Abandoned Tech Projects

From Microsoft's dual-screened tablet concept to a holographic video game system, we take a look at some tech projects that died on the vine.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So obviously I love talking about technology.
It's a good thing, considering more than two thousand episodes

(00:27):
of tech stuff to my name at this point, and
as the episode on Libra and dem indicates, I also
love talking about tech products that never actually made it
to market. With Libra slash dm that was a cryptocurrency
initially spearheaded by Facebook, but a skeptical regulatory environment sealed

(00:49):
that project's fate within a couple of years of it
having been announced. So I thought we could look into
other technologies that died before consumers could actually decide if,
you know, they were good products or not. You know,
the market didn't even get a chance to make a
decision in these cases. So let's start with a product
concept that I thought was a really cool idea in

(01:11):
the first decade of the two thousands, as that was
coming to an end, I remember seeing the news on
this and thinking it was pretty cool. I don't even
remember if Chris and I talked about that on tech
stuff we might have because it's in that era, the
early tech stuff days. So I'm talking about the Microsoft Courier.

(01:32):
So this was at least the concept was a double
screened tablet device, so it opened up like a book
or a journal. And you already know this device never
came out. I mean, that's the title of the episode.
But Microsoft had abandoned the project before mid twenty ten.

(01:52):
So sometime in spring of twenty ten, that's when Microsoft
at least acknowledged that it wasn't working on the project
any more. They never really announced it. This was not
something that was announced to the public. It was an
internal project. Now, considering that the iPad came out at
the beginning of twenty ten, you could say the Courier

(02:13):
was kind of Microsoft's attempt to make the tablet form
factor a compelling consumer item. Like this was a time
when different companies were trying to take another swing at
tablet computers. Now that's not to say that there were
not tablet computers before the iPad came out in January
twenty ten. There were. Apple is mostly known as a

(02:35):
company that innovates on existing form factors and often can
create a market where none existed before, right, because like
smartphones before the iPhone, they were pretty much the domain
of executives and maybe a few, like bleeding edge technology,
early adopter types, but otherwise we were all just coping

(02:57):
with cell phones. I didn't know anyone who had a smartphone.
I knew a couple of people who had PDAs personal
Digital assistance, but that was it. But then the iPhone
came out and changed everything. People suddenly said, oh, that's
a really cool piece of technology. It combines a lot
of things that I find really intriguing. I'm going to
make that my next phone. And Apple has done that

(03:19):
over and over again. You know, I'm not the world's
biggest Apple fan, but I acknowledge that's a company that
has an amazing track record for convincing people to buy
into technologies that previously they had dismissed. But before the
iPad came out, there were tablet computers. They just weren't
really adopted by the mainstream. They were more commonly found

(03:42):
in specific occupations like someone who worked on construction sites,
or you know, land surveyors, or you know, a medical
staff in a hospital. These were people who were not
working from a set location. Each day right, Like, they
weren't sitting at a desk all day. They were moving
from place to place, and they might need some sort

(04:02):
of computational device, maybe not one as robust as a
full computer, but something would be handy, and laptops, even
by twenty ten, laptops were pretty hefty. They were not
slims things that you easily carried around. So having a
tablet made sense for specific kinds of tasks, but for
the rest of us, tablet computers just seemed like they

(04:24):
weren't a good fit. Right. They couldn't do everything that
a computer could do, They couldn't do enough unique things
for the form factor the limitations just seemed like that
was a non starter, and often they lacked a user
interface that was intuitive and easy to use, like a
lot of these tablet computers had interfaces that had been
intended for laptop or desktop computers. Converting that over to

(04:49):
something that's using like say a touchscreen interface that doesn't
always work out so well. But then came the iPad
and it really changed things, and I had doubts that
Apple would succeed where others had failed, but that was again,
was very shortsighted of me to the extreme really. After all, again,
Apple had proven with the UI for the iPhone that
it could create an operating environment that was so intuitive

(05:11):
that a young child can master it in a matter
of minutes. It was a responsive user interface, It was attractive,
it worked, probably the most important part. So Apple saw
great success in a market that previously had only been
the very definition of niche. Now I should also mention
that the Courier reportedly never got so far along the

(05:33):
process that it was actually on the way to becoming
a consumer product. It didn't get that far in development.
It was kind of inn a nebulous phase in which
a company is exploring possibilities without fully committing to them. So,
as far as I can tell, there was never a
point in the Courier's development where Microsoft was actually seriously

(05:53):
considering putting it into production. So in some ways, the
Courier doesn't quite qualify for a canceled product because Microsoft
never actually called it a potential product to begin with,
at least not publicly. The world first heard about the
Courier not from a Microsoft representative, but rather from a
media outlet, specifically Gizmodo. They got their greedy little hands

(06:18):
on some information about this tablet that was in development,
including some images of what it might look like in
its final form factor, and they published this. They showed
off this concept, you know, this dual screened foldable tablet,
each of the screens measuring around seven inches on the diagonal.
It would obviously be a touch sensitive device where you

(06:40):
would interact with the screen itself. You would be able
to use a stylus with it to write and select things.
And it was clearly something that was really interesting. And
this article comes out before Apple had even announced the iPad,
But everyone in the world knew that Apple was developing
its own tablet. It was kind of like a worst
kept secret sort of thing. The Courier seemed to stand out, however,

(07:04):
even knowing that Apple was coming out with this tablet device.
So in a world that was still skeptical that tablet
computers could become viable consumer products, the Courier actually looked
like it could stand a chance because it just it
seemed compelling. The design looked neat. A team in Microsoft
that ultimately included around one hundred and thirty people were

(07:25):
hoping to be the ones to succeed where other tablet
designers had fallen short but that team faced opposition within
the company itself. Jay Allard, the head of Entertainment and
Devices at Microsoft, was leading this project, and he had
also been the leader responsible for the original Xbox as
well as the Xbox three sixty, so he already had

(07:47):
success in launching non computer products at Microsoft. Not only
just success at that he was successful in pushing out
a product that was not directly linked to Windows, which
was kind of seen as like the lynchpin for Microsoft
right the crux of all of Microsoft's products. Xbox was

(08:08):
outside of that, and it was a huge success. His
team was building this dual screen tablet device while using
a modified version of Windows, so in this case he
wasn't creating an all new operating system. He was, however,
relying on a I don't know how heavily modified it was.
I imagined it had to be significantly modified because this
is before the era of Microsoft building in touch screen

(08:32):
capabilities within its operating systems. But then there was Steven Sinofsky,
president of the Windows Division in Microsoft. So Sinofsky's division
was hard at work on an upcoming version of Windows
that was meant to be more tablet and touch screen friendly.
It just wasn't ready. It was in the early stages

(08:53):
of development, so Snofsky had already shown his worth with
a launch of Windows seven a Windows seven helped improve
consumer opinions of the Windows operating system because the previous
version of Windows, which was Windows Vista, was not met
with very much approval, which is putting it lightly. Windows
Vista was heavily criticized for lots of reasons, and the

(09:14):
generation before that was Windows XP, which a lot of
people really liked, or at least they found to be
very useful. I don't know how many people loved Windows XP,
but they found it to be understandable, like they could
navigate it. They felt that the changes that Windows Vista
introduced were confusing and counterproductive. So Sinofsky had helped repair

(09:38):
Microsoft's reputation with the launch of Windows seven, and he
had big plans for Windows eight. Those plans, however, were
for the future. They were a couple of years off,
so Snofsky had concerns that a touchscreen device running on
a modified version of an earlier Windows build would ultimately
hurt Microsoft because if it didn't work, then that was

(09:59):
going to be a big hit to the reputation there
had been other tablet devices that had failed in the market,
and they had become something of a joke. In fact,
if you go back to the PDA days, the Apple
Newton is a notable example of this, as it would
turn out Windows eight had enough flaws to disappoint people
all by itself. But that's a different story. The fact
that Windows eight was in development meant that the Courier

(10:20):
team didn't have access to a UI that was from
the get go designed to work on different kinds of devices.
The Courier team also saw the device as a compliment
to a PC, rather than a replacement for a PC,
so you wouldn't use a courier instead of a computer.
You would use a courier in addition to a computer.

(10:40):
The courier would let you do things like work with
electronic documents, and it would have handwriting recognitions so that
you could use a stylus and you could write down
notes on your screen, which the courier would then transcribe
into text. You could integrate pictures and sketches into your work.
You could make sketches for your work, and it could
be really useful for people like our artists and architects

(11:01):
and other folks who work closely with mixed media. It
was kind of envisioned as a creator tool in that regard,
but it would not be designed to integrate fully with
other Microsoft products, kind of like the Xbox. The Xbox
was a departure. The Courier was thought to be a
departure as well. So, for example, email, while the concept
of the Courier would allow you to check email through

(11:23):
like a web based application, the Courier wasn't intended to
provide full support for something like Microsoft Outlook, and this
lack of integration with core Microsoft products ended up being
another strike against the Courier. Not only would the Courier
need to cluge together a version of Windows that would
work on a touchscreen device, it would also not directly

(11:45):
provide a feedback loop into the other Microsoft ecosystem of software.
And Microsoft has always been about integration, sometimes to the
point that it has brought legal action against the company
because Microsoft has stood accused of anti competitive behavior on
more than one occasion for how the company has integrated
various applications very deeply into the operating system, thus making

(12:07):
it challenging for any competitor to actually create a working
tool on a platform that maintains a dominant market share
in the PC world. You got to remember that the
Windows operating system to this day remains an incredibly dominant
OS for desktop and laptop computers. Now, had these two
teams united with the idea that the Courier would remain

(12:30):
in development until the release of Windows eight, whereupon it
could be a flagship product featuring the new operating system, well,
Microsoft might be able to compete, but it would still
be well behind Apple because Windows eight launched in the
summer of twenty twelve, while by the summer of twenty twelve,
Apple was already on its third generation iPad. It had
already kind of established an anchor in that market. And

(12:53):
to this day, Apple remains dominant in the tablet market.
There are lots of other tablets out there, but Apple
has more than a third of the entire market share,
and the next closest competitor is Samsung, and it's down
closer to like twenty percent. That's according to Statista dot com.
By the way, if Microsoft had been able to launch

(13:14):
the Courier in twenty ten, you know, the same year
that the original iPad came out, maybe Apple wouldn't have
had such a huge headstart in the tablet space. Maybe
the dual screen format of the Courier would have been
enough to entice consumers to adopt the Windows based tablet,
or maybe they would be frustrated with that lack of integration.
Maybe they would think that this is a device that

(13:35):
almost does what they need, but not quite. I'm not
sure about that last part. The original iPad was by
no means a replacement for computers, and it did just fine,
but that lack of integration may have been really what
sealed the fate of the Microsoft Courier. Because Microsoft's CEO
at the time Steve developers, developers, developers, bomber. If you

(13:57):
don't know what I mean when I'm saying developers over
and over, go to YouTube search Steve balmert developers and
get ready to be amazed. Anyway, he was unsure about
which way to go with the Courier, so he called
in Bill Gates, co founder of Microsoft, former CEO and chairman,
to come in and advise him on the matter. And
Gates thought that the Courier's lack of integration with other

(14:19):
Microsoft products was a non starter. He didn't see the
value of a gadget that did not lean heavily on
Microsoft's existing suite of productivity software, and ultimately Microsoft pulled
the plug on the project. While the company never officially
announced the Courier, it did go so far as to
confirm that development on the product had ended. Considering some

(14:39):
of the other products that did come out around this time,
like the Windows Phone or Microsoft Zoom. Maybe it's all
for the best because those products ultimately got shut down
when they too failed to compete against Apple and other
competitors on the market. Maybe the Courier would have met
the same fate. We'll just never know for sure. Well,
we've got a lot more to talk about with products

(14:59):
that never made it to market, but first let's take
a quick break to think our sponsors welcome back. We
now turned to a couple of tech projects that were
canceled quite some time ago, and I'll start with one

(15:20):
that I wasn't familiar with. That's because it was a
project that was done by Sinclair Research, So the company
Sinclair didn't get much traction over here in the United States. However,
listeners from the UK might very well be familiar with Sinclair.
It was an electronics company that started in the nineteen seventies.

(15:40):
It was responsible for the production of personal computers for
the UK market in the nineteen eighties that didn't stick
around that long. Sinclair ended up selling its PC assets
to another company called Armstrad or Armstrad rather in nineteen
eighty six. Sadly, the founder of Sinclair, Clive Sinclair, passed
away a few years ago. But back in the mid
nineteen eighties, when Sinclair was still a thing, engineers at

(16:03):
the company were brainstorming about creating different types of PCs,
and there were a couple of different lines of development.
It wasn't like this was all unified under one project.
It was more like a bunch of different people working
on kind of similar ideas all around the same time.
This particular one I wanted to talk about was meant

(16:23):
to be a PC that could go toe to toe
with a couple of other machines that were debuting around
this same time. Those machines include the Atari st computer
and more notably the Commodore Amiga, which would eventually just
become the Amiga. So the code name for Sinclair's project
was Loki. That would not have been the market name

(16:44):
for the product like once it hit the market. If
it had gone that far, it would not have been
called the Loki. I think that is missing a trick,
so to speak. I would actually love to have a
computer called a Loki. In fact, I might even rename
my personal machine because I just loved that idea, because
it does feel like I'm working on a trickster God
some days, particularly when I am getting ready to record

(17:07):
and then my computer tells me, Hey, don't worry, I'm
going to reload and update. It's only going to take
forty five minutes. Meanwhile, I'm just ready to start recording.
Good times. Anyway, the Sinclair low Key project didn't really
have enough time to coalesce into anything definitive. According to
Martin Brennan, an engineer who spoke with The Register about

(17:30):
the low Key project, it never got so far where
someone even made conceptual drawings of what the computer would
look like. So low Ki was only in the earliest
stages of ideation before the whole rug got pulled out
from underneath the project. So it was more like a
collection of ideas that were intended to achieve a particular goal.

(17:54):
And this wasn't just for bragging rights. It wasn't just hey,
let's make a computer that can go toe to toe
with the Amiga. It could really appeal to, say gamers,
because the Amiga was known as a machine that was
phenomenal when it came to graphics and sound. I mean
when you compared the Amiga against other computers of that era,

(18:14):
Amiga's performance for sound and graphics it was just a
head and shoulders above all the competition. So it wasn't
just to say, hey, we can make a computer that
can do that too, And it wasn't really a market
demand issue in the UK necessarily. Rather it came down
to a matter of taxes, and then later on the
conclusion of the story is due to Amstrad's acquisition of Sinclair.

(18:38):
But the taxes thing is a little bit bonkers to me.
It's also it's outside my wheelhouse. But according to the Register,
in the mid nineteen eighties, like around nineteen eighty four,
the government in Spain created rules that would place taxes
on computers sold in Spain if those computers sported up
to sixty four kilobytes of memory or less. If you

(18:59):
were to offer computers that had more than sixty four
kilobytes of memory, the taxes didn't apply. There was like
a loophole you could create. As long as you were
selling computers with more memory than sixty four kilobytes, you
were not going to be hit by those taxes. So
now all these computer companies have an incentive to develop
computers with more memory in order to be able to

(19:20):
sell them without having to deal with these higher tax rates.
I don't know if that was the intent of the
tax law, Like, was this something that Spain was passing
to push computer companies to put out more advanced machines,
or was this a matter where Spanish legislators were looking
to tax businesses and didn't think enough ahead to allow

(19:41):
for higher amounts of memory to be considered under the
same tax law. I don't know the answer to that question,
but it did end up being a financial incentive to
create machines that had one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes
of memory or more. And LOKI was Sinclaire's approach to
fill that niche or one of their approaches, I should say,

(20:02):
because like I said, there were multiple projects that were
in development around this time. In addition, the idea was
to have a machine capable of generating superior graphics and
audio to other computers that were found in the Sinclair line.
So the low Key was intended to have a MIDI
interface that would give the capabilities of a commercial synthesizer.
The graphics hardware would quote allow better animation effects than

(20:26):
any existing home computer and will allow cartoon quality graphics
end quote. That's from that piece in the register. And
it was intended to be compatible with CD systems from
one a read, which is kind of a novelty. In
the mid nineteen eighties, CDs were not yet widely accepted,
and so that was kind of a really advanced concept.

(20:46):
It was also meant to facilitate stuff like home video production,
so that you could do things like create more advanced
home videos, including the ability to do stuff like insert
captions into video. That was something that you know, unless
you were working at a television broadcast editing station, you
typically didn't have access to that kind of thing. It
was also meant to be a pretty affordable computer, selling

(21:08):
for quote less than two hundred pounds end quote. All
of this, by the way, is according to a paper
titled the Specification of this Super Spectrum Entertainment Engine. Now,
not everything about this computer was bleeding edge technology. For example,
the low Key design also integrated a cassette deck. This
was for saving and retrieving data, so rather than a

(21:31):
floppy disk drive, perhaps in addition to one, you would
have a cassette drive. And that wasn't unique to Sinclair
by any means, but it does seem a little strange
to talk about cassette drives once we're into the era
of the mid nineteen eighties. In my experience, most of
the home computers, at least here in the States had
already moved on to floppy drives. At that point, you
didn't really see a lot of computers that used cassette drives.

(21:54):
Some of the ones in the nineteen seventies did, but
by the nineteen eighties, floppy drives were pretty much standard. Portunately,
Sinclair would never really get the chance to develop Loki. Further,
the sale of assets to Amstrad would kill not just Loki,
but other projects that were in development that various Sinclair
engineers had been working on, so Loki never emerged from

(22:15):
that ideation stage. The Register article about the abandoned Sinclair
projects mentions that it was at least a year out
from even hitting a prototype phase, so it was still
fairly early on in development. But hearing about it, I
really wish it had become a thing. One because I
think it would have been interesting to see another computer
kind of going head to head against Amiga in the

(22:37):
performance department in graphics and sound, and partly because I mean,
I love the idea of a computer that, at least
at one point was called Loki. Our next abandoned tech
product was announced back in January twenty eleven at that
year's CEES aka the Consumer Electronics Showcase. I was actually
present at that CEES, but I have did this particular

(23:01):
press announcement because I already knew a little bit about it.
I knew that the person who had been booked to
make this press announcement was Lady Gaga, and y'all, I
love me some Lady Gaga. I think she's an incredibly
talented performer. I think she's an amazing entertainer. But the
exhibit hall of CEES is already full of monsters, little

(23:22):
and otherwise, and I didn't want to subject myself to
more of that, so I skipped this particular announcement. But
it was with Polaroid. So Polaroid had named Lady Gaga
the creative director for the company. And a year earlier
in twenty ten, the company was eager to forge a
viable path forward in a world where digital cameras were

(23:43):
now everywhere. Right, digital cameras were already on the rise
before smartphones started to incorporate digital cameras. But then once
smartphones did do that, it really meant that companies that
were more mired in film based cameras were getting left
in the dust. They had moved too slowly. Some of

(24:04):
them didn't adopt digital camera technologies because there was a
fear that doing so would undercut their own business, like
this incredibly lucrative business they had created that was film based.
The problem is if the rest of the world moves
on from film, then yeah, you might be a definitive
name in the market, but no one's going to that
market anymore. And companies like Kodak and Polaroid, I would argue,

(24:29):
were trying to catch back up. They had given ground
to the digital landscape, and now we're trying to figure
out a way to become relevant again. Not that I
think that their products were bad, not that I thought
film had no use. I still think film is amazing,
but that's not where the majority of the market was going, so,
how does a company known for film cameras survive in

(24:51):
this rapidly changing environment. Well, one way might be to
bring on someone who is known for being a risk
taking artist, someone who's associated with avant garde fashion, someone
with a ridiculously huge fan base supporting them. So in
that regard, Lady Gaga was an obvious choice. Now, what

(25:12):
I would have seen if I had gone to this
press release was Lady Gaga going up on stage and
unveiling her first official collaborations with Polaroid as its creative director.
One of the items revealed was a pair of real
Chonky sunglasses and it was the centerpiece of a suite

(25:32):
of new products. The suite was called Gray Label, so
this was one of the Gray Label products. Another one
was like a printer. So these sunglasses had a video
camera and it also had small LED displays incorporated into them,
so essentially it was a head mounted camera and display system. Allegedly,

(25:53):
Lady Gaga was heavily involved in the design. That could
very well be true. Way back in twenty twelve, Steam
Meltzer of Cnet was pretty skeptical about that. He said, quote,
the sunglasses themselves look like they were designed by a
Polaroid accountant for his brother in law, the Invisible Man
end quote. Sick Burn Meltzer, Polaroid's own publicity reps said

(26:16):
nothing could be further from the truth. A Fast Company
article quotes Robert Brunner, who said that Lady Gaga was
quote fairly involved with the process end quote, and also
that she quote has ideas coming from her ethos and perspective.
So how do we turn that into a strong, viable
product design end quote. Well, it seems like Polaroid never

(26:38):
actually found the answer to that last question. A year
after the announcement and there still was no Polaroid camera
glasses to be found. Lady Gaga and Polaroid actually parted
ways at some point between her appearance at CEES twenty
eleven and the year twenty fourteen. Exactly when the two
parted ways I don't think was publicly disclosed. Polaroid reps

(27:02):
did acknowledge that the two parties were no longer collaborating
officially by twenty fourteen, so we do know that. We
just don't know at what point did they decide, you
know what, this isn't working out anyway? The glasses would
let you take photos and videos, and then you could
plug one of the arm pieces into a USB port
on a computer in order to transfer files from the

(27:23):
glasses to the computer. You also, if you wanted to,
apparently could transfer pictures and video from your computer to
your glasses. So if you just want to take a
real close look at some photographs or video, you could
use your glasses as a display. That way, I guess
you could take photos manually, or you could also have
the glasses set to take pictures at specific intervals of ten, thirty,

(27:43):
or sixty seconds each, which starts to get into some
potentially creepy territory when you think about it, Like if
you have your your glasses taking images every ten seconds
without you having to manually do it yourself, people might
start thinking that you're a bit of a creep. So
why was this project abandoned? Well, it's not official, but

(28:05):
I think it's because Lady Gaga found the glasses to
be really uncomfortable to wear, Like every time she would
put them on, they would poke, poke Pope poke her face, poke,
Pope poke her face. Or you know, maybe Polaroid just
couldn't reach a point where the product made any sense.
It could have been issues with the battery life, could
have been issues with storage capacity, the weight of the glasses,

(28:27):
the heat it would generate while in operation. The cost
might have been a problem. It was probably a combination
of some of these things. But whatever the reason, we
never actually got them. So if the sun seems too
bright in your life, it's probably because Polaroid never came
out with those Lady Gagaa glasses. Okay, we've got some

(28:49):
more to talk about before we get to some other
abandoned tech projects. Let's take another quick break. You know,
sometimes a product fails to emerge from development, not because

(29:09):
of technical issues or because of internal disagreements within a company,
but because there's a backlash from the public after the
company announces the product. That's largely the case around Mattel's
planned smart speaker for kids, which was called the Aristotle.
So the idea was that parents would put this smart

(29:31):
speaker in their kids room and the smart speaker would
be the kid's companion from cradle to I don't know,
adolescens or thereabouts, and it was meant to be an
all in one voice controlled smart baby monitor. As James
Vincent of The Verge put it way back in twenty seventeen.
That's the same year that Mattel first announced this technology.

(29:53):
January twenty seventeen, that's when Mattel unveiled this product with
the plan of having it come out than the year.
The device was intended to serve as your typical baby monitor,
so you know, alerting parents if something is amiss in
the kids room, whether that's a fussy baby or I
don't know, a baba duke or something. I don't have

(30:14):
kids and it shows. But of course, this device could
do so much more than just monitor your bebe. Not
only could it listen in on your kids to make
sure all is well, or you know, to check to
see if your infant is committing state crimes if that's
your thing. Again, I don't have kids, I don't know
how this works. But it could also do things like
recite bedtime stories to the children. It could play soothing

(30:35):
music if it detected, you know, a crying child late
at night. It could play games with the goal of
teaching kids their numbers or the alphabet. It was intended
to be almost like an infotainment device, with the added
benefit of being able to do things like e commerce
transactions like you could use this smart speaker in order
to place an order for diapers just by talking to it.

(30:57):
So what could possibly go wrong? Well, if you're like
a lot of people who heard about this, your response
might immediately be, Hey, what about privacy? Because these are
kids we're talking about, right? The kids didn't consent to this.
They can't, they're not the age to grant consent for
this sort of thing. And a company potentially making use

(31:19):
of information to advertise to parents or to the kids directly,
that of course, seems wildly inappropriate. I mean, I'm sure
that there are a lot of parents out there who
would be really upset if one day they just got
an email from Mattel saying, Hey, your kid is crying
a lot every night at eight pm, Maybe try this
product to see if that helps. Like nosey printing, advice

(31:41):
rarely goes down, well, it certainly wouldn't go down well
if it was from a corporation that knew when your
kids were unhappy. Right. Plus, then there's the added issue
of well, if it allows for e commerce, what stops
kids from being able to exploit that, either on purpose
or by accident could be every day is when you

(32:01):
ask Santa for your new Christmas wish list, right, So
there were lots of issues here. The reaction was swift,
it was considerable. One advocacy group launched an online petition
that was asking Mattel to not release this product that
reached more than seventeen thousand signatures. There were US legislators

(32:23):
who were getting involved. They were expressing concerns not just
about the privacy and security issues, which were considerable, but
they were also worried about parents leaning too hard on
technology in order to raise their kids. Were already in
an era where increased amounts of screen time is a
pretty big concern. I mean, I've had experiences with children

(32:44):
who were absolutely addicted to their screens and wouldn't even
bother lifting their head up or merging out of their
room if it meant that they had to put their
kindle down or whatever. So the idea of parents checking
out and letting a robot do all the parenting was
a sobering thought. Mattel paid attention and pulled the project
before it could go to market. Now, the reason that

(33:07):
the company said it changed course was that the Aristotle
speaker quote didn't fully align with Mattel's new technology strategy
end quote, which is a non committal kind of answer, right, like, oh,
it doesn't fit with our strategy anymore. It was certainly
not admitting to the criticisms that had been leveled at
the speaker. It wasn't like Mattel was saying, you know,

(33:28):
consumers and critics brought up valid concerns and we have reconsidered. No,
Mattel's like, oh, this just doesn't fit with our strategy.
I think we can all read between the lines. I
guess it's that thing where companies can't really admit fault
because I don't know, well, in this case, it wouldn't
be opening themselves up to litigation. That's usually the reason
that companies do not admit fault because if they do

(33:49):
admit fault, then they're going to have to start compensating,
you know, hurt parties. But in this case, it wasn't
even a product, like it never went out, So I
guess you don't admit fault because that's a sign of weakness.
I don't know. Anyway, Aristotle went the way of Socrates,
as in it had to drink the hemlock and then
go away. Now I'll wrap up with a product that

(34:10):
dates back to my childhood. That never came out. It
was aiming to be a really kind of innovative gaming
technology and it was a quasi holographic portable tabletop game system,
which is a lot of word salad. It was the
Atari Cosmos. So Atari, of course, had really made a

(34:33):
name in the video game space, both the arcade space
and home video games. The company famously released the Atari
twenty six hundred back in nineteen seventy seven, and that
would steadily grow to be a huge hit for the
home video game market. So in nineteen seventy eight, a
group of engineers at Atari began to work on a
new game system concept called the Cosmos. So it was

(34:57):
intended to bring holography into the gaming space, a tabletop
game system that used holograms. So it'd be a console
that would fit on a table, it would not attach
to a television or anything. It would be fully integrated.
It would have its own screen, and it would have
holograms integrated into the video games. How futuristic can you get? Well,

(35:21):
pump the brakes, because when I say holograms, I don't
mean moving images or even the illusion of moving images. Instead,
I'm talking about still images that are created through holography.
So the images seem to have three dimensions to them, right, Like,
you can change your point of view and view different

(35:43):
angles of this image. But it is a still image.
It's not video. It doesn't actually move. The moving element,
if you can even call it a moving element, was
a grid of LEDs behind the holographic image, so they
would project light through the holographic images. And by grid,
I'm talking about a seven by six grid of red LEDs.

(36:04):
A resolution of seven by six not high resolution at all, right,
you're talking about little blocks of light. That would be
all that would make up the games apart from these
holographic still photos. So the game, each game would involve
these little red dots potentially making shapes together and appearing
to move in a very primitive, animated way through a

(36:27):
holographic environment created by this still image. At least that
was the thought. The controls in this device were on
the face of the device itself, so again integrated, so
that it's just in front of where the screen is.
The controls were pretty limited. You had four direction buttons,
so up, down, left, and right, you had a fire button,

(36:48):
and then your other controls were kind of like for
settings and stuff like. There was a start button, there
was a button to select either one or two players,
and another one I believe it was a skill button,
so that you can set the level of difficulty for
specific titles. And you would have to push down these
buttons while looking at the screen. All on this tabletop.

(37:09):
There was no separate controller or anything like that. It
was all integrated into one form. More than that, the
system was designed to have all the games pre installed
on the system itself. By all the games, I mean
nine different games. Now, you wouldn't be able to play
all nine of these games right out of the box
because it was also a cartridge based system. And you

(37:30):
might say, well, wait a minute, Jonathan, how can it
be cartridge based if all the games are hardwired onto
the system itself. Well, that's because the cartridges did not
have the games programmed on them. The cartridges had the
holographic still image that you would slide as almost like
an overlay for this grid of red LEDs. Plus this

(37:52):
image on the frame of it on the side would
have a notch. That notch would indicate to the system
which game had been inserted into the cartridge slot, so
that you would be playing the appropriate game for whatever
holographic card you had slid into the system. But technically,
at least theoretically, you could play all nine games right

(38:15):
out of the box if you were just able to
activate that notch. But if you didn't have the holographic background,
I'm not sure that it would be that compelling. But honestly,
I'm not really sure it's that compelling even with the
holographic image, because obviously the system never came out. Atari
showed off the Cosmos at the New York Toy Fair
in nineteen seventy eight, so it had been in development

(38:35):
for like three years and they show it off, but
it didn't exactly set everyone's imaginations on fire. A lot
of people who had time to look at it said,
it's an interesting idea, but this execution lacks a compelling
reason to get it so. Allegedly, However, even with this,
the company had received thousands of pre orders. Now I
imagine those pre orders were coming from retailers, not from

(38:58):
end consumers. So when you're talking about thousands of pre orders,
this isn't like the current era where people will pre
order a video game without having a chance to play it.
This was retailers putting in pre orders to potentially carry
this game in their stores. So even with the lackluster
response of the toy Fair, Atari was getting a lot
of interest. However, from what I can tell, those units

(39:21):
were never made. Now, some units of the Atari Cosmos
were undoubtedly manufactured, you know, maybe quite a few, like
fewer than two hundred and fifty, but maybe more than
just like three or four. However, I think only three
have ever been verified in existence, So yeah, a fraction
of what was expected to be. To be sure, Atari

(39:42):
dedicated its resources instead toward producing more Atari twenty six
hundred units because those were selling really well and demand
had outpaced the supply. So the general thought is that
Atari saw the writing on the wall with the Cosmos,
and instead of pushing out anyway, they decided to redirect

(40:03):
all that effort toward producing more of what was already
selling well and would continue to sell well for a
couple more years until the video game crash in nineteen
eighty three. Now a couple of Atari Cosmos game systems
have made it out of the vaults over the years.
One is owned by a former Atari employee. One is
now owned by someone who operates like an Atari museum.

(40:26):
One of them sold for around five hundred dollars on eBay.
If you thought that the PlayStation five or Xbox Series
X was expensive, it's not seven five hundred dollars expensive,
and you can play more than nine games on those Also,
the one that sold on eBay was only in partial
working condition. It was missing some buttons and stuff. Apparently
the holographic cards that slot into the Atari Cosmos are

(40:49):
a little less rare like those that already kind of
started to be produced by the time Atari decided to
switch gears. I have never actually seen an Atari Cosmo
holographic card in person, but apparently they're not nearly as
uncommon as the systems themselves. Honestly, it looks to me

(41:10):
like Cosmos. Isn't that different from the very early handheld
electronic games that were out, like the Tiger Ones or whatever,
where you would push buttons to make different LEDs light
up on screen, supposedly as part of a game. I
remember having a football game that was like that. It
was American football, that is not soccer, and I can
never tell if what I was doing was working or not,

(41:32):
because I was just looking at little dots of light
on a screen, and when you can't tell the difference
between what is a player and what's a ball, you
got a problem. Anyway, while the idea of integrated holography
into video games was really neat, I think this was
an example of trying to build a product before the
tech is actually mature enough to do that. So again,

(41:53):
Atari Cosmos never meant to be. That's just a small
selection of some products that were in various stages of
develop some of which had been announced to the public,
and others that just got leaked at some point, but
they never actually became a real thing. There are plenty
of other examples, and I'll probably do more episodes along
this line in the future, but I thought this would

(42:14):
be kind of just a fun way to talk about
tech projects that could have been, but for one reason
or another, never actually made it. For every product that
you do get your hands on, there are a countless
number of products that at some stage just ended up
being thrown into the garbage can. So a moment of
silence for the tech that never was. Okay, that's long enough.

(42:37):
I hope you are all well, and I will talk
to you again really soon. Tech stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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