put her in a nursing home recently (greatly accelerated memory loss), so it was unclear if the clone would have been able to detect the same precursors to blacking out.


I just realised cloning pets is a thing now.

More interested in seeing if they can get the Wooly Mammoth up and running again!


I assume you'd still need a viable mother to grow the clone in. Easy with dogs, but who will carry the mammoth?


Cloning your beloved dog is apparently legal at ViaGen for the low price of ~$50,000 USD


It would be an interesting mnultigenerational experiment to clone a dog every time it dies, and pass the dog & its genes along via cloning for 100 years. If I could get that for $50k, I'd pay for it today.

Not a guarantee that I have $50k to spend, but I do have $50k in thought experiment bucks.


I thought at first that Gunther the Dog would meet those requirements but when I looked it up it turns out that entire story was just made up by the guy administering the fund.


Just don’t name the dog Duncan Idaho!


The Dog of Theseus?


Not very many people talking about NFTs nowadays, perhaps unsurprisingly


I am delighted.


/u/davidhyde already said it, but I'll pile on: memristors. So much hype and potential, but so far as I can tell it's still more or less impossible to buy a memristor today.


With respect to graphene, it's possible to make reasonable quantities fairly cheaply using several different methods.

See here for a recent rundown (yeah, I know, youtube, but it's worth it in this case if you actually care about the subject.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q4UQL5k4wI

Graphene will be commercially cheap fairly soon, I suspect. Meantime, it isn't that difficult or expensive to experiment with for yourself.


Thermal Cameras - I really thought every phone would have a cheap, mass manufacture thermal camera by now, so everybody could do "U so hot" jokes.

They may not be in phones, but thermal cameras are cheap, and ubiquitous in many fields. I'd venture that the majority of the fire departments in the US have thermal cameras in operation at this point, and probably most of the people (including hobbyists) with an electronics test bench have one.


Hydrogen fuel cells


Hydrogen fuel cells are in a midst of a revolution. This is like dismissing photovoltaics in the mid-2000s.


I have no doubts of this, but I think it's fair to say they have vanished from public view in comparison to battery tech.


Those are just as present/viable as they ever were.

The hypothesis was that they'd advance tho.


Physical newspapers and books. Not trying to be cute, but it's very easy for these vanishing technologies to, well, vanish.


I assume most stuff you mentioned fizzled out because there wasn't a viable business model (small number of adopters, high cost manufacturing, etc) and patents. Just look at 3d printers - been around since the 80s but the advances in computer size and being common coupled with expired patents makes it viable today.


Something like the Ergodex DX1: Easily spatially reconfigurable physical keys.

https://www.ergocanada.com/products/other/ergodex_dx1_input_...


I was going to suggest the :CueCat [0], but as I just realized, scanning QR codes with one's phone is quite trivial.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat


When I was growing up in the late 80s, there was a lot of talk about computers that would use light rather than electricity in their processing. That doesn't seem to have happened.

The other thing that has vanished is supersonic commercial air travel.


There was some 3d rendering tech that promised infinite details in the early 2010s. Can't remember what it was called. The premise was the pixel colors were searched instead of computed in the regular manner.


Bubble and holographic memory.

Magneto-optical and fluorescent multi-layer disks.

Plasma displays.

VLIW/EPIC processors.

Fast infrared communications.


The Russian government has been slowly moving everything to the homegrown VLIW architecture known as Elbrus or e2k. Not sure how the sanctions affected this, considering that the high-end implementations (28nm iirc) were being manufactured at TSMC, with only the low-end ones (90nm) manufactured locally.


Stand alone portable music players - nowadays that's niche product for audiophiles.

PC sound cards - for most people integrated HD Audio is enough.

SLI, AMD Crossfire


Thank you for all the responses, suggestions, and lengthy discussion. Below is a summary of everything I have seen on here (per 9/12/2023)

Phased Microphone Arrays (actually used to work in this field, not discussed much, yet NASA uses these for Liftoff acoustics) - https://benwang.dev/2023/02/26/Phased-Array-Microphone.html (DIY if you'd like your own) - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20120007205 (NASA Paper)

Memristors - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

3D Movies (has a revival almost every 20 years) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_film

Full Body Impermeable Swimsuits (banned after 2008 Olympics) - https://www.engineering.com/story/the-technology-behind-spee...

Mini-Disc (perhaps Multi-layer Blu Ray mini-discs?) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Mini_Blu-ray_Disc

E-ink displays - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink

Rear Heat Sinks for Laptops / Portables - https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/LCD_20heatsinks

CPUs in Non-standard locations (behind the screen) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37473795

Thermal Cameras - Cat S62 Pro (who knew Caterpillar had phones? Only $500 new? Yoink) - https://www.catphones.com/en-au/features/integrated-thermal-...

Alcohol Fuel Cells - https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/tiny-alcohol-fu...

Personal Nuclear Systems (water heating suggested, occasionally also hear about personal nuke power in your backyard) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37473795

Automatic Food Preparer/Cooker Machines (mostly exists as restaurant automation) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_restaurant

Flywheel Energy Storage (Suggestion for Sale) - https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel

Rapid Application Development - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

Ultrasonic Dishwashers (exist, just not talked about) - https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasonic+dishwasher&source...

Ultrasonic Dishwashers (ver2, medical, really expensive, yet 0.85m x 0.85m x 1m) - https://www.proxibid.com/lotinformation/51850649/getinge-mod...

Music/mp3 Players (dedicated device, rarely mentionedd, "why not use your phone?", still exist) - https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=dedicat...

Self-Heating Coffee/Cocoa/Ramen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-heating_food_packaging

Starlite Thermal Shielding Plastic (now owned by Thermashield, LLC) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite

3D XPoint / Optane Memory (discontinued non-volatile memory, sold since 2017, largest sales non-charge storage memory) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint

Graphene (disagreement about my example, shrug, 150mm x 150mm for $240? 30mm x 30mm for $20? Even an 8.5 x 11 that is not) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37473795

Generalized 3D Printers (lots of varieties, just not in one machine, Note: link has slightly invasive ads) - https://all3dp.com/1/types-of-3d-printers-3d-printing-techno...

Ramjets and Scramjets - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet

Bubble Memory (several mentions) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory

Hardware Accelerated 3D Sound (ex: Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX)) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions

Hydrogen Fuel Cell (not vanished, just little public awareness) -

Spatially Reconfigurable Keyboards - https://www.ergocanada.com/products/other/ergodex_dx1_input_...

Smart Dust (chips and sensors at "dust" scale) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust

General Topic Stuff:

Gartner Hype Cycle (lots of criticism, yet common, start -> hype -> disillusion -> enlighten -> productive) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Need for a market that can scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37473795


Hardware accelerated 3D sound in video games a la EAX. That one went away with Windows NT IIRC and never surfaced again.


I think that the Apple Vision Pro might claim to have something _like_ this in audio raytracing?


I think this was also a hyped feature of the PS5 when paired with specific Sony headphones.


Fourth-generation programming languages were hot for a while until people got sick of writing GUI applications in SQL.


Smart dust.

Especially as both microcontroller chips and sensor modules now exist at the scale of literal dust.


Bubble memory


CASE tools? Related to CASE: round-trip engineering.


ipod


Hyperloop


Because people caught on that it's a terrible idea with terrible (unstated) goals.




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